Presentation Reflection

My presentation was on ‘The Use of computers in Design and Manufacturing’. My opinion of my performance on the day is not good. I completely blanked and forgot what I wanted to say, despite weeks of preparation, practice and creation of, what I feel was, a great piece of media presentation. I know this subject inside out as well I should, I have been in the industry for 11 years.

In fairness to myself I did settle down after the first couple of slides and present a semi-understandable talk that ran through the whole process of engineering design and manufacture showing how computers are used and are in fact vital to every step. I also postulated that computers would become more vital as manufacturing becomes more reliant on automation.

Questions raised were, firstly, who the buyers of products would be because if all the manufacturing was automated no one would have a job or money and, secondly, how 3D printers work. In response to the first I pointed out that manufacturing was not the only industry and people would never be fully removed from the process anyway. The second was trickier as I have only ever seen a ZCorp machine in action despite having handled a number of 3D printed units. I feel my description of the way the ZCorp machine worked satisfied most but not the questioner as he had seen a machine which used another method.