DesignSplaining...explained – DesignMap

At DesignMap, we do our best to create an environment that enables a growth mindset and think of ongoing development in three ways: Education, Experience and Exposure. Enter 45-minute DesignSplaining sessions, an interview-format presentation for sharing work across a team. DesignSplaining gives everyone an opportunity to learn explicit, transferrable skills and to see outcomes they might not have imagined from their work. All delivered in a fun, engaging way.

Design Brownbags or Sharing or Lunch-n-Learns are kind of like bran flakes — a great idea, but ultimately harder to stomach than our good intentions anticipated.

They’re a great idea because, especially in the new remote-first or remote-hybrid world, they’re a way to bring geographically dispersed teams together. If you run a design team of any size, it’s not long before Designers are wishing they could learn about what their colleagues are working on. 

(It’s worth noting that these aren’t design critiques, and aren’t meant to replace them. Critiques happen weekly or even daily within project teams and also with Design Directors for the explicit purpose of improving that design, not to teach or share.)

This sharing can inspire, teach, generate new ideas, set a high bar for quality, and support consistency. And for Designers who are mostly working with Product Managers and Engineers, they’re a morale boost, a chance to huddle up with like-minded folks and talk shop.

And, yet, done poorly they can be an unappealing combination of dry and soggy.

Do you really want to add prepping for an internal presentation on top of the team’s day jobs? Or do you want to tell a Designer (with a straight face), “Don’t put any time into prepping for this — whatever you already have is fine.” I don’t know how many times I’ve asked teams not to spend time on prep, but know that 100% of the time they have, in fact, prepped.

For the audience, sometimes a design sharing session is fascinating, but often…well, it’s all a bit boring. 

There is a reason that architects invented pecha kucha (20 slides for 20 seconds of commentary each). The presentations are often too far into the weeds, to high-level, or too dry to be what we crave when we think of this kind of sharing: we want something fun, something that piques our interest and excites or teaches us. Not bran flakes. Something fascinating that you can’t wait to go to every month. With no prep. Hm…

At DesignMap we’ve been thinking about this for a while. We’re a team of 25 people distributed from San Francisco to New York and many places in between. We could be working on anywhere from five to 10 projects at any given time. Designers work with us because they want to work with other Designers, to grow their skills, and to be inspired. So it’s really, really important that we figure this out.

At DesignMap, we do our best to create an environment that enables a growth mindset and think of ongoing development in three ways: Education, Experience and Exposure. 

• Education is accomplished through specific training we’ve created on methods to deliver our work.
• Experience is what naturally happens when designers are part of a team led by a seasoned Director or Principal. 
• Exposure is seeing great work to aspire to.

Enter 45-minute DesignSplaining sessions, an interview-format presentation for sharing work across a team. 

DesignSplaining falls into the Exposure category and gives everyone an opportunity to learn explicit, transferrable skills and to see outcomes they might not have imagined from their work. All delivered in a fun, engaging way.

DesignSplaining has a few key aspects:

• It’s fun. Thus the title, and the questions, and the poster (that’s much of the point!). If it’s not fun, we won’t keep doing it.
• It’s easy. We use an interview format — having someone else host and interview the team means that there is little prep the team can actually do. Because, if it isn’t also easy, we’re not likely to keep doing it either.
• The interview format also means that nobody can get 49 minutes and 128 slides deep into their own monologue. Conversations bounce back and forth and the interviewer can help manage the energy level and the pace.
• We do a panel interview, so that the whole team can get involved.
• The questions are pretty standardized (so again, easy). While there is a “lightning round” that might vary from session to session, those questions are quicker to answer and lower stakes.
• Finally, the work is available in detail via a Figjam board so people can peruse in-depth during the session, but it’s entirely optional. 

Some of our standard questions include:

• How would you explain this project to your mom?
• Describe the entire process in five steps or less.
• What was your favorite thing about the project?
• What are you most proud of?
• What was the most surprising thing about the project?
• What was the most frustrating thing about the project?
• What do you wish you knew when you walked in?

…and lightning round includes things like:

• If this project were an animal, what animal would it be?
• If this project were a celebrity, what celebrity would it be?
• What music did you listen to while you worked on this?
• If you had a magic wand, what would you have changed about the project?
• If another Designer had this deliverable in their portfolio, would you hire them on the basis of this work?
• Who or what was the secret hero of this project?
• If you had to do it in half the time, what would you have needed to make it possible?
• Who had the best snack on a Zoom call?
• Is there any inside joke that is safe for work?

So there you have it, our holiday gift to you!  If you’d like to join one of our DesignSplaining events, let us know and we’ll invite you to one if our client is cool with sharing. Or, give it a shot with your own team in the new year, and reach out to let us know how it works!