In short: Have a poster that has three levels of informations (little visible from far, medium visible from 2 meters, lots visible from 1 meter) and put your main prototypes on a table (each on his on sheet of paper that contextualizes it and shows the key learnings).

The context

Within the Master Service Design of the HSLU we have from time to time intermediary exhibitions where learners have to share the state of their project in a exhibition format. This means they have to present clearly what is their service idea, in which context they work, what is the problem they solve, and all of these key ideas. But they have to do it in a way that is understandable without oral presentation, and that has to fit three audiences. The guy who just spends 15 seconds, the person who is curious and is okay to stay for a minute, and the very invested person (a friend, a supervisor) who will watch it all.

The poster

An illustration of a poster showing the context of a series of service prototypes

Limited space to clarify your concept. To me having a poster that describes your service concept is a great exercise for any service design professional. It forces you to really prioritize what you want to share because the space is limited. You can't just add another slide. You have to make it work within the limits of your poster.

Don't over index on the spatial stuff.

A poster is also a very nice tool because it puts the focus on what's really important for the service designer: not making a lovely exhibition and spending hours on the exhibition stuff but focusing on having and sharing a clear idea.

Structure three levels of pitch.

Whenever we have to pitch our service design work the pitch really adapts to our audience. To a C-level guy you have to pitch the big idea and the impact. To a manager some process elements. And to direct colleagues who need to live with the consequences or implement it you need to share many more details to reassure them. A poster helps you to formulate these three levels of pitch in one format. To do so you design the poster with three levels of engagement, time invested and physical distance:

  1. From far: share the title, concept and impact. This , in big size on the poster.

  2. From 2 meters: share the key findings and guiding principles. This is in medium size. share the details and reassure.

  3. From 1 meter: This is in small size.The table.

On the table you can share more details for the very engaged people. This is the place where You can share prototypes of key elements of your service.

Prototypes on the table

An illustration showing a table with prototypes on it and a poster above the table. On the side a zoom in the prototypes shows that the prototypes are put on a sheet of paper that contextualize the prototype with information like "What it is", "Impact", "Testing insights", etc.

One approach that works really well to present prototypes is to place them each on a big sheet of paper. On this sheet of paper you then have two zones:

Context zone

This one gives key information to understand what the prototype is about and what was learned from it. This could include things like:

  • title

  • insights it's based on

  • testing results

  • implementation considerations

  • where and when people interact with it

  • etc.

Obviously, the art is in choosing what are the three to four things that you find the most important to share here. 2-

Prototype zone

This is the place where you put the prototype. Just make sure that the color of the paper your prototype sits on and the prototype itself don't have the same background color.

Backstage of this text

This text was written and illustrated by hand on a remarkable tablet and then converted in a typed text automatically.