On a recent, five-day field trip, junior-level industrial design students met articulate design professionals who unknowingly demonstrated their ability to communicate effectively with process partners across multiple disciplines. These professional designers, with their honed communication skills, enabled design in their organizations to be elevated and valued to levels that were beyond the students current understanding about what design was and what designers could accomplish. The visits were transformative. Tom Greever, in his book Articulating Design Decisions summarizes this experience with the idea that, “Communicating about the designs was more important than the designs themselves.” (Greever, 2018)

While theoretically understanding the role of multiple modes of communications, students are very comfortable sticking with visual communication – models, sketches, renderings, image boards, etc. They like to let things speak for themselves – which is dangerous (Dykes, 2016) – and often struggle with precisely articulating the meaning and value of their designs outside of this image-based mentality.

The aptitudes and skill-sets that might pre-dispose a student towards industrial design – summed up in Visual, Adaptive, and Creative thinking (Skaggs, 2017) – might also pre-dispose them against communicating specifically and clearly with forms that resonate more with other disciplines – i.e. words and numbers.

This paper outlines an attempt to get students to work with both pictures AND words, helping them experience the benefits of both in a creative, project-based setting.