Designing with Vision

A framework to not lose your design battles

Did you ever present an awesome design concept to a group of stakeholders and then walked out disappointed? Disappointed, that they just didn’t get it? Did you experience your good concepts being put down while some of the so-so ideas received praise? Did the discussion just go awry?

To my knowledge, all designers have experienced these sad situations at some point throughout their careers. And some go through this again and again.

My experience is that most of these unlucky situations can be prevented through careful planning during the design process and framing the discussion right. It’s no guarantee that your favourite concepts make it through the decision process, but at least they’ll lose in a fair battle.

But first you have to accept my premise: designers are not artists. Excellent post about this here.

It may be that some designers also work as artists, and some artists also work as designers. But it’s two very different roles — not the same.

Through our professional work we designers are mostly not seeking to exhibit our own opinions or emotions. We’re designers, who design with purpose and requirements rooted in the world around us. An artist’s inner drive and self-evaluation of a piece work is more important than whatever the world outside thinks of it, because artists’ work is personal. A designer designing with purpose cannot be solely responsible for evaluating his/her own work. Hence, a designer cannot just dismiss the surrounding world’s feedback.

That’s why involving other stakeholders matters — and this includes how you present your work on stakeholder meetings.

How to not present your work

There’re many ways to make yourself the host of a really bad show.

You risk meeting a shit-storm of gut feelings, uneducated opinions and top-of-mind change requests, if:

• You don’t frame the discussion. This is when you present your design proposals without proper introduction. E.g. you start presenting your concepts immediately, first concept on first slide, with no warming up.
• You don’t allow people to prepare up front. Typically this happens when yon’t have a meeting agenda. You invite a number of people to a meeting and name the meeting: Review Designs for Project X, no agenda.
• You use the no-meeting approach: You collect all your design concepts in a PDF. First concept on first slide. You then send an email with the PDF attached and the email body reads: Here are my design proposals. Please give me your feedback.

These approaches are surefire ways for you to end up in frustration and sadness because the stakeholders simply didn’t get it. But remember: It’s your responsibility to frame the discussion and make sure these out-of-nowhere-opinions don’t surface. You asked for it — you got it!

Here’s a model

While nothing in the world can prevent unprepared stakeholders in screwing up your evaluations, you can do a lot to frame the discussion right.

The following is a model that my design professor used for brainwashing me 10 years ago. The model still represents the backbone in my way of organising my thinking around design issues. It’s a model by Erik Lerdahl and it’s called The Vision-based Model:

The Vision-based model. I’ve tweaked it’s purpose to fit mine, so Mr. Lerdahl isn’t to blame if you disagree with my explanations.

I’ve probably drifted a bit away from some of the original concepts and made my own interpretation of the model based on my experience. So anyone who already have a deeper relation with The Vision-based Model, please forgive me my modifications.

Reading the Model

From top to bottom:

• Spiritual/Intention: This is where you want to align the visionary leaders, managers and strategic stakeholders. Normally this level is directly connected to a company mission: What is it ultimately the company wants to achieve? Fill that purpose in here and remind everyone who evaluates your designs, that this is why we are here, and this is the most high-level reason we’re doing this project/running our company. A rough example: “Preserve beauty of nature”.
• Contextual/Expression: Still making sure all key strategic stakeholders are listening, you want to discuss how to conceptually stage the company’s mission. “Preserving nature” can be done by being an aggressive grass roots movement trying to evoke emotions on an ethical level or it can be done by trying to rationalise based on a scientific agenda or in 1000s of other ways. It’s important when you end up presenting your design proposals that everyone agree on or understand on a contextual level, how your client/company is positioned and intend to express itself. The contextual/expression rarely changes for one company/organisation and is deeply rooted in how it’s organised, funded and defines itself. Rough example continued: “Preserve beauty of nature … By being a scientific, reliable challenger”.
• Principal/Concept: This is where the more visually oriented designers start imagining a wealth of solutions to the required expression. This is still a pre-mockup/sketching level, though. In our rough example, many concepts for being a “scientific, reliable challenger” can be imagined. It could be concepts that on purpose fall into prototypical ideas about colours (let’s make it blue), using graphs, pictures of people with lab coats and highlighting certificates of some kind (or, something that look like certificates). In our example: Expressing “scientific” by using imagery from a chemistry lab and overlaying dystopian graphs to challenge the recipient.
• Material/Product: Here are your actual designs. If everyone agreed to your presentation of the hierarchy above, there’s a good chance you’ll get good feedback. If some disagree to some of your higher level conclusions, it’s good time to discuss on a higher level than layouts your well-intended illustrations.

When presenting your design concepts at the lower levelsIt all comes down to connecting your design proposals to vision and purpose (see, non-artist approach).

Above is the model with transitions you’ll have to make clear. The example I used was very made up and more marketing related. But it could easily be applied to more functional product designs processes. E.g. for directing discussions about visual qualities of your product and which mental model you’ll want to provide your users.

It’s more than a presentation model

Remember this is more than a presentation model. If you’ve not used the model or this way of thinking and structuring your design process it’s very unlikely that it can just be retrofitted before a stakeholder meeting. So while designing, make sure you can always mentally relate your decisions and ideas to the higher levels.

It’s probably appropriate to read Lerdahl’s own description of the model. My description here is somewhat modified and is modelled around my interpretation and fitted to my way of designing and discussing design. So Lerdahl cannot be blamed for my misinterpretations/model-abuse ☺

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