Pitching an Idea

Learnings for the development of inspiring and convincing pitches

This term’s projects are based on design challenges pitched by each of my course mates. We all prepared a one page idea and presented it in 3 minutes. The task for creating the pitch was to include a title of the project, it’s name, relevance and target group. The pitches should work as the project brief for the team projects, similar to a 'framework from which to begin' (Brown, 2009, p.22).

After all pitches, we selected our top three projects and Leslie set up the teams. For me, the voting of our course for the pitches is an indicator for how convincing the pitches were.

Here is an overview of all the pitches from my class, with green frames around the pitches that were chosen by most people and a blue frame around my pitch:

Pitches from the DMC course (credit go to all studentd from the MA DMC, 2019)

I learned a lot from the session by watching all different approaches and how to set up an inspiring and convincing pitch.

• Have a strong title This catches attention and makes the project memorable. e.g. ‘Breaking out perfect bubbles’ was later refered to as the ‘breaking bubbles’ project due to its catchy slgan.

• Define an aim that targets a greater vision and does not yet define a possible outcome This leaves space for creativity. And as Tim Brown states 'If you already know what you are after, there is usually not much point in looking' (2009, p.23). e.g. ‘Arouse people’s awareness of the threat we have posed to sea creatures, advocate a life style of using less plastic objects in our daily life’ was an aim that could be interpreted to be many different solutions.

• Decide on a clear target group This sets a clear frame for the project. If not defined in the brief it will have to be defined in the beginning of the project. e.g. ‘Human Beings’ turned out to be too general and needed to be specified.

• Create a visually attractive page This inspires and engages people. e.g. the project of continuing grannie’s food recipes showed heart warming pictures in shapes of hearts and the project to reduce plastic in supermarkets illustrated it with a shocking picture of shelves full of plastic.

One pitch that did not fulfil the visual criteria and had no catchy slogan won a lot of votes anyways. It addressed the topic of suicide and my interpretation is that it got votes as it stood out because of its controversy.

Analysing my own pitch around urban gardening, I see a lot of aspects that could have been improved.

Urban Gardening Pitch (Hinger, 2019)

I didn’t have a catchy title, as basically my aim was also my title. An idea for a title could have been ‘Green City Wave’. The aim of encouraging and facilitating urban gardening seems quite open and therefore leaves space for creativity. Nevertheless, it does not reach for a greater vision. To reach more people I could have stated ‘Encouraging and facilitating urban gardening to reconnect people with nature’. My target group was broad including individuals and local communities. After my pitch I received the feedback that choosing a more specific target group, e.g. college students could have engaged more people. Concerning the visual attractiveness I put a lot of effort in creating memorable symbols. In retrospective the symbols did probably not trigger emotions in the audience. If I had to create the pitch again, I would include a grey image of a city and a colourful image of a garden to show the two contrasts and inspire people to be willing to lead this change.

The winning pitch I will work on this term in the Ocean Plastic campaign. It convinced me especially with its vision to ‘Arouse people’s awareness of the threat we have posed to sea creatures, advocate a life style of using less plastic objects in our daily life’, because environmental protection and living a conscious and considerate life are my personal passion.

Reference List:

Brown, T. (2009) Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.