Presentations have always been a difficult thing for me, I’m slowly getting better mostly because this major practically forces you to take your nerves and overcome them. I’ve never been a fan of public speaking, the only time I really seem to feel good about it is it’s something I’m truly interested in. Or if I'm pretty knowledgeable about the subject I’m presenting on. Luckily with this final studio project I was speaking on a space I was designing for architect Santiago Calatrava, and he is one of favorite designers and I like to think I know quite a bit about him. And the space I ended up creating I knew a lot about as well because I designed and planned out the majority of the space except for the exterior walls which were already in place there.
But when the day came for me to finally stand in front of all my fellow classmates and teacher and TA’s my nerves were doing pretty well truthfully. I had rehearsed what I said the night before on the drive to school so I did have some practice but I didn’t want to put any notes on cards or anything. I felt like with notecards I would rely to heavily on them and tend to look at them for guidance. So it was all in my head and I managed to talk about everything I had planned except a few points. But overall the points I missed were nothing that took away from speech, they were just kind of extra snippets of information. And I also started my presentation by providing a brief background about Calatrava and the way he designed because it was a way for me to weave my way into my design and relate these two together so you had a sense of where I was coming from and why I did things just the way I did. Presenting is really only half of it though, there is always afterwards when you have to take questions and you never know what you could be asked. But I felt like all the questions I was asked I answered in a good and polite way and was able to defend most aspects of my design because I tried to consider things such as code, or a bathroom size or the way my designer works or it relates; things like that.
Going on the first day, when I read that last Sunday I was petrified because I never really want to go on the first day but in the end I was definitely glad I did because the other two days of critiques I just got to watch and take it all in. Watching like forty some critiques you see how people design differently and how they think something works within a space or doesn’t. I could tell people that really cared about what they were talking about because they seemed to have knowledge about what they were talking about and they considered things as well. I enjoyed all the presentations that had time invested in them considerably, if your board looked good and clean and your model and if your presentation was good and crisp... I enjoyed it. A lot of people seemed to sort of do the model as a sort of after thought, and it was noticeable. Or some people would get up to present and just explain where there perspectives were drawn from and which one was there so called “money shot” and I got tired of that and just didn’t like it. So I liked things that were different and I liked the people who really tried to put forth a significant effort.
I thought I'd show you this to, even though our final project is over we have an autonomous project we've been working on and it's due Tuesday but you won't find out exactly what it is until then!
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