MADD Capstone:

Creative Brief 🧭

why are you making this

A creative brief is a core document that guides both you and any collaborators or stakeholders, ensuring clarity in the purpose, audience, and conceptual direction of your work. It's less about execution and more about setting the conceptual groundwork for your creative process. It should include the following:

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Impetus

Clearly define the primary goal or message driving your project. What experience, ideas, questions, or emotions do you want to evoke in your audience? Be as specific as possible. You might consider...

Audience

Describe your intended audience in detail. Who are they demographically? Consider their age, gender, cultural background, technical literacy, media diets, and interests. Why is this audience important to your project? Are you addressing a specific community, or is your work more broadly aimed?

How do their needs, interests, or expectations inform your project? Are there values or ethical consideration to keep in mind when producing work for this audience? Any content sensitivities, accessability considerations, data/privacy stance, consent in capture/telemetry, licensing plan, etc, worth mentioning here?

Context

Explain the form of media or combination of media your project will take, and how it relates to the Media Arts and Design (MADD) clusters (Creative Computing, Digital Sound and Music, Expanded Cinema, Games, and Media Performance). Your project does not have to fall exclusvely within one of these clusters, think of them less as categories and more like tags to help you triangulate your work within the larger landscape of Media Art and Design.

Where do you imagine your audience encountering your project? Is it online, offline or both? Is it on a specific platform, in a gallery, a performance space, a festival, a convention center, or some other venue? Be specific. Why is this context the best fit for your piece, and how does the format enhance your project's message or audience engagement?

Vibe

What will be your visual and/or auditory palette? What sorts of textures, colors, sounds motions, etc will define your project's style? Is your piece playful, serious, provocative, or reflective? How do these creative elements support the goal or message of your project? Think about the emotional or aesthetic atmosphere you're trying to create. Are there specific artistic references or styles that inspire you? How do the colors, sounds, or visual elements you've chosen contribute to the overall mood?

To answer these questions, create a mood board which visually and or auditorially describes the intended tone and stylistic choices for your project. While your mood board can include a few captions or titles, it should primarily be more of a visual (or auditory) collage. The goal is to convey the vibe your going for thourgh references, a collage of fragments, clips and screenshots from a wide range of inspirations. Captions should be used to call out specifically what aspects of the references you'll be borrowing (not just inspired by) and how those particular aesthetic/dynamic aspects of your references connect to your impetus (for example "The glitch texture underscores themes of memory loss").

Rubric

Define how you will measure the success of your project. These can be quantative and/or qualitative measures. Example of qualitative signals might be "Players of the game negotiate aloud within 3 minutes" or "participatns of the installation report feeling complicit". Quantitative markers might include amount of time spent interacting with an installation (e.g., longer than 3 mins), or player rule comprehension on first play (e.g., greater than 70%).

FAQ

How do I turn it in?

Create either a doc or slides on Google Drive and share me (nbiz@uchicago.edu) on it, then submit a link to the doc on canvas. Canvas will be used to mark the assignment as "complete" or "incomplete." When an assignment is marked incomplete I will give you specific notes regarding what sort of revisions are needed in order to get a "complete." At times this feedback will be provided in person (in one-on-one meetings where you are expected to take notes) other times it will be provided online through comments on the doc.

How long does it need to be?

Each of the written sections should be between 50-150 words, although the shorter and more concise you can make it, without compromising clarity, the better. There will be opportunity to expand on these points in more detail in future docs. The mood board should be between 3-9 slides.

Can I make revisions?

The creative brief is your north star, it points in the direction you're working toward. Most course documents are living documents, meaning they evolve as you learn from prototypes and critique/play test, update them as needed and record what changed and why. Your Production Plan (scope/timeline) and parts of the Design Doc will change most, however, your Creative Brief should stay relatively steady because it defines the project's core meaning and purpose. You can revise the brief, but that typically signals a pivot made only when evidence shows the original direction no longer serves the work.

For any revision, include a version number and date at the top of the first page/slide of the document, then resubmit the link to canvas for review.