Design concepts guide

The design phase is all about creation. To aid idea expression and development, designers use non-verbal and non-text-based communication to show their ideas and thoughts, in addition to talking and/or writing about them. We use these because it can be difficult to express the fullness of ideas verbally or in text, especially collaboratively, when the idea is still emerging, vague, or unfinished.

Alternatives to verbal and text-based communication channels, like drawing, collaging, or model-making, aren’t necessarily better than verbal- and text-based communications; they’re all different from one another and can be used in unison.

Each communication method answers a specific set of needs, according to the strength of that method. If talking about potential changes to an existing system is confusing, why not draw it? If you can’t really describe a better visual-impairment melody for a system to play when people log in, why not hum two or three options, record it on your phone, and email that instead?

You might feel silly at the time you’re making the drawing or recordings, but your team will more easily understand what you’re thinking, and you’ll be able to move forward more rapidly. Crawing, building, collaging, and/or recording ideas is often faster, more clear, and more actionable than just talking or writing about them.

Show & tell in the design process

Showing as well as telling allows vague or complex ideas to start to rapidly take shape. Concrete items like drawings, models, or recordings, retain their shape while words fly about and sometimes get lost, forgotten, or misunderstood.

Making a collage, a drawing, or building a model of an idea brings the idea away from the individual into a stand-alone space so that it can be evaluated without attaching evaluation to the individual.

By layering showing and telling, designers can communicate more complexity than either showing or telling alone.

Communicating abstract concepts

When design teams need to talk about abstract concepts or convey a feeling, they often use alternate forms of communication to do so. These photos, drawings, recordings, etc., are called “references” because you should “reference” them when reading the text or listening to the presentation that accompanies them. They function the same way that metaphors and similes do in written and verbal language. Instead of saying “happy” and expecting everyone to know what we mean, we often say things like “happy, like a sunny day”.

In design, we bring our metaphors into visual, audio, and tactile forms so that we can communicate meaning, form, and emotion all in one place.

Using references: communicating happiness

In this example, a team member would like to describe a product or service that should have a happy, sunny feeling. To do this, the team member has collected images to help them communicate what they mean when they talk about a happy, sunny feeling.

None of these images are actually images of “happy.” One is a line drawing of two people talking to each other with stars around them. One is a logo that uses a sun-like form that seems like it might be quite happy and optimistic. The third is just the words “I’m walking on sunshine,” but in a font that looks happy and fat, sort of like it’s written in toothpaste. And the fourth is a photo of a beach on a sunny day, which many people associate with happiness.

None of these images are actually images of happiness, and none of them are particularly sophisticated. In fact, they look homemade or pulled off the internet. And that’s part of the point: references shouldn’t be polished; they’re a quick way to communicate your thoughts, not your final presentation. But what is a picture of happiness, and how could your final idea be just “happiness”? First, there isn’t one picture of happiness, because it’s different for all of us, and second, this is not the time to have a final idea; you’re still envisioning and communicating your first draft ideas. This is why using references is so useful when talking about abstract concepts like happiness, and when working at the early stages of your design phase.

Using references is just Show and Tell

In grade school, many students play an in-classroom game called “Show and Tell.” In this exercise, students bring in an object they think is interesting, show it to the class, and then tell the class a story about that object.

One of the purposes of this exercise is to teach students how tangible objects can represent abstract concepts or events that have already occurred.

For example, although a student cannot bring to class the hike in the woods they took over the weekend, they can bring the cool rock they picked up on that hike as a representation of what they did. By connecting the tangible rock with the intangible hike, students are able to make generalizable connections about the elements of a hike, where to find rocks, and what future hikes or rocks might be like.

As adults, images and objects function in the same way: an object or visualization allows us to give shapes to ideas. From that starting point, we can then talk about a desired experience, substance, process, etc., that cannot be present. For this reason, the old game of Show and Tell is as useful in meetings as it was in your grade school’s class.