DESIGN CHARETTE 4: Presentation breakdown

Understanding self limitations as an important part of collaboration, as Yen Trinh pointed out (accessed October 30, 2012) was definitely something we had to face. Sometimes it means admitting to the group and yourself what your weaknesses are, but often it can highlight your strengths and help the group charge ahead to its main goal. Our major limitation across the group was time and commitment. We are all full time students and with work and our other subjects, it got very hard to try and split time up evenly and sometimes it meant that we put in less work than we would have liked into our collaboration subject. When it came to presenting our actual D2 presentation, we are all disappointed to say that it all kind of fell apart. We had tried to commit to too much over that week, we fell apart in our complete and total communication style and we didn’t recognise when to spend less time on some things and more on others.

Because the actual presentation had gone so well last time we didn’t bother to allow any time to prepare for that, and at the same time we had not really recognised that having one speaker was our strength- we thought it was just the fact that I brought a personality and identity to the team. So we had me introducing and all of us speaking. If we had spent any time practising this or communicating properly our concerns on it, we may have realised that it was going to fail. But we didn’t and we presented tired stressed and unrehearsed. It went for 10 minutes over time and it rambled more than we ever would have liked.

Another communication breakdown that happened in the final stages was when we tried to decide how to do up the presentation boards. Steve and I said that the boards should be industrial based: a few large clear drawings, minimal text, and white space. The architects then pointed out their reasoning and perspective which is work for who is marking you. So they reasoned that we should do up boards in Caitlin’s architecture influenced style (for which she has done well with in the past). We left it at that and didn’t think to push our unease and we trusted what she was doing. They were lovely clear boards that had s flow for them but they were architecture boards. When it came time to present they made no sense next to the product and if we had simply stopped, had more time and discussed it more we would have realised what we were to do. Another problem that occurred was that we were all worried about the font size (size 12) and the readability of that. But as the boards were looking so lovely and balanced we didn’t change it or argue it further despite out better judgement- again because we had run out of time. If we had talked and decided before it had been done perhaps we could have avoided that. When it came time to presentation we were told that size 18 font was the standard minimum. When we heard this we simply wrote it down, took it on the chin and made sure it was changed for D3. This was the good thing about our group- we understood what had happened, that we had done a rushed job and decided to stay positive and chipper anyway. We took in all the feedback and produced better work in D3.