OUGD502 - Studio brief 01

In the first PPP session of the year I've been asked to analyse what I struggled with in first year of the course, especially things I highlighted as a struggle in the PPP presentation at the end of the module. When looking back to first year and the challenging points I encountered, what comes to mind is managing my time and presentations. To start with time management, I really struggled at the start of first year with juggling various modules at the same time and due to this certain modules such as context of practice was affected. I prioritised studio practice modules over context of practice which led to me being less interested in the theory of graphic design, I felt I never engaged during the sessions which led to a poor overall context of practice grade which brought my end of year overall grade down. This is disappointing and regretful on my behalf but now I look, I seen what I done wrong and can hopefully improve my time management in second year to accommodate all the modules. A way in which I can do this, is delegating individual days to solely work on a particular module. By doing this I won't be distracted by other work and the module wont feel fragmented to me as it did last year when I was too quickly interchanging between modules on a daily basis. 

My other challenging point of last year was presentations, I'm not the only one as nearly everyone gets nervous before public speaking but what I seem to struggle on is talking about my work in confidence. I understand my own ideas and concepts but sometimes find it hard to present them to people who are totally oblivious to them. This can be annoying for a number of reasons because I don't receive the feedback I need, plus it makes me doubt my ideas at points. I feel when I'm presenting something other than my ideas, I'm fine and feel confident in front of people.

Ive already started a way of helping myself talk about my work this year, I simply note down key words or sentences about my work rather than a talking about the overarching concept as a whole. I feel like people use the key words and piece together the idea themselves, I find this technique helpful because it makes the audience ask more questions as sometimes I find myself sat in presentations and the idea goes over my head, due to an intricate description of the idea that sometimes is unneeded.