Post-human branding
I designed a microteaching session around a topic I am passionate about: the ethical tension I experience in my teaching practice between human-centered design and environmental responsibility when producing visual and verbal brand identities. My goal is to address this challenge directly, inspire participants, and encourage course to adopt this approach.
The two key learning objectives were:
- Understand the need for a post-human design approach.
- Understand how to ideate branding and co-design with nature and planetary empathy.
Session plan.
During the planning of the session, I encountered some challenges. The session needed to be accessible and engaging for a diverse, non-specialist audience, which required adapting both content and technology—using PowerPoint instead of typical design tools—to ensure participation and minimize technical issues.
The most important aspect of this session was to make it as collaborative as possible – design is a collaborative effort after all.
Session structure:
- Welcome, intros and cleaning brand (2 mins)
- Setting the scene (5 mins)
- Collaborative moodboard workshop (8 mins)
- Creative share (5 mins)
Session delivery
The session began with a warm-up where participants wrote their names and favourite cleaning brand. I then introduced the concept of post-human branding, emphasising the need for planetary empathy and interspecies design thinking for sustainable design. Best-practice brand examples were shared. Participants were tasked with a design challenge: to create a ‘disappearing brand’ with minimal environmental impact, producing collaborative visual moodboards exploring names, copy, packaging, colours, and typography. The session concluded with participants sharing and discussing their ideas and decisions.
Technical issues, including a Mentimeter pop-up and lack of timer visibility, disrupted the PowerPoint session and forced me to rush through key context-setting slides.
Presentation slides. Link to the full PowerPoint presentation.
Collaborative moodboard.
Peer feedback
The peer feedback was very valuable, particularly highlighting the challenge of delivering dense content in a short session. Ideally, the session would span 3–4 hours, allowing participants to create a collaborative moodboard and design visual outcomes to share in a pin-up crit.
Some feedback noted that the slides were text-heavy. I aimed for clarity, especially for an international cohort that often translates slide content on their phones, which made the slides more content-rich than usual.
There were also suggestions to provide clearer structure or frameworks for creating the moodboard, as well as to streamline decisions on product category and name, which took longer than expected.
Reflections
This microteaching session was incredibly valuable. It was an opportunity to see other peers deliver different content, at different paces, in different ways, which helped spark some new ideas.
Al’s story telling session, made me think of audience personas and empathy, as well as how to use storytelling to help set the scene and contextualise projects. Shaheer’s session was brilliantly light whilst also teaching the fundamentals in an engaging and digestible way. Anna’s session inspired me to bring the handmade element to a digital space.
I am certain this experience will inspire future teaching sessions. It also taught me to pack less into a session and leave more room for silence, rumination and knowledge retention. It also made check my bias and not assume the skillset in the room.