As part of the design for real life brief I have chosen the Brief Your Health: Highlighting Atrial Fibrillation as a Major Risk factor for Stroke. This brief is centred around raising awareness the impact Atrial Fibrillation has on the chance of having a stroke. Atrial Fibrillation is when the heart’s upper chambers contract randomly and this can sometimes mean the muscles cannot relax properly between contractions. This reduces the heart’s efficiency and performance and then can develop other problems as a result such as blood clots that can lead to stroke.
The eventual outcome will be some kind of campaign to make people aware of this. I am particularly happy with being able to get this brief as it was high up on my preferred choice of briefs. This brief in particular attracted me after the success of the last stroke related project, that combined with the opportunity to work on the project by myself should make it a fun and challenging experience with plenty to do. I had also met the brief setter Niki while partaking in the ‘Get Involved’ project as she was part of the research group so knowing what she was like helped further to inform my decision on choosing this particular brief.
After confirming that I was going to be doing this particular brief the first job was to further go through the brief in detail to look for a starting place to research and make sure I fully understood it. From the brief there are a few key points that I feel need to be met.
- That it emphasises that symptoms of Atrial Fibrillation are not always readily apparent so you won’t necessarily know that it is affecting you.
- That the screening process is easy and non intrusive so it is not any hassle to get it checked.
- Make the relating statistics to Stroke very clear and how the two are closely related and one leads to the other.
- Finally the target audience must be considered, although it will not likely be made explicit I think considerations such as legibility must be made for the age bracket of 60+
Some of the basic facts outlined in the brief are that having Atrial Fibrillation means your risk of stroke is 5 times higher. Around 1.2 million people in the UK have AF and many may not even know. These are both hard hitting statistics and could be important later in the project within the materials.
On reflection I do not think that I have heard much mention of this condition before reading about it especially in a stroke context, which does show its not as well known as a lot of the other causes of stroke. Even after a quick search I can find very few campaigns that take it from this angle, so it will be good to create something knowing that it is not just going into a crowded market. My next task will be to further look into the types of campaigns are out there, I suspect there will not be many of this specific topic so I intend to look at some for stroke and heart conditions to compare the kinds of tones that they are trying to set and their method of persuasion.
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