My DA began back in week 1 where I landed on the idea to pursue a coffee based online persona. I wanted to make content for other baristas and individuals looking to learn about coffee, as it is my passion and something I felt I could bring knowledge, experience and enthusiasm too. I have done projects like this before where I begin with lots of eagerness and a voice telling me ‘it will be different this time’ and ‘we will stay dedicated’, but at some point I always lost motivation (foreshadowing at its finest). But I believed by focusing on something that was my passion and my job I would be able to truly find my grove for this project, and reflecting back I think I finally did.
The next step for me was finding a platform, I chose TIKTOK from day 1 as it felt like a no brainer. The app contains everything necessary to create content and reach the desired audiences, I felt as though it truly fit the FIST design principals spoken on in many lectures and tutorials.
For me FIST meant that:
- My project would have to be inversely proportional to the budget of the project. By budget I refer to my own time and energy, and I guess also finance in some regard. In week 2 we discussed the capital we can invest as input into our project; attention and time also known as cATs. This is one of the principals of FIST for me, my project had to be inexpensive in the currency of cATs, as I knew as the semester went on I would have lower and lower cATs to invest.
- The second part of FIST that I identified early was the importance of creative constraints actually fostering my creativity. I knew I needed to keep myself in check and not bite off more than I could chew, and in affinity to that, keep the cost of cATs down. Another part of this principal was acknowledging that adding time/money does not generally improve outcome and that complexity was a cost.
- Another principal that tied into FIST but also FIFO was that optimal failure costs a little but teaches a lot. When a FIST project fails it does so optimally, meaning it was essential for the success of my project to fail at some point (or many points).
- The fourth component of FIST to me, was that iteration would be the driving force behind learning, discovery an also the efficiency of my project. If one thing failed it was ESSENTIAL to quickly regroup, analyse and iterate.
Moving forward form this, the next component of my project was my audience assessment, in the early week of BCM114 we worked in tutorials and in my own time to understand how we define an audience, and what to create for each audience base. It was in this stage that I developed my first audience starter pack.
After detailing the who, what and where of my project, it was time to focus on the WHY. I then produced a project statement and defined the utility of my project.
Iteration I
After identifying I quicklime began the first iteration of my project and began prototyping. As I mentioned above the original concept for my project was a tiktok for other baristas and individuals looking to learn about coffee. This is where my project started and where I began early testing. The early feedback for this stage of my DA was minimal to none.
This is where I learnt that no feedback is feedback in and of itself. My videos where underperforming for where I had expected them to be at this stage and I realised it was time for me to close the feedback loop for the first time and begin the iteration process for a second time.
Iteration II
The changes I made to m DA for iteration II focused on attempting to reach and connect with my desired audience. During iteration I felt as through my content was not engaging with my audience and the online community anywhere near enough. My DA felt distant and like it was filling up empty space on the internet for a random person to stumble across every few days.
During my time on tiktok I had observed the phenomenal popularity of. Comedic and relatable videos. Because of this I decided to take a new avenue with my DA. In order to connect with my. Audience and made my first comedic video. This video ‘blew up’ in relation to my previous posts and my tiktok was reborn. I begun posting whenever I felt like it, which without the pressure of a schedule, actually became a lot more frequently. I was inspired and enjoying creating content for my account and finally felt a connection between my personal interests and the content I was creating.
For a while I felt as if I finally had found continuity and connection between myself and my project, unfortunately after a few weeks I begun to fall out of synchronisation as my project begun to underperform again. I felt like I was chasing the early high of random success.
iteration III
The internet is an unpredictable landscape where success is gaged comparatively and ‘anyone can blow up’ but not everyone can sustain their success. The uncertainty of this is amplified when the content you are sharing is deeply connected to your personal life and sense of self. This is something that I really struggled with in the third stage of my project and something I wish was touched on more during the subject. In BCM114 we are asked to open ourselves to the online community, create what we desire and are pushed to tie our sense of selves and our uniqueness to our projects for the sake of their success; it is an inherently personal experience. When your project is performing well this can be a truly amazing experience, however the ‘come down’ from a successful project can be stressful and uncertain, where am I meant to go from here?.
This was a massive turning point for my project and my relationship to it. I had been striving for a successful DA and had instead created something where I felt as if I was fulfilling a duty that I was failing. It was at this point where I realised I needed to enter the breaking stage of my project, not just for the revitalisation of my project, but also for me and my relationship with it.
The first stage of this was identifying what was not working for me. The feedback for this chapter of my DA was not only going to be form my audience but from myself.
The first and biggest issue I identified that was jeopardising the success of my project was my general burnout and pressure of the project. It was here that I realised success and growth are not linear. I also realised the desire I had to truly keep my DA alive after the conclusion of BCM114, for their were parts where I truly fell in love with the content creation process and the expression of my interests to an online community.
After identifying this issue it was time to rebuild from the ground up. Who was I making this project for and why?. This is where I realised I wanted to be creating content for people exactly like me. And of course this made sense, we feel passion for the things that we can relate to; if I was relating to my content I felt that my audience would only be there because they did too.
It was once I had identified these points that I could begin remaking my project. I want to make light of the hard parts of working in hospo (as many students do) and share the reasons I love it and plan on staying in the field and hopefully one day owning a business. In BCM114 and many of the other BCM subjects we touch on creating our online presence and using it as a portfolio of our work and experience. Therefore it felt important to me to consider HOW I was defining myself online, and to do so as genuinely as possible. It was in these final few weeks that I gained an understanding of the deep importance of the breaking and remaking stages of a project. It was a process of weeding my metaphorical garden of the pests (issues) that halted the growth of my crop (success).
going forward
From here on I am committing myself to creating a digital artefact to represent me as a person and the thing that I hold important in life and career, from this I hope to gain an audience that relates to my personal experiences and career objectives and build on an already niche online community of hospitality workers.
Please follow along to see what happens next: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZSejxAW8J/
Phoebe Mae 