Designing Effective Presentation Boards in Industrial Design Education

ABSTRACT Product proposals developed within the scope of design studio courses, which are the backbone of the curriculum in industrial design education, are presented to jury evaluation through presentation boards prepared in printed or digital format. Presentation boards function as the ultimate visual communication tool between the designer and the client in professional life and between the student and the jury in educational life. In addition to the quality of the design proposal, the quality of the presentation board in terms of form and content is also effective in the final evaluations of the customer or jury. With the aim of increasing industrial design students' awareness of the importance of presentation quality, the Presentation Board Analysis Module was designed within the scope of the ENT 382 Portfolio course in the 3rd-year curriculum of Gazi University Industrial Design Department. In this module, designed as a three-week workshop, students were first asked to create a visual material pool of presentation board samples. Then, they were expected to subject this pool to content analysis in groups. This study aims to reveal the criteria that need to be considered to prepare effective and successful presentation boards in industrial design. It proposes a constructivist pedagogical approach in which the student constructs the knowledge of the criteria. As a result of the study in which a total of 156 different product presentations were analyzed, three basic categories have been reached in the criteria that should be considered to design effective presentation boards: (1) criteria arising from the context in which the presentation will be made, (2) criteria related to the components and content of the presentation boards, and (3) criteria for the visual composition established with the components.