For the final meeting of the semester, I led the studio in creating a case study based on their work. In Design For America, we spend a lot of time learning the human-centered design process and generating ideas, but it can be difficult to talk about why we chose specific ideas.

Often, at presentations, teams will be confronted with a wall of questions: why didn’t you do this idea? Why did you choose this one? How did you decide? It’s hard to finish a presentation when someone older than you cuts you off and starts a line of questioning. There’s also not much discussion on what we learned and how to discuss our experiences. Even though many studio members are engineers, they spent a semester working on a team to solve a problem. I think that’s worth talking about!

By hosting this case study module, I hoped to encourage members to reflect on their process and to be able to present their project in context. A solution may seem simple at first, but explaining the problem the team set out to solve, and the challenges they faced, develops the idea and can lead to more meaningful feedback.

To prepare, I read through several marketing case studies, as well as course materials for both engineering and arts classes. Case studies focus on analyzing the process, while one-pagers are more of a brief summary of where the project currently stands.

Members of the studio would be writing about projects that were potentially still in progress, so this template should also help them discuss where they currently.

To begin, every group wrote down key parts of their project, or anything that they felt was important.

Then, we went through the slides. For each slide, we spent several minutes writing down ideas on sticky notes, adding the key parts we’d written out before where they fit. After each round, we also shared with the rest of the studio in order to get comfortable composing a narrative.

As an example, I used my team's ongoing project.

I used this case study by Teehan + Lax as an example.