Show Us How You Got There.

Designers have always talked about process, so I'm not pretending that's anything new, but I've been getting more and more interested lately in what we actually mean by it.

If you scroll through all the work that's out there online you'll see plenty of work-in-progress shots and sketchbook flick-throughs and behind-the-scenes carousels, and it's genuinely great that so many people want to share that side of things, but the more of it I see the less sure I am that it's telling me much about how the work was really made.

I'll hold my hands up and say we've been guilty of this too, because we've tried many times to show our students' thought process and it's honestly one of the hardest things to get across. If I'm being truthful, I think the only way you can ever properly see someone's process is by sitting down and having a conversation with them about it, but I'd love to think there are ways we could all get a bit better at showing it, and I spend so much of my time in a studio full of people learning to design that I've started to think our students might be pointing the way.

When I talk about process I don't mean the really tidy case study that walks you from the brief to the final outcome as if nothing ever went wrong along the way, and I don't really mean the carefully chosen fragments and half-finished bits that look like process either, because so often that ends up being a kind of curated process rather than the real thing.

I don't think that comes from anyone trying to hide anything, either. Sometimes the real process is quite boring, sometimes it's just really hard work, and neither of those things is easy to document, and if you're doing well and going from one project straight into the next it's incredibly difficult to stop, look back and say right, this is actually how I did that.

What I'm thinking about is messier and more tangible than any of that, all the references that creep in without you noticing, the conversations and wrong turns and small accidents and the hundreds of little decisions sitting behind every choice that makes it to the end. It's a very hard thing to show, and I don't think it gets any easier even after years in the job, which is probably why so few of us really manage it.

In our studios we ask our students about it constantly, often to the point where it must start to feel a bit absurd, because when someone tells you they took some paper and stuck it on a page as a teacher you need to ask:

“Why that paper, why that spot on the page, why paper at all and why glue rather than tape?”

The first few times we really dig into it students tend to shrug and say it just felt right, which is completely fair enough, but if you keep asking gently, in a sort of Socratic way, really interesting things start to happen, because so much of what we put down to instinct turns out to have something sitting underneath it.

It goes back to a lot of what I've been saying about taste, because the reason might be a colour you remember from your childhood kitchen or a poster you used to walk past every morning on the way to work, or simply a feeling you had about something long before you had the words to describe it.

Watching someone think about that for the first time is one of my favourite things about teaching, and I'm not sure students always realise that what they're really learning is how to understand their own taste well enough to use it with real purpose, which I think is worth far more than learning to justify the work after the fact.

Our motion students do something I find really exciting, which is that every project they make starts with a set of motion principles, a few lines on the drama and the feeling and the rhythm they're hoping to create, and from then on the work gets judged against those intentions rather than just on whether it looks nice.

I keep wondering what would happen if more of us worked that way, if studios and freelancers set out their own process principles at the start of a project, the feeling they were after and the tools and techniques they were open to using. On one project the principle might be that nobody opens a laptop until the idea has been worked out on paper, on another it might be that everything has to be made from whatever you can find within a mile of the studio, and on another it might be that the copywriter does the designing and the designer does the copywriting. Setting things like that out at the beginning would be really interesting in itself, but it would also give you a way of telling the story of how you got there, because you'd have something guiding you from the start that you can look back on at the end. Some of the studios I speak to do write this kind of thing down, but plenty don't, and it tends to live in people's heads or somewhere on a to-do list.

There's something lovely and slightly humbling about the fact that students a few months into the course often have a clearer sense of what they're trying to do than the rest of us, and I think a lot of that is because they get to work without the stresses of real deadlines and the politics of a workplace, which makes them so interesting to learn from and is a big part of why teaching them gives me so much joy.

I don't think there's a neat formula for showing how you worked on something, but I'm fairly sure that if we all spent a bit more time at the beginning of a project thinking about how we were going to work on it, we'd have a much better framework for telling the story of it at the end.

So I'd really love to find people who already do this well, studios and designers who are brilliant at showing what really goes on behind the scenes of their work, because the more of that we can share the more we can teach the next generation about different ways of working, and the more we can help clients understand why it's worth working with designers in the first place.

It feels like a bit of a catch-22, because the human value of design lives so much in the process and the process is the hardest part of all to show, so if you know someone who's cracked it, or you think you have, I'd genuinely love to hear from you.