MYP Design Writing a Design Brief Notes

The Brief Is the Contract Everyone Signs

1. The fourth strand of criterion A asks you to develop a detailed design brief that summarises the analysis of your relevant research.
2. A design brief is a short written statement of what will be designed, for whom, and why.
3. It closes Inquiring and analysing and becomes the thing every later decision gets checked against.
4. It has to be readable by your client with no design vocabulary in it, because the client is the person agreeing to it.
5. Done properly it fits in one paragraph of roughly 100 to 150 words.

Situation, Problem, Brief and Specification Are Four Different Things

1. The design situation is the context you started from, written down before you knew anything about it.
2. The design problem is the single sentence naming who cannot do what, and at what cost.
3. The design brief adds everything your research taught you: who it is for, what it must achieve, the real constraints and your intent.
4. The design specification then breaks the brief into numbered testable points with figures attached to each one.
5. Brief and specification get collapsed together more than any other pair, which produces a brief nobody can read and a specification with no reasoning behind it.

What Goes Inside a Design Brief

1. Name the client and the target audience using actual names and actual groups, not "users".
2. State the problem in one clause, lifted straight from the problem sentence you wrote at the start of the unit.
3. Say what you will design in general terms, such as a storage solution or an interactive guide, so several routes stay open.
4. Give the constraints your research uncovered: budget, size limits, the materials your workshop stocks, the deadline, the setting.
5. Say what success will look like in outcomes, such as a class storing work in under two minutes, rather than in features.
6. Name the piece of research behind your biggest constraint, so the brief carries its evidence with it.
7. Leave out sketches, every dimension except the limiting ones, and all manufacturing detail.

The One Paragraph Shape

1. Sentence one names the client and the target audience.
2. Sentence two states the problem together with its measured consequence.
3. Sentence three says what will be designed, kept deliberately broad.
4. Sentences four and five carry the constraints that came out of your research.
5. The final sentence says how you will know it worked.
6. Six sentences, one paragraph, and your client should be able to nod at every line of it.

Weak Briefs and Why They Fail

1. The catalogue brief names the exact object, material and colour, which leaves criterion B with nothing left to develop.
2. The fog brief says "design something to help students be more organised", which can never be tested or failed.
3. The copied brief repeats the task your teacher set word for word, with no client anywhere in it.
4. The wish list brief stacks fifteen requirements into one paragraph until the actual purpose vanishes underneath them.
5. The evidence free brief states constraints with nothing behind them, so a 25 pound budget appears from thin air.
6. All five fail the same test, because a stranger reading them could not decide whether the finished product had succeeded.

Test the Brief Before You Start Sketching

1. Read it aloud to the client and ask them to say it back in their own words, then fix whatever they got wrong.
2. Check every constraint traces back to a specific finding, and either research or delete any that does not.
3. Count how many different design routes are still open, since three or more means you left room to develop ideas.
4. Check the success sentence could be settled with a stopwatch, a ruler or a count rather than an opinion.
5. Get it dated and initialled by the client, which doubles as evidence that the client exists.
6. Expect small changes once you start testing, and log them with dates instead of quietly rewriting the original.

The Brief Is the Handover to Criterion B

1. Developing ideas opens by turning the brief into a design specification, so a vague brief guarantees a vague specification.
2. Your design ideas are judged against that specification, which traces to the brief, which traces to the research.
3. Evaluating compares the finished product against the same specification, so a brief with no measurable success statement makes the final evaluation impossible to write.
4. That chain is what a moderator follows through the ePortfolio, and a break anywhere in it costs marks in more than one criterion.
5. Spending an extra lesson on this one paragraph is the best value work in the whole design cycle.