colla bora tion in de sign educa tion
colla bora tion in de sign educa tion
Communicating with Clients: Collaboration in Design Education by Zheng Tian Bachelor of Arts, Visual Communication Design School of Media and Design Shanghai Jiao Tong University June 2014 Š 2017 Zheng Tian A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts, Communications Design School of Design Pratt Institute May 2017
Communicating with Clients: Collaboration in Design Education by Zheng Tian
Received and Approved:
___________________________________________________________________ Michael Dyer
|
Primary Thesis Advisor
May 2017
___________________________________________________________________ Dinah Fried
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Secondary Thesis Advisor
May 2017
___________________________________________________________________ Frances Pharr
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Secondary Thesis Advisor
May 2017
___________________________________________________________________ Santiago Piedrafita
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Chairperson
May 2017
___________________________________________________________________ Zheng Tian
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MFA Candidate
May 2017
I would like to express the deepest appreciation to my three advisors, Michael Dyer, Dinah Fried and Frances Pharr for helping me explore and refine my thesis ideas. Thank you for providing your precious time and effort for me. Without your ongoing support, I could not have finished my thesis.
I would like to thank all professors who have taught me in the past two years. I have had so many meaningful experiences from your classes.
I also would like to thank all of my friends. You shared so many great ideas and interesting stories with me which made my time here more fun. Specials thanks to Janet Yin and Heidi Li for always being here with me.
Finally, I would like to thank my family in China. Your unlimited love and support have always been my source of strength.
Thank you so much.
table of content
Research Question
1
Abstract
3
Introduction
5
Literature Review
7
Historical and Contextual Framework
13
Delimitations
27
Process and Methodology
29
Contribution
39
Capstone
41
Conclusions and Further Directions
56
Glossary
59
Bibliography
65
research question
1
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How can communicating with people in different professions be an actual learning method in design education to help designers and clients talk in a mutual language?
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abstract
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We can see design everywhere which conveys ideas and messages through various visual forms. Clients raise requirements then designers make them a reality. Those countless examples of great and poor design mean that the creative cooperation may be effective or a mutual understanding may be missed during the working processes. In this context, leaning how to communicate with clients is the main topic of this thesis. For designers, the key is facilitating a better understanding about the different ways of thinking by engaging clients together in the creative processes. Both should know needs and desires from each other. However, design education today lacks such opportunities to offer some practical guidelines to eliminate the gap between clients and designers, the people who are meant to collaborate well. It is especially critical for design students to learn how to guide clients to better understand our ideas in a proper perspective.
The purpose of this thesis is to highlight the role of learning to deal with clients. In order to reach the main goal, this thesis points out that current design education needs to be improved by providing more practical chances to let design students listen to voices from different perspectives. Designers and clients have their own duties. Designers are responsible for the success or failure of projects and the clients act as equal participants in the design process. Communicating with clients can be an actual learning tool to help design students stand on a corporate ladder to work with the people who are at the level of familiarization with design. To this end, the results provided by this research are applicable to our design education, and will also serve as general guidelines for design students who are entering the professional environment from school.
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introduction
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Among the different types of designers, design students are special ones who pay more attention to the process rather than the outcome. They are relatively flexible and free when doing school projects. Due to the limited experiences that they have in dealing with clients, they might be unfamiliar with various working processes in different situations. Since the creative cooperation greatly decides the design outcome, design students must learn the way to effectively collaborate with clients and control the pace of the communication in order to realize a successful design. How can design education help students adapt to a professional environment?
Communicating with clients and people in other professions can be regarded as a useful learning tool. Although studying a communications design program, I usually get stuck in dealing with clients. To a certain extent, design education today ignores the importance of multi-disciplinary collaboration in real contexts. Design schools are such important places that not only offer academic knowledge, but provide students with channels of doing practical cases as well. It might be a precious chance which lets us learn how to effectively communicate and work with clients. In this thesis, interviewing design students, analyzing cases and setting role-playing experiments are vital parts which prove theoretical findings and outline possible solutions to improve design education. By understanding how different patterns work and how they relate to the outcome, design students can better control the relationship with clients. This research will provide a new perspective for client-designer collaboration and refresh the current design education model.
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literature review
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The main purpose of this research is to guide design students to better communicate with clients. I aim to find how the design education can help students adapt to a much more professional environment and how communicating with clients can be an actual learning method in design education. To answer these questions, this literature review explores a basic origin of designers—design schools and helps me to reveal reasons of misunderstandings between the designer and client. In addition to that, the existing articles present fresher concepts and discussions about the current stage of design education and how it can relate to design practice.
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Design can be applied to almost every aspect of our environment and it has been a significant part of our society. It concerns many disciplines including art and architecture, philosophy and ethics, literature and language, science and politics and performance (Helfand, online). Moreover, design highly intersects with marketing and commerce. Products have their unique representational values in addition to the practical and functional values (Bierut 1999, 106). In such a situation, design plays a role of emotional and symbolic communication between producers and consumers. Design also has psychological significance because it makes people express their own attitudes, such as taste, experience, knowledge and status, through the things they choose and consume (Salmon 2001, 1−8). Thus, design is strongly related to and affects people’s choices and behaviors. Design is important not only for commerce and business. It can be a strong ‘cultural force’ in many non-commercial aspects. For example, in wayfinding systems it navigates people, in politics it influences people’s actions and shapes social beliefs, and in education it aims to improve teaching and learning interaction (Bennett 2006, 10−28). Therefore, the visual communication provided by design may change an audience’s social behaviors.
Since design generates the visual communication, designers are creators and producers of new concepts that accord with the needs of our society (Ilhan 2009). In connection with advertising and marketing, it requires designers’ strong sense about consumers’ demand to improve sales. In a non-commercial condition, design can convey ideas and messages in order to make people change their opinions which means design serves to present social behaviors and prediction of its future changes (Ilhan 2009). Thus, designers, especially communications
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designers are making a reality of public expectations and requirements by using their own creative expressions and methods. It implies that designers’ consideration and decisions not only depend on personal preferences, but also on social demands.
Designers have several career opportunities. In every situation of design practice, designers should directly or indirectly communicate with clients. The client has a high responsibility for success of the project, but probably indirect control over the implementation process (Young 2004). The communication during the design process has gained much attention within academic literature (S.A. Brown, “Communication in the design process”, Taylor & Francis (2002), M.L. Chiu, “An organizational view of design communication in design collaboration” Design studies, 23 (2) (2002), pp. 187–210) It has been recognized that clients and designers face communication challenges when speaking different languages due to different educational backgrounds. It's all too often that designers leave a meeting with clients feeling as if they've been speaking an entirely different language. Ineffective communication can lead to a misunderstanding of important information by both designers and clients. Generally verbal communication is used. In “Briefing and reframing: a situated practice”, Paton and Dorst investigate client-designer communication in graphic design. They raise the issue that during the briefing process the establishment of a common language between clients and designers is vital for communicating successfully, particularly when developing the brief. Designers should break down client-designer dialogues into something both parties can understand. For example, Graphically Speaking solves such communication problems by visually ‘defining’ more than 30 of the most common
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words that clients use to describe what they want in design (Buchanan 2002). Vague, possibly confusing terms —words like "elegant" or "powerful" or "warm"—are made specific as they relate to actual design style. Entries provide visual reference materials including color combinations, fonts and final designs, so that terms are defined both literally and visually. After a mutual language and understanding is built, designers and clients will trust each other more, the process will be more enjoyable, and the outcome will benefit.
Since designers today act as the profession of problem-solving, they sit on the cross of a variety of disciplines. During years of study in design program, students should obtain the ability to effectively communicate with their clients who are the first audience to review designers’ works. The current design education is not enough. It should encourage students to collaborate with people from other fields (Phingbodhipakkiya 2015). Co-creation is suggested as a creative method. The value of co-creation arises in the form of personalized, unique experiences for the customers. In the field of design, “co-create”, which is also “co-design” and “participatory design”, is an approach to design attempting to actively involve all stakeholders, including designers, researchers, partners, clients, customers, etc. Designers may produce more innovative ideas through working in a co-creative situation with people from other fields, than when they work on their own. Co-creation is often used by designers who recognize the difficulty in properly understanding the cultural, social, or usage scenarios encountered by their user. Co-creating of design is focused on the process and procedure, not a specific design style. In such a design process of co-creation, the significant value is to make individuals open, active, resourceful and confident in
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their ideas. It also helps ensure the result meets the needs of all and is usable.
Today a lot of positions are filled by students with arts and humanities degrees whose skills are much more flexible than design students (Murphy & Baldwin 2012). Those graduates from non-design fields outnumber design students significantly in the design industry. Design courses fail to meet the needs of the real world. In addition to being engaged in the collaborative process, learning how to sell what you design also becomes a new way to know about design entrepreneurship (Heller 2008). Designers employ their skills and talents to create their own content, then package, fabricate and promote it, with the goal of selling it in the marketplace of ideas and goods. In this case, the designer is not a servant to a client but rather a self-motivator who has at least one big idea and realizes it by combining business and art. This design program makes students keep their own thinking patterns, while also learning the way to adapt to the commercial situation. The design program can be a place that provides students with an opportunity to explore humanity and the environment we need should be more dynamic and responsive. Design students could learn about the multidisciplinary culture of practice if courses were more open to collaboration. The interdisciplinary nature of learning within industry should be better reflected in education. Students from different disciplines, including non-design disciplines, should be working together, as this can encourage design students to be less precious about their own discipline and more accepting of interaction with other non-design disciplines. Communicating with clients in real contexts during the study can be regarded as a tool to help design students go further in the professional world.
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historical and contextual framework 13
Due to different educational backgrounds, occupations, and expectations, it’s no secret that designers and clients can struggle with communication, much the same way doctors and patients do. Communication is a two-way street and no one always gets it right. Both are owning and using different languages and vocabularies based on their professions and backgrounds. The key is to facilitate a better understanding about the different working pattern and ways of thinking by engaging them together in creative processes. After a mutual language and understanding is built, designers and clients will trust each other more, the process will be more enjoyable, and the outcome will benefit. This historical and contextual framework includes several precedents related to my thesis topic on exploring and designing systems to improve the communication between people from different fields.
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Precedent 1: DesignJam When reviewing the theses of former Pratt students, I found one which was related to my thesis topic to a great extent, and provided me with some useful thoughts and methodology. DesignJam, created by Pratt Institute’s Graduate Communications Design Alumna Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, presents the following hypothesis: that “applying principles of start-up to design education creates an environment of collaboration, the exhilaration of new experiences, and time and monetary investment for a larger future success” She holds that such a hypothesis requires a disruption in design education—an encouragement of multi-disciplinary collaboration across the fields of design, engineering and business, in order to foster peer-learning, transparency and innovation.
The current design education model is not enough and it can be bolder and more purposeful. Amanda’s hypothesis arouses audiences to rethink design education from a multi-disciplinary perspective. This thesis is a reaction to her own experience at Pratt and her time spent working with both design agencies and start-up models. In her opinion, a start-up is a place where individuals work efficiently, defy the odds, and reinvent themselves. People at start-ups are open, active, resourceful and confident in their ideas. By focusing on flexibility, transformation, innovation and collaboration, individuals’ productivity will be greatly increased. She intends to bring such a spirit to design education.
The methodology Amanda chose attracts me. She did two field studies. The first field study was observations on environment which showed how place influences
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Amanda uses infographics to indicate the differences between startup model and agency model.
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work. By gathering imagery from the web or taken live in person, of both established agencies and start-ups, a rough painting of how place shapes the culture and values of the individuals in each space started to emerge, as well as further proof of how the start-up model could benefit the education. The second field study is on sound and productivity which is a comparison of audio recordings in both agency and start-up models revealing a difference in environment, productivity and individuals.
Then she analyzed the state of education. As it exists in design education today, departments are still very isolated, and students always miss opportunities for peer-learning and outside influences. However, design today sits at the crossroads of business and technology. She insisted that we should bring those influences into design education and she came up with a solution—DesignJam is the collaboration between design, engineering and business. Sharing this concept with design students will improve how they approach design education and
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ultimately open up their design solutions to more creativity and innovation. How this takes shape is in the form of DesignJams calling students from all three professions to participate in day-long hacks on real briefs. She invited people from different fields to gather and recorded how DesignJam could work at Pratt. Amanda created an experiment as well as an awesome platform to encourage collaboration.
The methodology she used can be a good reference for me which combines theory with practice. Her two field studies of comparing different working patterns from several perspectives are good reference for my thesis. I want to explore how designers’ work with their clients influences the outcome of a design project, how they more tightly engage in each other’s working process, and how to generate a balanced communication including two different “languages”. Compared with Amanda’s application of start-up principle to design education, I intend to apply co-working principles to clients and designers, and offer clients the opportunity to participate in the design process. DesignJam is an inspirational precedent because it is about process and multidisciplinary collaboration.
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Precedent 2: InVision Designers are developing better tools to help present their design concepts. “Design better, faster, together”, that’s the tagline of InVision, which is the world’s leading prototyping and collaboration platform. Interactive and user experience designers have become familiar with it. InVision is a prototyping tool created for and by designers, which allows designers to quickly and easily create interactive mockups for their works. Designers can share these prototypes with their team or clients. It makes presenting your design works clearer and easier, and is much more effective and useful than sending a PDF file or screen shots to clients.
When I first used InVision to present my prototype, I was impressed. When it works, I wish I had known about this useful app earlier. As a designer, especially a user experience designer, presentation is the most crucial thing. Imagine you are a client. You receive an email with a PDF file including 50 different JPGs of an app design project from a designer who is asking for your feedback. Or, you could receive a link to an interactive prototype that you can play around with as if it had the function of a real app. Compare those two ways of presenting an nteractive
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design work, and the experience clients have will be totally different. By using InVision, designers can control the interpretation of design. When designers upload several images of screens, InVision helps them present those screens in a way that imitates an actual web or app browsing experience, which means you know how your clients will see and interact with your design. In the past, when I sent a long page of a website, which might include the header, body and footer to clients to have a look, they would say “Oh, it is so busy.� But if I put this page in
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context, clients could experience the content as the audience would. InVision can be used for mobile apps as well. Clients can use gestures, like swiping to the left, double tapping, dissolving a screen on click, or sliding to the right. All of these make the experience vivid and interactive, mimicking a live site or app.
In addition, InVision can build seamless communication for a co-design team. “It simplifies the feedback process by having clients, team members, and stakeholders comment directly on the work. Designers can see feedback for all their projects in one place, or drill down by active project, specific people or their own names.� It offers a simple way to give and receive feedback, and this creates a real-time to-do list. Thanks to the technology, InVision shows how a prototyping tool plays the role of translator to establish a bridge between designers and clients by creating an effective interactive and collaborative presentation.
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Precedent 2: InVision Presentation platforms help us express ideas and present designs in a vivid manner. However, to let clients and designers participate in each other’s working process is important as well. “When was the last time you looked over the fence?” I was attracted by this question from Karen Schmidt. “Over the fence” is co-initiated by Frank Habermann (business professor) and Karen Schmidt (facilitator) after many years of designing and managing together. Their own “over the fence” journey is to collaboratively work with facilitators, as well as with project owners and teams, to explore even more meaningful practices and tools for thriving projects. To express that in a simple way, it is an opportunity to know about the people you work with but from other fields and together discover new perspectives to co-create”.
“After 15 years of designing and managing projects in the field of organizational development, I did. Actually, I even jumped over the fence and found myself in the field of business innovation.” says Karen Schmidt. While supporting a client to develop a new business from scratch, she realized that her former rich experience from project management was not going to help her. This led her to start a new learning journey, and then she discovered a big world. Learning from and working with practitioners in fields like service innovation, leadership, facilitation, agile management was greatly inspiring. They started to experiment with collaboration labs, linking people with diverse backgrounds to work on challenges together. That’s when they realized there was an overarching pattern on projects: in order to master a definite and complex challenge, a diverse group of people needs to go
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on a journey to create solutions together. “What if we would bring innovative ways of connecting perspectives into projects?” Karen asked herself. The answer was the co-create project, which intended to connect different professional perspectives to create thriving outcomes.
“Over the Fence” came up with the idea of “The Project Canvas” which is an easy-to-use tool that helps users to systematically understand and initiate new projects online. On the Canvas, you can start with any building block of your project. The Canvas will flexibly support your effort and provide useful patterns to answer crucial questions like how to balance goals, specify risks, and define milestones. Without using physical sticky notes, the e-sticky notes, magnets, tape, pins, and other movable tools keep ideas and thoughts mobile and conveniently arranged. The “Over the Fence” project canvas takes into account the main building blocks of project management and gives space for creative group facilitation. It’s free of charge, open source, and usable for all sorts of projects and most valuable for projects in complex settings.
“Co-create” is a creative form of bringing different parties together (for instance, a
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company and a group of customers), in order to jointly produce a mutually valued outcome. People usually produce more innovative ideas than when working in a co-creative situation with people from other fields than they work on their own. In such a working process, the significant value is to think of the project in a brand new perspective and to help ensure the result is usable and meets the needs of all. Each project is a collaborative endeavor, which involves people from diverse backgrounds and fields. These people have different professional perspectives and use their own “languages”. Thus, the point of each successful project is a mutual understanding about the purpose, the subject, and how to proceed. Compared with InVision, this platform focuses more on the design process. “The Project Canvas” helps teams to work together as a communication and design tool, and helps designers and clients achieve mutual understanding.
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As designers, we know more than clients do about our own field, but clients know a whole heck of a lot more than we do about their business. We do not necessarily need to teach clients all basic knowledge and fundamentals of design. But when we’re explaining what we did and why we made a certain decision in a draft, we do need to give them enough guidance and hints, which comes from the whole creating process, to understand our concepts. On the other hand, clients need to offer design problems such as “the branding isn’t quite strong enough on this poster”, not design solutions as “the branding isn’t quite strong enough on this poster”.
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My thesis is exploring the situation that designers and clients, who are supposed to collaborate, lack effective communication, and to eliminate the gap in understanding caused by using different languages. The precedents above show various tools and forms which help people from different fields respect and understand other’s roles, leading to an effective, honest and open communication.
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Delimitations
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The thesis will: Highlight the role of learning to communicate with clients. Explore the existing design methodologies which emphasize the collaboration in design. Illustrate the relationship and interaction between professional designers and non-designers. Compare and analyze the visual vocabularies used by designers and people in other professions. Propose a creative educating model in order to help design students learn to better communicate with clients.
The thesis will not: Discuss the relationship between designers and clients in the context of business processes. Simply teach designers how to meet the requirements of clients. Shift perspective of design to communication skills. Seek to replace current design education models.
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process and methodology
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Here is a project in Visual Language. By visualizing a system of knowledge which is related to this study, the taxonomy can be applied to describe my own different working models in different contexts to do a comparison. I organize the data logically and consistently using these steps:
1 Individuals Instances or objects, kinds of things (the basic or “ground level� objects)
2 Classes Sets, collections, concepts, categories and subcategories, types of objects
3 Attributes Aspects, properties, characteristics, or parameters that objects can have
4 Relations Ways in which classes and individuals can be related to one another
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/DESIGNERS/
/DESIGN TOOLS/
In-House Designers
Design Students
Designers in Agencies
Apple
Freelancers
Sketching
Prototyping
Adobe Creative Suite Microsoft Office
Interviewing
Brainstorming
/create ideas/ /provide design service/
/used by designers within a creating process/ /help designers come up with ideas and design works/
/DESIGN FORMATS/
/CLIENTS/
Website
Poster
Advertisement Booklet
Flyer
Logo
Customers
Identity
Book
Audience
Package
Signage
Image Form
Size
Users
/buy and use the service provided by designers/ /communicate with designers/ /give feedback, advice and criticism on design/
/DESIGN ELEMENTS/ Color
Shoppers
App
/communicate ideas in a visual form/ /created by designers/ /can be used for decoration/
Typeface
Buyers Consumers
Shape
/DESIGN PROJECTS RELATED THINGS/
Space
Point
Structure
Line
Material
Layout
Surface
Text
Project Brief
Reference
Budget
Phone Call
Presentation
Stakeholders
Feedback Due Date Products
/important elements which keep design projects going/ /relate designers and clients/ /express ideas from both/
/basic units that form design works/ /decide and change the style of design works/
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By following the steps, I create my own infographic system about how I work as a designer. It is clear to see the differences and features of different situations. From this chart, I can see that there is no real ‘client’ I can talk with during the design process when doing school projects. Design students usually assume themselves and advisors as clients who review the work. This kind of working pattern is different from what designers do in professional companies. From the research, I found few design programs pay attention to teaching students how to properly deal with clients in a variety of contexts. Doing self-motivated projects is a great way to develop the thinking space. However, as communications designers, we should obtain the ability to express ideas to people from different fields rather than design related people. Exploring how to deal with clients could be an important issue during our learning process.
/DESIGN TOOLS/
/PROJECTS RELATED/
E
FO
US
R
ALONG WITH
ORGANIZE
/DESIGNERS/
/CLIENTS/
/DESIGN ELEMENTS/
THROUGH & PRODUCE
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/DESIGN FORMATS/
To answer the question of how designers and clients can learn to talk in a mutual language to better communicate with each other, the first thing is to know how designers think about the clients according to their own experiences. Since this study is going to apply communicating with clients as a learning tool to design education, a survey about dealing with clients was made for design students in Communications Design Program at Pratt. I list the following three questions:
1
What qualities do you expect your clients to have?
2
What scares you most about your clients?
3
What was the weirdest question/ requirement/ suggestion from your clients? What did you reply?
The main purpose of this survey is to find the problems in the communication between clients and those young designers by knowing what they complain about their clients.
Then I collect all answers as follows:
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What qualities do you expect your clients to have?
What was the weirdest question/ requirement
They have the basic knowledge of design.
/suggestion from your clients? What did you reply? "It needs to be both stuffy with products and looks
What scares you most about your clients?
simple." HTF do you expect me to do that? I said ok
They reject any new things.
and complained to my co-workers.
What was the weirdest question/ requirement/ suggestion from your clients? What did you reply?
What qualities do you expect your clients to have?
Put as much information as possible. My answer is no
t will be good if they listen our designer's idea
enough space, otherwise it will ruin the layout.
carefully and believe our skills or professionalism. When they order us something, they are likely to require ridiculous things. They do not know well how
What qualities do you expect your clients to have?
difficult we meet their request perfectly because they
I will prefer before coming to me they have a clear
are not an expert. For example, when I was requested
idea about what they want from me. After giving me
to make website, the client gave me a guideline and I
work I'll appreciate if they don't give me suggestion
made a draft based on her order although I have
on how to design. I want transparency in
different good idea from hers. Sometimes I disagreed
communication and they should be understanding
with her idea but I tried to satisfy her idea. However,
enough to let me work on my own terms.
just before deadline, the order was changed suddenly and I had to change it to my original idea. What if she
What scares you most about your clients?
had believed my idea...?
I'll be scared if they don't pay me and use my work. What scares you most about your clients? What was the weirdest question/ requirement/
Basically, they tend to consider designers as just their
suggestion from your clients? What did you reply?
employee. Sometimes they ordered unreasonably and
"Design as I say" was the weirdest statement a client
ignored our better suggestion. But I think we are
gave me. And one client said that,"Oh, so I just need
cooperators of them, not staff under them. There
to learn this software to be a designer".
needs to be belief and respect between them and us.
What was the weirdest question/ requirement What qualities do you expect your clients to have?
/suggestion from your clients? What did you reply?
Basic understanding of design, or at least some sense
"You can change this small detail for free?"
of aesthetics and beauty.
"Could you send the modified one until tomorrow morning?" (especially just before the closing time)
What scares you most about your clients?
etc... I said "Yes..." doing the F**king overtime works..
When they don't pay; or lie to me about a future promotion; Exploiting new interns for months without pay and get rid of them after; Exclude design teams in
What qualities do you expect your clients to have?
major structural changes of the website, like wtf
I hope my clients have some basic knowledges about
designers are just decorators who fill stuff in between
design or they know what kind of design they want.
the grids? When they wanted me to stay but didn't mention increasing my wages. When I wanted to leave
What scares you most about your clients?
but they insisted otherwise, almost trying to ignore my
I'm not scare my clients. I care more about the result.
request, very annoying.
What was the weirdest question/ requirement/
What scares you most about your clients?
suggestion from your clients? What did you reply?
When they refuse to pay, and refuse to negotiate.
I afraid of the clients say: I don't like this but I don't
They keep asking for all these changes and take
know why.
advantage of the designer's time and patience and work.
What qualities do you expect your clients to have?
What was the weirdest question/ requirement/
I usually don't have expectations from clients
suggestion from your clients? What did you reply?
considering that they all have different knowledge of
Work for free. My answer: HELL NO. PAY ME.
design or no knowledge at all, and most have different
Do their marketing and managing strategies as well as
wants and needs. However, If I can choose which
physical work, like rearranging office for an entire
clients I prefer, I prefer the ones who have some basic
weekend and doing the interior design, despite the
knowledge of design with a clear understanding of
fact that i was only hired for making posters.
what they want and who they want their target
Ridiculous. I left immediately.
audience to be.
What scares you most about your clients?
What qualities do you expect your clients to have?
What I fear most is if I proposed an idea or designed
Honesty.
something for them, and then they take my idea or design to another designer or company to add on
What scares you most about your clients?
to/or slightly change it. This never happened to me,
Terrible taste.
but I heard it happens a lot which is upsetting. What was the weirdest question/ requirement/ What was the weirdest question/ requirement/
suggestion from your clients? What did you reply?
suggestion from your clients? What did you reply?
Make texts as big as possible. My reply: no way.
When I was working as a freelance graphic designer for a non-design company, I had to constantly design things that I preferred not to do. I prefer simple/
What qualities do you expect your clients to have?
minimal designs, however the company always wanted
I am expecting to client about the general
me to create designs with "3D effects" with shadows,
understanding about the design process such as time
embossing, and tacky filters. I hated it so much, but I
and budget.
had no choice but to do it because I was their designer.
What scares you most about your clients? Sometime, client quick change their mind near the deadline.
What qualities do you expect your clients to have? I think many clients undervalue design: they think it's
What was the weirdest question/ requirement/
not a lot of work. Many don't realize there's a lot of
suggestion from your clients? What did you reply?
strategy and research involved, on top of all the
Few client don’t know about the how many time
versions and iterations of a project that we will make!
designer struggle to solve the problem. They easily
Because our work is usually shown through visuals,
think creative work done by few mouse click.
they seem to think that 'anyone could do it'
Personally, I was trying to pursue client I need more time and should pay more.
how to be a good client? I have the same experiences as most of them. I hope I can talk to an educated client who has basic knowledge of design and a similar taste as me, which can create an effective collaboration
voices from designers
process. However, each individual has their own background and work in specific fields. Designers should guide them to understand our profession’s features and our works. The results of the survey provide me with a couple of details and actual situation that can help me start role-playing experiments in the next steps by making use of these negative experiences to explore what’s the way to fix them.
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contribution statement
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Every designer has challenging experiences in dealing with clients sometimes. It seems that the client is playing the role of the severest critic of the designer’s works. All of us regard it as a normal phenomenon and simply accept it. We do know the so called “tips” and learn to talk with clients in a way which can avoid unnecessary troubles during the communication. However, it is important to remember that many insights raised by clients can be valuable and push the message and aesthetic of a design project forward to a better stage. A good design comes from an exciting and harmonious working process which requires that both designer and client engage in each other’s concepts.
This thesis creates an opportunity for me to do a self-examination of the way that I communicate with the clients. As a design student, I have few experiences of directly working with them in a professional environment. I am curious about how to generate a new way to communicate with people from other fields especially clients by using different working patterns. The current design education should provide a better environment to students and guide us to achieve the ability of effectively talking with clients. This study is not going to repeat the communication skills we already know, on the contrary, it intends to explore the reasons behind the current situation of the imbalanced relationship between client and designer in a critical tone, and to regard working with clients as an actual learning tool in design education. In addition, I aim to serve the findings provided by this research as ideal models for young designers who start opening the door of the professional world.
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capstone
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The purpose of the study is to apply communicating with clients as a learning method to design education and to see how it will influence our existing design program. In order to achieve the goals, my capstone project provides design students with opportunities to do role-playing experiments by standing on different positions and think from others’ perspectives. It can cooperate with some specific courses to examine whether this form of experiment works in class.
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Debate: Vocabulary Sharing
Participants two designers / one designer and one non-designer
Form The pair will get a piece of design. One is taking a favorable attitude to it and the other one is opposed to it. They will individually comment on the works and have a discussion to express their points of view. I will document the process and see how they support their own opinions to persuade each other.
The piece of design I give the participants is the new logo of Met Museum. It is one of the most controversial redesigns in recent years which can be a discussible topic. This experiment is going to encourage design students to think of design works from perspectives of people in other professions. To designers, it is important to learn how to talk with non-designers in a mutual language to let them understand designers’ concepts and works better.
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Group 1
Janet: Communications Design / Prefers the old one
Old: More elegant / Historical / Smaller / might have a problem / Not readable / Not quite stand out / Not a huge problem / Circle very simple
New: Loss of balance / Modern but corners and curves weird / Not sense of historical architecture / Characters complicated
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Heidi: Package Design / Prefers new one
Old: 21st Century now / Inspired by Renaissance painting and letterforms / Lines are not organized / Asymmetrical space / Flourish red / Something put there for a long time / A little dirty / Background lines should not be there / like guidelines
New: Seems inspired by red decker bus / Separating to 2 lines / Signature in NYC / Taking tourists around the city to see what the city looks like to enjoy the culture and history / Relates to museum / Typefaces / Curves / Vertical lines / Front look of the museum / Cool / Catch more attention / New design is always controversial / Willing to accept new things
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Group 2
Yuki: Marketing / Prefers the old one
Old: Da Vinci / More suitable for museum / Historical
New: looks like Vogue and New York Times / Nothing special in this logo / Too modern
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Chudan: Communications Design / Prefers the new one
New: Not only for designers and artists / For every single education background / More expressive and easier to understand for everyone / Design trend leading to simplicity and minimalism / New one maintains that feature and extends the classic feeling
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OL NE Historical backgrounds
Agree with the color part
Disagree with the messy part
Shape comes from the form of the architecture Stands out to be a museum How MET looks like Not messy
As designer
Always show outcome
Logo shows the process Designers’ effort More elegant
Circle very simple
I don’t see the red decker bus M and E weird random corner break the balance Top heavy
Loss of balance
Modern but corners and curves weird
Not sense of historical architecture Characters complicated
LD EW White light circle and lines are not symmetrical Guideline of M Messy
Color Dirty
Not attractive
21st Century now
Inspired by Renaissance painting and letterforms Lines are not organized Asymmetrical space
Flourish red
Something put there for a long time A little dirty
Background lines should not be there like guidelines
Modern Elegant
Introducing new culture Represent NYC
Red decker bus
Not just MET itself
small space not equal / Kind of playful Not very balancing curve
New typeface
Relates to museum Curves
Vertical lines
Front look of the museum Catch more attention
New design is always controversial Willing to accept new things
OL NE Da Vinci
More suitable for museum Historical
Brand effect
People will be familiar with the system and the logo. Met has used it for a long time Weight on people’s mind
It will cost time to let people reaccept the new logo. The old one can represent everything we need.
Looks like Vogue and New York Times Nothing special in this logo Too modern
Logo should be unique and different from others Have to choose one among the art history Not the most popular one for now Has nothing other than serif
Why don’t you just tell me you are an art museum?
The brand may lose something accumulated by the time. Build your public image
NYT and WSJ don’t change their logos and design system. No need to risk yourself to change the system
LD EW Classic combination
Very simple
Really pushes you to know it is an art museum
Not the thing the logo should do Circle so weird
Try to constrain the logo
The old one is too cliché.
It was changed in a good way.
For every single education background
More expressive and easier to understand for everyone Design trend leading to simplicity and minimalism
Maintains that feature and extends the classic feeling More expressive
More straight forward
Trend / Follow certain style / Similar
More universal / Neutral / Telling “we are the MET” Not so intentional
The new one will become a symbol like the old one. The logo appears in my mind is the new one. A concise expression
The museum will not change.
logo - external thing - a new way of expression The art - essential thing
I give these two groups the same topic which is about the redesign of the Met Museum’s logo. When reviewing their discussions, it is easy to find the difference between two groups from the words and sentences they use. Two designers in group 1 talk about the piece from a visual perspective and they analyze every tiny visual element from a professional designer’s point of view. That conversation obviously shows how two persons talk to each other by speaking the same language.
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However, the conversation produced by group 2 which includes one designer and one marketing student is much broader. The marketing student doesn’t use the vocabulary as designer use. She expresses how she feels about the logo directly from a subjective perspective. This discussion is more attractive to me because they talk about it in different layers with group 1. They mention a couple of terms which are not limited to the field of graphic design such as education background, time periods, brand effect and people’s behaviors.
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conclusions and further directions
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As it exists in design education today, departments are still very isolated, and students miss opportunities for outside influences. However, in the real world, designers are collaborating with people from different fields all the time which is a huge challenge.
When taking design courses, students share ideas with people who are in the same major, and sometimes regard teachers as potential clients. They are advised to do a presentation as if there are clients sitting in front of them. The idea of communicating with clients is not simply letting design students do commercial projects with real briefs. It should be applied to design education as a thinking pattern.
The combinations of student from different majors makes the conversation turn to a higher level. Thoughts of people from other professions can encourage designers to jump out of the initial thinking of using designers’ vocabulary to critique a design piece. Our regular design courses are lacking this kind of interaction to broaden the thinking mode. It can be regarded as an essential part of class critique.
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Designers are speaking in one language when gathering together to comment on a piece. When the voice in other frequency jumps in, designers will generate more creative ideas with both breadth and depth. To better communicate with clients in the future, design students should be provided with a broader environment to listen to voices from those “outsiders� who may have much fresher insight on the design works. The collaboration can be an indispensable part in design students’ daily classes.
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glossary
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Client–designer Communication Communication during the design process has gained much attention within academic literature. It has been recognized that clients and designers face communication challenges when speaking different languages due to different educational backgrounds. Ineffective communication can lead to a misunderstanding of important information by both designers and clients. Generally verbal communication is used. In “Briefing and reframing: a situated practice”, Paton and Dorst investigates client–designer communication in graphic design. They raise the issue that during the briefing process the establishment of a common language between clients and designers is vital for communicating successfully, particularly when developing the brief. After a mutual language and understanding is built, designers and clients will trust each other, the process will be more enjoyable, and the outcome will benefit.
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Co-create “Co-create” is a creative form of working together. In economic strategy, it refers to bringing different parties together (for instance, a company and a group of customers), in order to jointly produce a mutually valued outcome. The value of co-creation arises in the form of personalized, unique experiences for the customers. In the field of design, “co-create”, which is also “co-design” and “participatory design”, is an approach to design attempting to actively involve all stakeholders, including designers, researchers, partners, clients, customers, etc. Designers may produce more innovative ideas through working in a co-creative situation with people from other fields, than when they work on their own. Co-create is often used by designers who recognize the difficulty in properly understanding the cultural, social, or usage scenarios encountered by their user. Co-creating of design is focused on the process and procedure, not a specific design style. In such a design process of co-create, the significant value is to make individuals open, active, resourceful and confident in their ideas. It also helps ensure the result meets the needs of all and is usable.
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Subjective Aesthetic Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of art, beauty, and taste, with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgements of sentiment and taste. To be general, the questions of “how do we define beauty?”, “what is beautiful?”, “what is ugly?”, basically consist people’s aesthetic. Although aesthetic is quite subjective, some external elements, like social approval, advertising, celebrities’ choices, others’ comments are greatly influencing and challenging our subjective aesthetic. In a design project, designers and clients may hold different attitudes regarding aesthetic, and designers often complain about the clients’ bad taste. It may seem that design depends on individual aesthetics, however, different education backgrounds, thinking process and expectations of designers and clients decide what do they think is a good outcome of a design project.
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Visual Accessibility The visual accessibility of a space refers to the effectiveness with which vision can be used to travel safely through the space. The term “visual accessibility� here refers to the clarity of a design work, including images, text and other visual elements, and the ease in which the audience can see the information displayed. Unclear graphic design will lead to some serious errors being made by the clients, customers, audience and user. For example, it has been estimated that 10 000 injuries or deaths a year in the US may be as a result of poor medication and packaging design. The importance of visual accessibility is much higher in graphic design than in other disciplines such as product design. Within graphic design, visual accessibility is a key element that determines overall inclusivity, whereas product design must meet accessibility requirements in terms of the user's physical capabilities as well.
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Inclusive Design The British Standards Institute (2005) defines inclusive design as: 'The design of mainstream products and/or services that are accessible to, and usable by, as many people as reasonably possible ... without the need for special adaptation or specialized design.' Every design decision has the potential to include or exclude customers. Inclusive design emphasizes the contribution that understanding user diversity makes to informing these decisions, and thus to including as many people as possible. Inclusive design is ‘a general approach to designing in which designers ensure that their products and services address the needs of the widest possible audience, irrespective of age or ability’ Clients and the designers must both drive the need for inclusivity. It reflects on the client-designer relationship and how they consider inclusivity among other user requirements. Designers need to demonstrate the capability to design more inclusively as often user needs are not considered unless requested by clients. On the other hand, clients have the power to implement inclusivity in the process, but rarely do. Inclusive design may be a good approach to increasing visual accessibility within the communication between clients and designers.
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bibliography
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