Presentation of Design Project

	Presentation of the Design Project
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Preparing for the Presentation of your Design Project

The presentation of your image to the review panel is the final stage of the Design Project. It is important that you prepare for the event carefully, because the skills you learn will be useful for a job interview, in the workplace, and lots of other situations relying on your ability to express yourself confidently.

The images.

You will need to prepare two images – one to help you ‘get a picture’ (called a ‘success picture’ or ‘success metaphor’ – “What would I look like if I was very successful at this task?”). The other is the image of your project manipulated to look as though it is a real or full size response to the design brief. The success picture is just for you to use, the other is the one given to me to project onto a screen for the presentation. I need the project image attached to an email message by Monday 13 October (SWTAFE and MRC) and Monday 27 October for CAE students.

The ‘Success Picture’

The simplest way is to take a digital image of your upper body, ‘cut’ it out using a graphics program (scanners come complete with a graphics program that should be able to do this process). Using the template provided will save time. Once you have yourself in the image, look at it often - first thing in the morning, and last thing at night (a semi-relaxed state) are good times. You may put your project image in this image to complete the picture.

The project image

As you have probably seen in the Design Project examples, simple projects can be made to look pretty impressive in an image. It is worth experimenting with images to get this aspect right. Generally speaking, unless you are familiar with graphics programs (Adobe Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, Micrografx Picture Publisher, and so on) it is best to set up the project as much as possible for the initial image. Having the action figure posed with the stage prop (see image) saved me a lot of time looking for the right image of a person to manipulate into position.

Sometimes it will not be possible to get the right background so a suitable photo will be needed – either from the Web (Google Images is a good source) or scanned from brochures and magazines.

It may not seem that important in the early stages, but use your ‘success picture’ to visualise the setting. You will feel much better if you are proud of the image being projected before a group of people, than wishing you had of taken more care with the early stages.

The talk

My suggestion is to write out what you are going to say, and learn it. Do not read it at the presentation, or your talk will lose its impact. Professional speakers write out their speech beforehand, read it lots of times, and even though they can’t recite it off by memory, they remember the basic structure or ideas, and it just flows. When you can remember what you have to say, you can then concentrate on the most important part – what to do with your eyes, hands, head and body.

There are no short cuts, write it out, read it aloud over and over, picture the paragraphs (or ‘chunks’ of text) and the order they are in, and then practice it lots of times. A few minutes several times through the day is better than a longer session once a day. It is a good idea to do it in front of a mirror, to see how you look, this means your senses of sight and sound are part of the learning. Seems like a lot of effort for a five minute presentation, but I can assure you, this skill will do more for you than almost any other I know. When I think back over nearly 30 years of teaching, the students who could ‘think on their feet’ and express themselves have all done very well. They may not have been the brightest, but they had a skill they could use to make things happen. Try and convince yourself you are doing something for your future in this exercise.