Project Presentations
Today we had our mid-project presentations. Both the Turing machine groups and the Memory groups presented, with a short question and answer session after each group’s presentation. We’re starting the third week of a four week project, with the final crits on the 28th.
Stress level was high going into this presentation, for several reasons: it was my first presentation in a long time, it was the first real presentation at the school, and there’s always stress when you’ve worked hard on something and are showing it to people for the first time. We were fourth to present, out of five groups in the Memory project, and I was getting antsy right before we went up to the front of the room. I definitely need to work on breathing properly while presenting: I found I wasn’t really breathing while I was speaking, which has a detrimental effect on, well, everything.
Our presentation went really well, actually. One of the indications was that when someone had a question afterwards, one of the audience members was able to answer that person’s question. So I think the communication of our idea was successful. We still have a lot of work to do to get this thing complete for next Thursday, but we are definitely on the right track. The discussion after our presentation was helpful because it revealed some areas where we either need to rethink our approach or where we need to explain our concepts better.
It’s somewhat annoying that we will probably depart from what we presented today considering how long we spent creating and preparing for the presentation, but if we develop a better approach to this project then I’d consider it worth the effort. Of course this means that as busy as we have been for the last couple of days, we’re going to be even busier between now and next Thursday. Tonight I need to catch up on sleep (we were up until 5:30 this morning), and then there are some other projects and work to complete.
The exciting thing, in one way, is the opportunity to integrate the concept of flâneuring, which something that I worked with while an undergrad at UD. We may or may not pursue this concept, but right now it appears to solve one of the questions several people raised during our discussion session. Briefly, we originally had the host describe a path through the city for the guest, but some people thought this was too rigid, that it didn’t allow for exploration on the part of the guest. If we introduce the concept of flâneuring, we can allow for exploration and use our tool as a safety net for when you want to return to known areas or to reach a specific place. Some of these concepts were implied in our presentation (for example, you can always put the map away or ignore its cues), but perhaps it’s better that we explicitly mention the concepts.
As with all the feedback we received from our presentation, we have to decide if it’s relevant and if we can or should incorporate it into our project.
Time to catch up on some sleep!