Defense of (Penny) Qiong Peng’s doctoral thesis entitled “Practicing storytelling in design with Pitchify--- A Tool to assist in pitching design concepts”. This work gives insights into the use of storytelling in design work by industrial design students and the problems that obstruct their practice. It also shows the current status of the research on storytelling in the field of design both in literature and in design practice. Finally, it introduces a tool called Pitchify which is developed to assist students in pitching design concepts.