Prep: volunteered venture agreed at the end of W06; its visual context built in advance from real material; both demo rounds rehearsed; contrast checker open; handout printed; lens cards; DESIGN-SYSTEM.md open in a window; the W08 brief printed and ready to hand out.
Second CM-owned session, with no precedent in Ryan’s corpus. It sets the largest single deliverable in the course, due in two weeks. Everything today points at that.
Keep the fallback visible and unembarrassing. W06 is Ryan’s, and the prototyping-tool decision has been open all term. A student with nothing on screen is not necessarily behind, and today does not depend on it.
Look at what is on the screens as they go. Expect the generic default in eight of eighteen ventures. Naming one of them during the demo is worth more than any example you could bring in.
The bridge out of the standup. Say it without contempt. What they built works, which was the ask in W06. The gap is that it carries no position, and a venture whose premise is that it differs from what exists cannot afford to look like everything that exists.
Flag the change of register early. This is the first session where the subject is the artifact rather than the evidence behind it. It is still the same argument.
Fifteen minutes. Instructor talk today totals forty-five minutes across three blocks, at the fifty-minute cap. The studio is ninety minutes because of that.
Have the three products chosen and the sentence written for each. Doing this live is how fifteen minutes becomes twenty-five.
Pick at least one that is deliberately loud and one that is deliberately quiet, so “good” is visibly not a single direction.
This is the row students skip in the deliverable, so it gets a slide. A mood board is not a palette. A palette says what each colour is for.
Run the checker on screen. The point is not the number. It is that the check is cheap. Most students assume accessibility work is a project, and ten seconds of demonstration ends that assumption.
Use a palette that looks fine on the projector and fails. That is the honest case, and it is common in generated palettes.
The fifteen minutes that has to land. Two rounds, one venture, same request. Rehearse beforehand on the model and the tool you will use.
Know the two failure modes before you start. They are in the notes on the round-one slides.
Design a clean, modern landing page for [the volunteered venture]. Make it look premium and trustworthy.
It will produce something. It will be competent. Say so out loud.
Say it is competent, and mean it. The credibility of the next ten minutes depends on not pretending the output is worse than it is. A room of designers can see the screen.
This is where 317’s version of the demo does not transfer. 317 could rely on a thin cold prompt producing something visibly poor. A cold visual prompt in 2026 does not. The lesson has to survive good-looking output, and it does. That is the next slide.
Question two carries the weight, and it works better on polished output than on poor output. That is what makes the demo robust. If round one came back surprisingly good, lean on question two.
If round one came back poor, do not celebrate. That is the cheap version and it teaches the wrong lesson. Note it, move on, and carry the weight on the twelve-decisions count instead.
Goal, stated as an effect on a named person · three references marked good and three marked bad, with a reason each · the constraints · the non-goal. Then: the same request.
Put the two side by side and leave them there for the rest of the session.
The context for this venture was built before class from their real W02 to W05 material. Show it briefly as a document. The students are about to write one in thirty minutes and need to have seen the shape.
Do not narrate the comparison while it renders. Let them look.
The full line: “The second one isn’t better because the model got smarter. It’s better because it stopped guessing. Every one of those twelve decisions it made for you in round one is a decision you have evidence for. You did the interviews. You never wrote it down where the tool could see it.”
Not an anti-AI moment, and not a prompt-tips session. The studio block is the payoff: the same tool, their own evidence, work they could not do as fast alone.
Twenty directions in the time it takes to build one, which gets you past your own first instinct, reliably the most conventional one you have. And applying a decision across fifteen screens without getting bored, which is where people actually fail.
It returns taste-shaped output, the visual average of its training data, and presents it as a direction. It will hand you palettes that fail contrast while looking fine on a bright laptop. And it cannot see its own output.
You have five weeks of evidence about who this is for and what they need to feel. It has none of it. And you can measure contrast in ten seconds.
“It cannot see its own output” is the sharpest line on this slide for a visual session. The model describes what it intended, not what it made. Say it slowly.
Same boundary as W03: the frame applies to model output, not to evidence students gathered themselves. It stays separate from Ryan’s 4-Risks. Different axis, not a level below.
A direct port of 317’s anatomy of a working context, moved into the visual register. The handout they keep lists the same six.
Spend the time on REFERENCES. It has the highest return and it is the part everyone does badly. Three bad references with a reason each will change their output more than anything else on this slide.
The GOAL example is deliberately over-specified. Read it as written. The contrast with “look premium” is the point.
317’s line, unchanged. It is the difference between someone who prompts and someone who builds a system.
Connect it forward explicitly: a correction you make twice is a house rule, and house rules are what the W08 deliverable asks for. This sentence makes the assignment make sense.
Open the real one. Not a slide about it. The document. Its three rules, and the fact that each one is a sentence you could point at a screen and check.
Orange means the course is asserting something · the title never moves · a box carries a fill, or a stroke, and never both.
The most credible five minutes in the session. A real system, in use, for the course they are sitting in, small enough to read on one screen.
The teaching point: each rule removes a category of decision permanently. That is what makes a system worth having at eighteen-student, five-week scale. Not documentation. Fewer decisions.
Hand out the visual-context sheet and the W08 brief now, on the way out. They read them in the break and the studio starts faster.
Circulate on the goal sentences first. That is where the failures are, and a bad goal makes the next fifteen minutes worthless. Look for adjectives standing in for people.
Second pass: the non-goal. Almost everyone leaves it blank. “Who are you content to lose?” is the question that unblocks it.
Order matters. Context first. Reversed, they anchor on the cold output and read the directed one as a variation of it.
Some will find their cold output fine. Send them to question two: whose product does it look like? That is the finding, and it lands harder on their own venture than on the demo.
Groups of four. Every screen gets all four lenses, and the lenses rotate each round. Lens cards on the tables before they sit down.
The technique is 317’s named-lens review panel. Vague critique produces vague feedback. An assigned lens makes people find things.
Is this well made, or just confidently arranged?
Does this look like it belongs to this venture, or to any venture?
Who cannot read this, and why? Contrast, size, and anything signalled by colour alone. Measure it.
Would you give this your credit card?
TRUST is the lens that makes this a 318 session rather than a borrowed 317 one. It is where the design axis and the business axis land on the same screen. Students can answer it honestly about each other’s work in a way they cannot answer “is it good.”
ACCESS is measurable. Insist on a number, not an impression. It is the one lens with a right answer, and that makes the whole panel less polite.
Eighteen students at two minutes each is thirty-six minutes, which is too long. Run it in threes on the wall as in W03, or take six volunteers and let the rest pin up without presenting. Decide before the session.
20% of the course. The brief and the rubric are both on the course site. Point at them explicitly, and say that the rubric is the specification.
Say the gates out loud: AI Use Statement, the visual context submitted alongside, contrast figures recorded, and a prototype link that opens. A missing gate returns the work unmarked, not marked down.
The handoff line, at 6:10 and not 6:14: “Two weeks. The context you built today is what you generate against, and the system you hand in on the 16th is what that context hardened into. If you correct the same thing twice between now and then, that correction is a rule. Write it down. That is the whole assignment.”
W08 is also a CM session, so this seam is internal. It carries the graded artifact, and it should not be delivered over the sound of eighteen people packing up.
These slides are a fixed 16:9 canvas. In portrait they shrink to an unreadable strip; landscape gives you the whole slide.