DESIGN FACTORS: Clarity of Design Idea

Though this is a communication studio, you are all developing as designers for at least the next three years, if not your entire career. Take a moment and write a single sentence that outlines what YOU wish to accomplish with the design. This statement will likely be something you will repeat in your presentation which will ultimately be the lens that the reviewers and assessors will evaluate your project.

3 Things to NOT DO:

•  Do NOT try to do everything at once (e.g. present your project as fulfilling a checklist of items)
•  Do NOT set your “design idea” as something inherently tied to tacit factors (e.g. “My big idea for this writer’s studio is to ensure he can write…” instead it might be something more akin to “My design idea is to use varying degrees of transparency to support the range of writer’s activities.”

•  Do NOT cater to your prof’s preferences (e.g. “She likes symmetry so I’ll do it even though I know it is useless in this project…”) but instead you should begin learning to proceed with your design ideas fully aware of the feedback from your instructor; if your design is completely misguided, they will tell you, but take their feedback as constructive criticism to make your work better; if you attribute a design decision to a professor, you may as well give him or her your grades for the project

3 Things to DO:

• DO identify your design idea and correlate the ways your design expresses and reinforces it (e.g. the design idea deals with transparency and there are instances where the design uses clear glass and frosted glass to delineate space)
•  DO show your classmates your work in a quick presentation and ask them if they could articulate what the main idea behind the design is; if they cannot, find out where the failure between intention and expression came from
•  DO ensure you have something to show with some level of reasonable articulation when meeting your professors; despite having the best idea possible, it is extremely frustrating for professors to understand what is in your mind unless you are able to represent the idea adequately (digital/physical models, drawings, and measured illustrations); sketches or parti imagery are devoid of scale and often fail to offer anything more than initial concepts