I’m involved as mentor and coordinator of the Creative Direction brief on the Southamptopn Solent MA Creative Direction for Fashion and Beauty course. MA Creative direction for Fashion and Beauty is one of the most popular postgraduate courses on offer at Southampton Solent University. The university is located less than 10 miles from IBM Hursley and we enjoy a long-running relationship with students who undertake the “IBM Technology” brief as part of their Creative Direction module.
The course information page can be accessed here.
Students study creative direction from fashion and beauty backgrounds with the aim of extending their practice into creative direction roles for brands, media, and more. The creative direction module that IBM is involved with allows students to self-direct a project which interacts with an IBM technology, using newly acquired design thinking skills which we introduce in the first semester. A combination of design thinking, user-centred design, business of design, and technology skills are encouraged through the year in informal lectures and mentoring relationships.
As coordinator I work with the course leader and other IBMers to structure the support and partnership we offer to students. This is a role I took on in January 2020. As mentor I provide 1:1 support to a single student through the duration of their second semester.
Coordination
Coordinating the IBM Technology brief for the MA students is a really enjoyable activity. It’s refreshing for several reasons:
- Students aren’t from technology, design, or business backgrounds. With experience typically in fashion or beauty, almost all of the skills we use as IBMers are new to the students, and it reminds me to make Enterprise Design Thinking, design, and technology as accessible as possible.
- Students aren’t learning to be designers. Typically our outreach roles involve existing or aspiring designers. The creative director isn’t a role we often (or ever!) interact with, so seeing how students adopt our tools and methods is always new and inspiring.
- The brief is very open to interpretation. Without specific deliverables required, the module emphasis is on documenting creative decisions and learning. This means that we get to enjoy a huge variety in outcomes from advertising campaign mockups to app design prototypes to 3-dimensional product development.
As project coordinator, I’ve enjoyed the following experiences in 2019/2020:
Concept reviews - December 2019
In december of the students’ first semester, we met to watch a presentation on each concept and provide feedback. At this point, students are aware of a selection of IBM technologies they might consider, and of the principles and activities behind some Enterprise Design Thinking. In the presentation, we expect to see a user-need and initial concept played back. Then, we critiqued each student’s work so far. The adoption of design thinking I saw at this stage was really make-or-break - since the onus of choosing a user, building empathy, establishing pain points and ideation is all taken individually and in isolation. I enjoyed probing all this thinking they had done, and gently steering them back on track to creating user-centred outcomes. Concepts must be pitched either within or as an extension to an existing brand - which can make choosing a user or problem to start from really challenging.
Evaluation
Evaluating the research and concepts of each student was really challenging, but essentially came down to how well we felt they’d taken the focus on empathy and real user insights to their brand of choice. Almost all students needed encouragement to go out and speak to real users. The majority of students managed to identify real user needs from what research they had done, and using Enterprise Design Thinking methods. The majority of the guidance and feedback we offered was on the IBM technology they should research, and how ambitious their concepts should be.
Concept development presentations and mentor matching
Early in the students’ second semester we invite them to Hursley for a tour of the studio and to meet their mentors. I expected recruiting mentors to be challenging, but it proved to be really easy. On this day, students who chose to continue with the IBM brief and develop their concepts presented their projects so far. Working with the course director, we elected each student an IBM mentor and provided a level of feedback. I set up a slack channel and various support for mentors to ensure that we all offered a similar level of support through the rest of the year.
Supporting mentors
Through the remainder of the project year I’ve liased with mentors and with the course director. As mentors all come from different IBM disciplines, we chat regularly about how the projects are shaped by us, how to maintain effective ‘mentor’ relationships, and share resources. The effect of the Covid-19 outbreak on the students has been really interesting, but I have been pleased to see mentors and students surpassing the expectations of their course lead consistently. The creativity of students in terms of adopting free online tools and communicating their design decisions in written documents has been really exciting.
Business Impact
Maintaining the partnership with a local university, even in a non-typical industry such as fashion, strengthens IBM’s contribution to the local community. Designers both within and outside of IBM benefit from the creative use of Enterprise Design Thinking and feel invigorated by the project. Several students have gained accreditation with EDT badges including the Team Essentials for AI course. Projects students complete are great candidates for the promotion of IBM at events and exhibitions.
This page describes the work I have done as mentor on the MA Creative Direction course at Southampton Solent University.
Mentoring
As a mentor to a MA Creative Direction for Fashion and Beauty student, I’ve had a variety of experiences:
- Introducing to design tools. Particularly with the effect of the Covid-19 outbreak, I’ve introduced my Mentee to a variety of design tools including Sketch, Marvel, and Mural.
- Enterprise Design Thinking education. Explaining design thinking methods in a business-relevant way has been a core role. Ensuring the student can balance the profitability of their idea while meeting real user needs has been an enduring theme of the whole semester.
- Introducing a design workflow. The progression from a to-be scenario, that details the success of the target user (with the proposed solution), to an application workflow in a wireframe, proved to be a contentious point in several students’ semesters. I managed this remotely in a Mural and worked with my student to tell the user’s story in words, then extract the actions at each stage, and construct wireframes from these actions. Other mentors adopted this strategy too.
- Introducing Information Hierarchy. This was a challenging item to introduce - and I started with a pedagogic statement that it needed doing. Once the student appreciated the condensation of menu items and navigation, its value was clear, but I’d like to introduce this differently in future, perhaps by suggesting a critique of the student’s chosen brand navigation.
- Giving a crash course in usability testing. Establishing context with the participant, recording results, and improving testing quality were all subjects we spoke about. I encouraged the student to document her research plans as well as her outcomes in her write-ups.
- Project direction. Encouraging the student to push the project in the direction they feel is valuable. With so many things to research, read up on, prototype, create and document, I feel that the most valuable addition I make as mentor is to encourage the student to achieve and create the things that would secure their projects’ future. As such, I’ve encouraged her to take a dragons’ den mindset, and made the Business Model Canvas avaialable as a tool for balancing all the financial, technical and design compoents of the project.