Having spent 15 years living and working with design – learning to interpret, analyse, communicate, criticise (in the very best sense of the word), and gaining a solid secondary education in the process, I will yield to no man or woman in my admiration and respect for design and designers. They – you – shape the world we live in, no less.

I’m fond of voicing this enthusiasm by pointing out to an uninitiated, unappreciative or otherwise ignorant bystander that practically everything we’re looking at or surrounded by is designed. Someone thought about the way it looks, the way it works, what materials it should be made of, what colour it should be, what length or width it should be. Transfer this spark of wonder to the natural world and you begin to enter the realms of religion or philosophy – not the arena for this particular essay, but it is arguable at some sort of fairly softheaded level that Nature (or the Divine) is the greatest designer of them all.

And among all others there is one outstanding reason why that may indeed be the case. Nature or the Divine never had to explain or present His or Her work. Nature or the Divine never had a client, never had an audience, never had a bunch of people peering at His or Her degree show boards trying to work out what the f*** He or She was trying to do and why.
Which is where the love affair between me and designers – not so much me and design, because in many cases it is poor old design itself that suffers from the disease of which I speak – turns to frustration, disappointment, even anger, fury and despair. You designers out there reading this, why don’t you learn to write? Why don’t you learn to spell? And if you’re presenting at a conference, which you often are, why don’t you learn to present? Your client presentations are the way you win jobs to make a living, right? Are all your client presentations as bad as your students’ degree show displays or your conference speeches? If so, how do you get any work at all?

You may think I’m overstating the anger and fury bit, using allowable emphasis to make a literary point. Not in the least. As a critic / commentator, it’s often my job – and has been over the last 15 years – to view presentations of work, either because I’m judging a competition or a set of awards, or because I’m figuring out which pieces are good enough for me to publish. And I am assailed by all those emotions far too often.

I was doing this very thing this summer at a collation of degree show work from various colleges. The first lot had their explanatory texts printed in a 60% tint of black in 10pt type (I’m being generous) – on the vertical surfaces of the table-height plinths. So to work out what was supposed to be going on, I had to bend down every time and decipher this otherwise fairly clear text. (I’m trying to take notes, remember.) The next lot was worse. No explanatory text or other defining mark at all on or near the work itself – just a collection of pictures and texts on the back wall, and a fold-out A4 plan of the stand that you had to take from a dispenser at the front. So it takes, say half a minute to work out that you were supposed to use this map thing. Then another two minutes trying to figure out how the map thing worked, until it slowly dawned on you that although the pieces located on the map in plan view, they were actually depicted in elevation. No ‘front’, ‘back’, ‘wall’ or other indicator. How’s that for gobbledegook? Rubbish. My blood pressure had risen several kg/m2 by the time I got to that point; and I was tempted just to walk away. I didn’t, because there could have been some good work I missed – but why make it so hard for me to find it?

This part of the presenting disease, most often associated with student shows but occasionally visible elsewhere, must be due to a failure to recognise that verbal communication of your work is the first step to an outsider understanding its intent or meaning. People who view – potential clients, potential employers, potential publishers – are looking at a lot of stuff in a short time and need to get to the point as quickly as possible. I want to know who did it, what it is and why you did it – in other words, the brief. Get that message across to me quickly and clearly. Don’t be clever, don’t be mysterious, don’t re-write the conventions. Use them, and let your work speak its own language.

There is another part of the presenting disease, much worse. So much worse, in fact, that it is more like a crime than a disease. You can’t have a perpetrator of a disease, and these are crimes, with perpetrators. The villains tend to be serious, senior and influential designers – the type of people who speak at conferences. This is why it is more serious; people have paid to see you. Usually the conference organiser has asked you to contribute to a debate, a theme. Usually you don’t. Usually you just talk about your work. If we the audience are lucky you will give a Powerpoint showing your work (obviously the same Powerpoint you keep as your portfolio, not something specially created); if we are not you will show a disparate collection of images and take us through a kind of ramble. ‘Oh yes, I forgot about this, this is something I did for…’ and ‘h’mm, what shall I show you now…?’ Disgusting. Insulting. Appalling. Unbelievable. Unprofessional. Infuriating. Insulting to us as an audience and to the organisers, who have at the very least paid for your flight, hotel and mini-bar bill. If you’re given a brief in the form of a topic to discuss, why don’t you stick to it? Is it because you’re lazy? Arrogant? Ignorant? Or all three?

The worst of it is, most of the audience laps it up. Most of the audience (many of them students) will happily sit at the feet of the great and the good of architecture, interior, product or graphic design, the people who have moved the discipline on, whose imagination, wit and creativity have made an indelible mark on the world. They will sit uncritically, adoringly, and genuinely benefit from almost anything one of these people says. But I don’t buy it. If you take the responsibility of appearing in front of an audience, respect that audience and respect the platform you’re given. Imagine we’re all clients, which in a way we are. Impress us. Make us think. Oh, and learn to spell.