Good idea! Or, good presentation? Examining the effect of presentation on perceived quality of concepts

In the product design realm, designers often use presentations to convey certain ideas about a product or a specific stage of the design process. The popular forms of presentation include verbal pitching, two-dimensional drawing, and prototyping. The clients, investigators, and other audiences rely on such presentations to evaluate an idea. Popular idea evaluation assessment tools, such as the consensual assessment technique, utilize such interactions. On the other hand, numerous pieces of literature state that the audiences are heavily influenced by the quality of presentation when evaluating the worth of the product being presented. In this study, we examine if the audience is able to discriminate between the quality of the presentation and the quality of the idea being presented. A total of 613 ideas were evaluated over a 4-year period during a specific product design class at different phases in the design process. The result shows that no matter the kind of presentation tool used, the presentation quality ratings and the idea value ratings had a very strong positive correlation despite the explicit instructions to reviewers to separate presentation quality from concept quality. Our additional analysis shows that such a pattern did not change during the different phases of the design process.