As I’ve mentioned this in the main story, projects really were worth my time. Even when not the ideal ones or from ideal companies, just the fact that you have a client/partner on the other side with whom you need to discuss things and present work, really puts students in the right atitude.

In the past I had had the experience of giving students fake briefs to work with, which they would use to exercise their skills. To some extent it worked as it allowed them to put in practice the “how you execute it” part of design. On the side of really understanding what was the root of the problem they were solving for, there wasn’t much of a chance, though. At the time I would compensate that by once in a while telling them stories about my ongoing projects.

Throughout all the TNDS cohorts, we noticed just how much confidence grew in people after finishing a project. So, we started investing more and more time in making projects an earlier thing.

At some point it was hard to get new projects, due to the partnership terms we had defined while trying to save students from financial burden. In the online model things were different and costs were lower, which meant that tuition was enough to cover costs and I could consciously make projects 100% free for partners. This made sourcing projects easier but also meant that with no money involved, partners were less invested in the project.

While this was delicate balance, I still managed to pick partners who I knew would be invested enough in making this work for everybody. This meant spending time during the brief explaining things and showing offices around. But it also meant being there for impromptu meetings filled with questions half-way through. To me, that’s how you learn but also how you work best.

Some projects were messier than others. The goal was to make something that was industry-grade quality and 95% of the times we did it. Whenever I was involved, I tried making sure we would deliver something that made sense but that wasn’t always the case. Incomplete briefs, exotic industries, or simple lack of participation in research plans were often in the beginning and we learned how to deal with them as if we were a studio standing on it’s feet. And all of that had a lesson in itself.

Of course, this was still a sandbox they were working in. It was as real as it could get (in that setting) but the stakes were still low as there was no money involved and most of the times it was non-essential work for the companies. There was a good safety net but an even better exposure to the messiness of business and the randomness of people as users.

At some point, I started making an habit of pointing out how all frustrating moments we encountered could exist in the real world, by telling them similar situations I had had at my former agency. I told them that if money was involved, things would probably be even more complicated because clients would make sure to get their worth. How most of our partners were actually very generous in their briefs and their time, probably because we were school. There was always a lesson to take from each moment. And I believe getting that level of reassurance was important and made them more resilient.