Winter Presentation Guidelines
Expectations
We, the ME310 teaching team, expect a succinct and clearly visualized (with annotation) representation of your thinking and doing during Winter Quarter. Clearly community to outsiders and especially your corporate client team: 1) what you did; 2) why you did it; and 3) what you learned from doing it.
Engage all team members, local and distant, in the creation of the brochure and in the final presentation. Let the world see and appreciate your creative productivity at the Winter Presentations on Thu.16.Mar.
Format
The presentation will be 12 minutes followed by maximum 8 minutes of questions.
Schedules found here: Sign-up Page
Content
The main objective of the presentation is to state what your final product will be and why. This is a point of convergence--clearly state what your product will be and give an overview of your development process. The complete presentation should include:
A clear vision statement -- What are you designing? Why is this the right thing to do? What can we expect in June? How will you get there?
Overview of your development (including prototypes, needfinding, etc.) -- This helps to answer the "why" question. Focus on what you learned.
Given and discovered requirements --This helps to answer the "why" question. You don't need to go exhaustively through all the requirements. Focus on the interesting or non-obvious ones.
Plan moving forward -- This helps to answer the "how" question.
A more detailed Template suggested for the winter presentation (this may not work for everybody)
Philosophy
The model for this quarter's presentation is that you have a little design startup company and you are giving a semi-formal briefing to your technical advisory board and a client who has supported your work thus far.
In Fall Quarter, you wanted to convince the audience that you had done great benchmarking and need-finding, so you understood the problem space and you had some cool ideas. Basically, you had a sound proposal and intriguing ideas for going forward.
For the Winter Quarter Final Presentation, you want to convince the audience that you really know what you are doing. They should come away with (i) a clear idea of what you will produce in June and (ii) confidence that you have the means to get there. They want to be confident that what you show in June will be suitable for presentation to upper management, venture capitalists, etc. It will be "believable" and credible as well as cool.
Do talk about your prototyping and discoveries, but emphasize the main points. You don't have time for a detailed recounting of your entire design exploration.
Make sure you present a unified (or at least unified-appearing!) vision for the local and global teams.
Note that your audience doesn't know about 310-isms like "dark horse" and "funky prototype" and mostly doesn't care. Avoid these jargon words. The point is that you first explored some more remote corners of the design space to make sure you weren't missing opportunities and then you pulled back and reassessed what your project direction should be. You considered the following factors... and you decided in the end that your best shot was ...
You can be brief about early need-finding and benchmarking. Show highlights. For people who want all the details, they should read your report!