Presenting style

There's a kind of meta game to going to conferences, and that's looking at presentation styles and slide design. Looking back over my notes from multi.player, I have left myself all sorts of comments about the speed of the presentation, the slide design, the slide contents etc. 

More recently I went to dConstruct, which is not an academic conference. It aims to be an inspirational one, with a theme to talk around rather than a specific technology to discuss and learn about. The speakers are professionals who also do a lot of presenting at conferences. I found it fascinating to see the differences in approach.

By and large, the slides were much better at dConstruct (granted at a design-oriented conference you'd hope for good slide design). There was less reliance on them, and less data displayed. In Don Norman's case, he didn't use slides at all and I don't think the presentation suffered for that. In Matthew Sheret's talk, the slides and more particularly how he moved between them (he'd hacked a toy sonic screwdriver) were a key part of the talk, but didn't distract from what he was saying. 

On the other hand, the academics had a much more rigid structure to their talks that in at least a few cases made them much clearer than those at dConstruct: 

1. Background of topic
2. Research questions coming from that background
3. Methodology used to explore research questions
4. Results and discussion.

Just like a paper, or a poster, or... well, most academic presentation I guess! 

So what have I learnt? From my time with American Express as well as what I've seen at conferences, I try to put as little as possible on my slides. They should not make sense without me there to talk around them. Putting tables of data on the slides doesn't work because a) it's almost impossible to make them legible and b) they distract people from what I'm saying. Use slides to show people things you can't say, so a picture (SINGLE picture, easy to see), not necessarily quotes. Have a structure so you know what your overall story is, although perhaps make it slightly less obvious in the talk than standing there and reading through it. 

Stylistically, dark backgrounds with light text is more robust if your room is too light. Talk at a reasonable pace, not everyone speaks English as a native and there's no need to pound people. Stay on topic - random 'surprise' slides are only really funny once. Test any tech on a machine other than the one you created the presentation on, just to make sure.

I think you have two goals as a conference presenter. You are trying to be interesting and informative (and I mean you, not your slides). If I can crack that, I'll be doing well!

multi.player 2011

Last week I went off to Stuttgartfor three days to attend the multi.player 2011 conference at the University of Hohenheim. I've been to a few professional conferences, but this was my first academic one. It's been about 18 years since I was last in Germany too, so my German is more than a little rusty (the conference language was English, it was just the getting around that was worrying me!). 

I had a brilliant time. It was a multi-disciplinary affair, with psychologists and sociologists much more prevelent than computer scientists (although honestly, I'm not quite sure where I sit. We're definitely the softer end of computer science, although the amount of time I spend coding puts me firmly in the technical camp. Perhaps a topic for a later post!). I heard a really wide range of talks on diverse topics including gaming addiction, the effects of rule changes on socialising, co-located playing, and (eventually) board games. I met some really interesting people from a range of places. I came across techniques from different disciplines that I hadn't come across before. 

As a result of 2.5 days of non-stop games research input, I feel like I've developed some clearer feel for where my research sits, a little bit more of what I'm actually interested in finding out, and perhaps some ideas for how to even get there. I didn't feel like a fish out of water, the reading I've done meant that I could hold my own in conversations and maybe even had some interesting ideas to add. I also got a real buzz out of it. I do love new ideas. Gets me all revved up to get back on with my work! 

I am slowly writing up my notes from most of the presentations I attended on our brain dump blog, but I do anticipate that there will be a couple of more generic posts pulling in bits and bobs over the next week here as I digest. 

More photos of Hohenheim and Plieningen can be found here - but it's just houses and greenery, no people. Seems I was too busy chatting to get my camera out when there were people around!