Project Presentations and final juries: Let's turn the nightmare into a sweet dream

Design Project presentations:

This is a note to design students on project presentations:
This is a PERSONAL blog, written in my personal capacity as a design educator, based on attending numerous juries in IDC as well as other educational institutes across the globe and after seeing students making the same mistakes again and again without anyone telling them what not to do.

Standard Disclaimer:

Any resemblance to events or persons, living or dead are purely coincidental.

The Institution for which I work for: IDC and IIT Bombay, has no relation with the views expressed in this blog and may not subscribe to the views expressed in it.

There are generally two types of students who attempt project presentations at design schools.
1. The sincere, ethical student. Puts in hard work. Believes that more than half of the time spent in a design school can be given for learning design, apart from social media, entertainment and time pass.
Approaches a design project seriously, spends time in studying the design problem, its context and is willing to take risks. Tries several design options, sometimes fails to arrive at a good solution, but learns from mistakes.

2. The time pass student. Goes to a design school for the brand value and to get a good high salary job. Once admitted, the main motto in life is to find short cuts to pass juries/exams. Interested only in placement and a good salary. 

If you are in the first group, please read on.............

A design project presentation is normally designed for twenty minutes. After this 20 min threshold, the audience and the jury gets impatient, irritated and bored.

Stage 1- "Paper" work:

Write everything you want to say in small chits of paper. Write one point in one sheet. 

I start with folding one A4 size sheet (one side printed papers which are wasted normally) and cutting it into around eight small pieces or "chits" as we call it.
Write whatever comes to your mind, without any restrictions. Let the mind be free. Dont hold back anything. Even if you think that one point is foolish and meaningless, write it down.
Write as many as you like. 

Take a ten minute break.
Spread the chits on a table. Read the chits again, add and delete as much as you want.
Shuffle them till you arrive at a sequence which is comfortable to you. 

Now visualise this as the sequence and structure of your presentation.

Take a deep breath, wait for about five minutes.Shuffle the chits as much as you like. repeat. Add. Delete. shuffle.
The keyword here is clarity. 

How can you communicate your project to the audience with clarity.
How can you hold their attention.

Soon, you will put the chits in such a sequence that you feel that it is the BEST possible way to create your presentation with maximum clarity.Now, smile for a while. Smile reduces stress!

Stage 2: Allocate time proportionately:

If you are planning for a final jury presentation for a Design project,  divide total time efficiently as per the importance of content chunks. This helps in establishing content Hierarchy.

There is also an interesting concept called "inverted pyramid", you may read up on it at this stage.

Here are some tips:
1. Give proportions to your presentation if it is final jury of a design project which normally has a duration of 5 to 6 months. My suggestion is as follows:
10% of time for Introduction, Aim, Context  

10% for Data Collection (dont use the word research here!), user study etc
20% of time for the Design process, design alternatives, testing etc
40% of time for final design solution.
Explain the final design solution in detail. How did you arrive at it. How is it better than the other alternatives you created. How did you test it. What was the user feedback. What did you learn from it etc.

A common mistake students do all the time, is that by  the time they complete the data collection stage, 45 minutes have gone! Jury members get impatient, bored and irritable. They start hoping when will this person complete the talk. This is an unpleasant phase, because it might trigger tricky questions or angry and biased responses from jury.

Some smart alecs do this deliberately to hide their final design output from scrutiny. Remember the fact that most of the jury members might have started their design careers before the student was born, and will see through the trick.

Stage 3: Start creating your presentation in digital platform.

Now translate all the chits into digital format, in a software you are comfortable with.

I create most of my presentations in Adobe InDesign, in PDF format. I use Keynote only if I need to use the special effects offered by it.

If you plan to use someone else's computer for your presentation and plans to use something like Powerpoint, be very careful about fonts. All missing fonts will show up in Arial and that can be a disaster in a Design school!
Stage 4: Check your slides

If you are using slide presentation, always use spell check and grammar check one day BEFORE the jury. It can be quite embarrassing if your slides have silly spelling mistakes and grammar errors just because you made your presentation the night before!

Always use page numbering in your slides. Many times, jury members note down the number of specific slides on which they want to ask questions.

Stage 5: Relax and plan your day

Next advice has a 0.00000001 chance of any student following it, but I want to give it:

Finish your presentation atleast 24 hours in advance. This gives you enough rest for the mind and body, and gives a good margin to reflect on your thoughts before the real presentation.

As you grow older, you will realise that getting your final talk a day or two before the actual event actually helps!

But at a young age, all of us feel that we are smarter than others and keep things postponed to the last moment.

Stage 6: Handle the jury with ease.

Be open minded and truthful when taking questions. If you have not done any specific task, be open about it and admit it. Dont try to fool the jury.
Never copy someone else's work and show it as your own. It takes a few seconds in google to find out the authenticity of any design. Remember that jury members also have access to internet as much as you have!
Respect the intelligence of others. There are several people in this universe who are more or much much more intelligent and smarter than you are! On a bad day, several of them can be in your audience or jury. Never underestimate the intelligence of the audience!