Week 4

Unfortunately this week I was sick for my film comedy class so didn´t make it in. So my first class of the week was history of design where we learned about the industrial revolution. The industrail revolution brough with it railroads, steam ships and steam machines. It affected the lives of workers, urban life and brought aboutsocial reform. I found this class very interesting. For the first time during the industrial revolution, women were now starting to work and children would also work instead of going to school. However both women and children got paid less then men and people would work 18 hours a day and therefore have no social lives. I couldn´t beleive this as I couldn´t imagine just spending your life working and have no social life. Nowadays people live for their social life whereas back then peope lived to work. Now people complain about working 8 hour days. During this time people also moved from farms to cities to be closer to work. George Stephenson (1781-1864) built the first locomotive. Before this there was only wooden trackways where horses pulled carts. I would imagine that it was something like this..

With these advanced trains and steam ships came the development of tickets, posters and publicity..

We also learned about steel and the skyscrapper. Henry Bessemer (1813-1898) produced steel. George A.Fuller, an architect (1851-1900), then built the Tacoma building (1889) in Chicago.

And in 1902 the first skyscrapper was built in New York, the Flatitron building.

In a few weeks time we have to get into groups with people from our country and do a presentation on a designer from Ireland. So we will have to spend some time over the next few weeks researching a good designer and preparing out presentaion. I think this will be very interesting as I don´t know any Irish designers so hopefully I will learn about a number of them during our research of picking the best one.

For out effective presentaions class this week we handed up our presentaion outlines so hopefully we will gwt some feed back on those next week. I have decided to do my presentaion on Thailand. I´ve travelled round Thailand for six weeks and think it´s an amazing country so I would like to use my presentation so inform people about the country and hopefully convince them to go there. I will also inform them of the cost of living, getting arounf things to do and places to stay. I will also include a small part on how to volunteer in the country. I think my presentaion will be very revelant to my audience who are a group of young erasmus students who like to travel. In class this week we learnd about body language and how it can distract your audience and take attention away from the message. The most important thing is to be yourself. If you are not yourself and try to be someone else who is funny or outgoing when your not your audience will know straight away and loose interest. You need to be enthusiastic about your subject, at some point try to make eye contact with everybody in your audience, (this is difficult for large audiences but my one will be small so I think it´s possible), and project your voice so the people down the back can hear you clearly. You also need to enunicate cleary. I think this is very important for me as I will be speaking to a group of people who´s native language isn´t english so they will find it hard to understand me if I mumble or run words together. I think this will need lots of practise :(