Issue:
This practicum will be a mix of presentation and discussion with the audience, about how to develop ideas that you might add to your portfolio. Portfolio reviews are great opportunities for gaining feedback, but sometimes designers and UX practitioners can find it difficult to develop an idea in the first place, and daunting to create a compelling presentation.
Purpose:
This session will discuss ways to develop ideas into a concise presentation, so that a) you can have a simple method for building items in a portfolio and b) more generally feel more confident about how to form a complete message that explains your idea fully. Attendees will learn how to think about their ideas as complete stories,
like an invention, and learn simple techniques to develop them. Whether it be a product idea, an improvement or innovation of a common user experience, or a software or multi-media experience, it shouldn’t require extensive design training to get them ready to add to your portfolio, just some creative thinking.
What I will cover:
The presentation portion of the session will walk through how to start from a problem, an idea, an annoyance, a cool slogan - whatever fragment you have - and build around it to cover four basic messages that can create a concise presentation:
- “Issue” – what issue have you identified? How does an issue convert into an opportunity?
- “Concepts” - how you might describe or visualize concepts that attempt to address the issue (physical thing or a process, for example)?
- “Value” - how do you concisely communicate an idea’s value?
- “Experience” - how might you represent the experience of the concept?
A portfolio presentation can consist of one “slide” for each of these topics, or perhaps an idea can be presented quite nicely in one, engaging shot. I will elaborate on the four topics through exemplars, but also leave 15-20 minutes to engage the audience in a discussion about their experiences, and ideas they have.
Ultimately, attendees will learn how to think about presenting ideas, which I hope will add to their confidence not only in building pieces for their portfolio, but also in creating effective presentations to coworkers, managers, clients and customers.
Who is this for:
Primarily, this session is a career-building topic, and students and novices might benefit most. However, more experienced consultant or corporate practitioners could also benefit because the principles could help anyone craft and corral their ideas into presentable, compelling packages – using a little bit of
inventing to present.
