Hasta La Ideas

Setting up for a presentation in the Ziba auditorium

This is the final post in a 6-part series from Ziba’s Industrial Design Director, Paul Backett, on rethinking design education. Read the Introduction to the series, Teach Less, Integrate More here

Design school is not a theoretical exercise. It’s a professional program; a set of courses that prepares students for a complex creative job upon graduation. Much of this complexity comes from the fact that designers don’t just define and develop solutions, we must also present them. Good designers are able to tell three different types of stories, and if students want to hit the ground running, they need to know all three intimately.

1) The process review – telling the story so far to an internal team.

2) The final presentation – telling the big picture story to a client or professor.

3) The portfolio – telling a capability story to a prospective employer or client.

We hear a lot about the value of storytelling in design, and with good reason: the objects and experiences we design have to fit into the user’s story if they’re to succeed. Moreover, telling the right stories to collaborators often makes the difference between a skeptic and an advocate. Here’s a brief overview of the three, and how students could be better prepared to tell them.

The Process Review

The process review is the least formal of the three stories, but in many ways it’s the most important. Think of it like a trailer for your movie: it draws the viewer instantly into the story, summarizes the plot up to a point but doesn’t give away the ending just yet. Unlike the other two stories, the process review is just as much about receiving information as giving it, so it’s up to the presenter to get the audience up to speed quickly, so they can respond in a helpful way.

In school and in professional practice, it’s important to start at the beginning: who is the user, what are the problems being addressed, why is it relevant. But the students I’ve observed overwhelmingly jump straight into their ideas without laying these foundations. Those character boards and 360 models from the research portion of the project serve an essential role here, and I require my students to begin any mid-phase presentation by using them to establish context.

In any project, by the time that designers are giving a process review, they should know their users intimately and be able to talk about the project from their perspective. They should also have a clear goal for the review and use this to channel discussion toward getting the input and feedback they need. It’s a presentation best given face to face, with boards and sketches posted on the wall and treated like a working session rather than a formal presentation.

Setting up for a mid-phase process review at Ziba.

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