Sophie Ashdown

This week I presented my research project to the group. I was supposed to present back in early March but it was when AJ was in hospital, the day after his operation, so it wasn’t appropriate timing.

This ended up being a blessing in disguise at it meant that I had more time to work on the presentation. However it also meant that I spent time on the presentation when I should have been creating more work. The end of year show is looming ahead and I need to create the pieces I intend to include.

I spent quite a long time preparing the slides for the presentation. The content was quite straightforward to put together but I agonised over what order the slides should go in, what images to use, and whether to include some video elements.

I also spent quite a bit of time getting the design of the slides right. As I’m obviously drawn to black and white, I knew that I wanted a monochrome pallet, but struggled to find anything in the usual Powerpoint design templates, so ended up making my own templates from scratch.

Thankfully the presentation went well and I was happy with how it went. I surprised myself by how passionate I can get about the topic of data art, and of course Constructivism. Running through the presentation I was pleased that I felt confident about the material, and believe that I demonstrated how much work and passion I put into the research paper. I enjoyed it much more than expected.

At the end there was a lot of good discussion afterwards in response. My coursemates are amazing with their questions, comments, and input. I had some lovely kind words afterwards to say that they enjoyed the presentation, which I really appreciated.

If anyone is interested, here are the slides as a pdf. Unfortunately converting ppt to pdf messes up some of the formatting but just ignore any anomalies!

I had some great feedback specifically about my slides too which I appreciated. I used to do a lot of presentations back in my corporate days, so this isn’t unfamiliar to me, but it has been a long time! It reminded me that I enjoy presenting, especially about something that I feel strongly about.

Maybe there is a Ted Talk in me at some point…