DONE!

Thank goodness it is almost spring. The week is wrapping up and by the end of today I will be completely done with all of my academics. However, this has been one stressful week. We had our first ever presentation to a real client yesterday. I am usually good about keeping my nerves under control in situations such as these but I actually started biting my nails, I was that nervous. It ended up going alright. Some of my classmates when they were done were upset because they forgot to say things that they wanted to. I did not want that to happen so I formulated a note card with key phrases on it so I could just glance and keep my thoughts. I was nervous about using a note card because I did not want to read off it. A couple of my classmates read straight off their paper barely looking up. So I used key phrases and important words on my note card, therefore, I would not be able to read off full sentences.

We take a lot for granted in our class critiques. For example, we rely on the rest of our class mates to know what a floor plan is and a perspective. My class mates understand how to look at a design and translate it. Real clients, however, have no such knowledge. When we were describing our design to the client we had to go into such detail and do a lot of finger pointing to get our ideas across. We had to take him little by little through our design and some of the drawings he could not understand what relation you were in from the overall design. All in all, it was a good experience and it is something that will help me get better at my presentation skills.

spring break just a week away!

How times flies. Next week is the last week of classes till spring break.
I have regrettably suffered from an injury this week. I have recently sliced part of my finger off while cutting a board for a model that I was building for class. While it is not terribly bad it is more of a nuisance because now I cannot use it to hold anything while I cut. It is just very inconvenient to say the least. Somehow I managed and it took me quite a while longer than it should have, but I finished my model. Beforehand, we built a model of stairs and for this last project we had to build walls around those stairs. It may sound simple, but this was one of the most difficult things I have done. We not only built the walls, but constructed them as well. My professor took an entire studio day to give us a lecture on how walls are constructed. We learned about columns, beams, studs, headers you named it we learned it. He helped us design our walls so they would be able to support our building around the windows we designed. As interior designers in school we are just able to stick a window here or add it there but with this project we had to understand the process in how to do so. So no longer will we just stick windows in a design because we now understand how structure works and what a pain it can be to structure a building around window. It is all very technical but it was well worth learning. It makes us design with a purpose not just "stick things in." It is not something you would think an interior designer needs to know (how to construct a wall) but I enjoy the fact that I pretty much understand how to do so. Of course we are not experts by any means, but now we have a foundation of understanding that we can grow off of.