MYP Design Annotating and Presenting Design Ideas Notes

Annotation Is The Drawing Speaking For Itself

1. Annotation is the writing around a sketch that explains everything the drawing cannot show on its own.
2. A drawing shows shape, while annotation supplies material, size, joint, finish, cost and the reason a user benefits.
3. Your folder gets read and moderated without you in the room, so an unlabelled sketch is an unexplained sketch.
4. Aim for six to ten notes per idea, each one short and each one pointing with a leader line at the exact feature it describes.

What Annotation Is Not

1. "Nice shape" and "I like this one" are opinions, and they give a reader nothing to use.
2. Repeating what the drawing already shows, such as "this part is round", wastes the note and the space.
3. A note earns its place when deleting it would leave a real question unanswered.

Four Things Every Set Of Notes Must Cover

1. Material must be named precisely, so "6 mm birch plywood" rather than wood, and "3 mm cast acrylic" rather than plastic.
2. Dimensions means the sizes that matter, such as overall height 180 mm, slot width 12 mm and wall thickness 3 mm.
3. Construction says how parts join, such as a finger joint glued with PVA, or an M4 bolt through a 4.5 mm clearance hole.
4. User benefit says why the feature helps the person, such as "the 15 mm lip stops pens rolling off when the desk gets knocked".
5. Add process where it is not obvious, such as laser cut at 60 per cent power, or printed at 0.2 mm layers with 20 per cent infill.
6. The benefit note is the one students skip and the one that shows you are designing for a client rather than decorating a page.

Put The Specification Numbers On The Page

1. Write the specification point number next to the feature that satisfies it, such as "meets point 3, mass under 800 g".
2. A numbered reference costs you five words and makes the link from research to idea visible without a paragraph.
3. Be honest where an idea misses, and write "fails point 6, will not fold below 60 mm" straight onto the drawing.
4. Those honest notes feed directly into the scoring you do next, so none of the work is wasted.
5. An idea page with no point numbers asks the reader to do the matching for you, and readers do not.

Clear Over Beautiful In Criterion B

1. Criterion B credits how well ideas are communicated, not how skilled an artist you are, so a clean pencil sketch beats a smudged attempt at realism.
2. Use isometric or two point perspective for the overall form, since a flat front view hides how parts meet.
3. Add an exploded view for anything with more than two parts, because it shows assembly order in one picture.
4. Add a section view when the important thing is inside, such as the battery bay or the route the cable takes.
5. For digital products, draw wireframes of the key screens with arrows showing what each button does.
6. Keep line weights consistent, with heavier outlines and lighter construction lines, and leave the construction lines showing rather than rubbing them out.

Presenting A Range So The Differences Show

1. Give every idea the same page layout, with the main view top left, details to the right, annotation around the edge and the idea name at the top.
2. A repeated layout lets a reader compare ideas instead of relearning each page.
3. Name your ideas something memorable, such as the clamp and the folding tray, because "Idea 2" is forgotten by page nine.
4. Add a one line summary to each page saying what makes this idea different from the others.
5. Keep all the idea pages in one run of the folder rather than scattering them between research and development.

The Page Test: Hand It To A Stranger

1. Give one idea page to someone who has never heard about your project and ask what it is made from and how big it is.
2. Anything they cannot answer is a missing note rather than a missing drawing skill.
3. Ask which specification point the idea serves best, and if they cannot find one, your referencing is not clear enough.
4. Fix the page before moving on, since these are the exact pages a moderator will see.
5. Two rounds of this on your first idea page usually fixes the habit for every page after it.