Developments
The death toll itself tells the story of how the pandemic has effected the UK and unfortunately in other countries worldwide the rates have not been much better. Unfortunately the virus was not handled correctly in the early stages, from late lockdown, to the eat out to help out scheme, to 20,000 deaths being consered a job well done, the pandemic has not been handled correctly in the Uk from the very start. The virus was not seriously enough to start and many schemes put forward by our ‘superiors’ didn’t take the virus seriously enough, in turn losing thousands of lives. The idea is to create a website to sell Covid as a product in itself, using controversial comments and actions from our public figures as ways to market it. The main points I took away from the feedback was that the design of the website was strong, but the rhetoric within the website was confusing, which upon reflection I would agree with. The idea was to use phrases from government officials in an ironic way to ‘sell’ the virus to people in order to show how crazy some of the comments were that they could be used in that way. And while that is still partly the idea behind the project, the originial contained some parts about herd immunity, some about death rates, some about lockdowns and more, so overall there was too much going on which ultimately made it hard to understand.
After more research and discussion about the design, I am still confident that using government officials phrases works well to criticise the government in showing just how ridiculous some of the comments sound, especially when used in an ironic way, However, due to their being too many different topics going on, I decided to stick with just one area, herd immunity. Keeping the idea of the virus being sold for purchase in order to help out with herd immunity, which has been discussed extensively and in the early stages was documented as being the governments proposed response to the pandemic.
Whilst using the same design, I have changed the tone of voice so each part of the website is based around selling the Covid-19 virus as a way to build up herd immunity as was proposed by the government. It is clear now that the government were warned away from herd immunity in the initial stages due to the fact that it would be risking thousands of peoples lives, however many still continued to back the idea regardless. After outrage, the government claimed they never planned to use herd immunity despite it being reported that it was the official plan until it was ‘ditched’.
The idea is the same as before, using irony and the government officials comments to show how useless many of them were in the beginning of the pandemic, however now the idea has streamlined to being all about the idea of using herd immunity to solve the problem. From changing the name to “optimal single-peak strategy” to hide what it really is, to discussing the fact that it is not desirable to stop everyone getting the virus, the website looks to criticise the actions and decisions of those high up within the government in relation to inititial calls for herd immunity by using their own comments to market the product.
Changing the tone of voice was something I thought about a lot, however I decided that ultimately the irony and sarcasm was the best way to ensure it’s clear that the project is criticising the government officials and not stating that whatever is said on the website is true.
Ben Jackson 