For the first project I was keen to stretch the idea of what it meant to be a ‘youth’ tv viewing website. Did it have to be dumbed down or feel like a school councilor trying to be ‘down with the kids’. I felt uneasy about the stereotype that a youth site had to be all backward caps, slang and graffiti inspired graphics? Or did it even have to be tailored to young people at all in order for them to use it?
Fig 1. 'Youthy' branding, Y'know cos this
is something we can relate to.
With teenagers of today being the internet generation, I thought that a great original concept behind viewing programmes would prove the most valued amongst the computer litterate. It would also have to compete with the competetive download market. I felt the site had to lie in between a kind of embodiment of the bbc i player because the interface was user friendly and straightforward, but with the back catalogue of asite like megavideo or google as ultimately the site with the best choice (delivered free) would be the most successful.
Fig 2. Low production 'youthy' vibe website
But what when you dont know what to watch? You cant think what you want to watch or you want to be reccomended something new. If those people could have a guarantee that all they had to want to do was watch tv and our site would give them something enjoyable that would suely be a unique selling point. The idea of a randomly generated viewing platform in which the site spoke out and offered a suggestion has been proved popular with websites such as fffound.com This proves immensely popular with young people because of the ability to always offer original content and inspiration at the touch of a button. What if this could be done with a website? would that be the hook that gauranteed success?
Layout and marketing wise, another thing i found really interesting was how little the channel 4 and bbc i player sites seemend to be specificly aiming at children. They had obviously been created so as not to exclude anyne and to appeal to as amass a market as possible but how far could this be pushed? Could the site actually go the opposite way and visually appeal to an older audience to prove the point that what makes it successful with the ‘youth’ is more than just aesthetic, cosmetic choices but in fact the quality of content and idea.
My main point of reference for the aesthetic of the website came from pages of the the book featured below ‘The World in Pictures”. I loved the clarity and established nature of the way the pictures were presented which really speaks, archive. This was exacly what I wanted the site to give, an archive vast and varied spanning genres and time frames.
But I didn’t yet feel that the concept was as good as it could be. The random nature of the advised ‘what to watch’ section wasn’t quite personal enough to ensure continued use.
Since the site was never actually going to go live I thought it would be a chance to work in a more idealistic way way and worry less about the practicalities of realisation. After taking personality tests online and seeing movies like ‘The Game’ in which a man’s psyche and enjoyment statistics are determined by just a form.
I began looking into psycoanalytic practices and developed the idea that through a multiple choice online personality test developed by doctors, the website could offer you what you truely wanted.There would be no deliberating or indecisiveness, the website’s test would break down your psyche and give you a choice of things you would absolutely love to watch at this moment in time. And you would enjoy them thoroughly even if you didn’t know you would, your brain told us so. No ifs or buts, it would be exactly as you wanted.
