Defining the Audience
The Depth of Design — target depth for the Cosmic Knot centers on shared human experience and the spiritual and metaphysical.
As I started the project, I honestly thought very little about the target audience. I had chosen a concept which was based on personal interest, and I had no idea if anyone would care about it other than me. I was making the project for myself and had trouble identifying a specific audience to be the recipient of my work. At the same time, I knew that ultimately the value of an identified audience would help immensely in the formulation and usability of the end product.
To aid in this process, the conceptual model of spiritual targeting was developed. The idea of spiritual targeting takes a different approach to find the target audience. Rather than looking first at the audience, the model looks to find the deepest commonalities between the audience and the designed product. These commonalities are defined as layers of depth.
These depths range from the individual tastes to the deepest connections of human experience and spirituality. The target depth for my project centered around our shared human experiences, and the spiritual and metaphysical. Targeting at this depth meant that design decisions would be based on themes, ideas, and perspectives that related to those topics. personal preference social influences cultural and regional influences beliefs and values spiritual and metaphysical imitation peer influence shared human experience Identifying a target depth allowed me to focus on audiences who would most likely have connections and interests in common with the qualities found within my project. I was searching for materials to support my project concept, I realized that many of the resources that I found were classified in the New Age section of bookstores.
I realized that there was an element of new age philosophy embedded in my work. At first, this discovery was almost repelling.
The whole idea of the new age bookstore, with incense, crystals, love potions, and Enya CDs, was not the direction I wanted to see my work going. This image in my head represented an extreme view of what is really a much broader and very popular world view of individual spirituality. After further research, I found many common beliefs with the audience, and a less extreme variety which actually represents the larger population of the movement. In a general sense, the new age movement includes elements of religious traditions melded with ideas from modern science, particularly psychology, physics, and ecology.
New age ideals are influenced greatly by eastern ideas of spirituality. The popularity of the new age movement can be seen everywhere. The rise in popularity of yoga, the meditative arts, and an overall interest in Eastern philosophies are evidence of the movement’s cultural impact. The new age audience, while not an exclusive audience for my project, represents a large group of individuals with common backgrounds and beliefs who would share an interest in ideas explored in my project.
An innate curiosity and openness to spirituality, mysticism, and symbolism make these individuals an excellent target audience for my project. * See “Audience Definition Report” for more detail on the target audience.