An academic conference is one of the best platforms for researchers to share new discoveries in their respective disciplines. But in the case of complicated topics, presentations where a speaker races through slides and an audience takes copious notes are not optimal for conveying the idea. This has been a motivation to bring about improvements for visual indicators.
Traditional presentations are shallow and easy to forget. And at conferences, time limits often mean that interchange with your audience is nothing more than a matter of speeding up through a presentation without being able to describe nuanced findings or ideas. This provides a shallow sense of things, rather than any kind of insight.
This all comes with a second kind of big problem: The way information is transmitted and remembered. Many struggle to write notes at speed, while those who photograph slides are frequently left with incomplete or blurry images. This decreases attention-guide through the presentation and decrease the chance for learning on reviewing of the material.
Large images change how people interact with the information they display. Recipients can read a printout at their convenience, but slides do not offer sufficient time. Prints also allow readers to focus on the sections or data that require close inspection.
This approach became popular when Johns Hopkins University started using a poster session as the sole mode of primary research presentations in their annual neuroscience symposium. Post-competition surveys indicated a 73% increase in the frequency of meaningful researcher-to-researcher conversations compared to lecture based formats.
Research materials are physically present throughout multi-day conferences, which also allows for repeated exposure-attendees find themselves coming back to view displays that didn't seem accessible after they gain context from later sessions.
Designing academic posters and banners is different from preparing presentation slides. The best research visualization is the happy medium between all the gory details and readable formatting. The trick is hierarchical information design: primary findings are legible from six feet away; detailed methodology might invite closer inspection. Tinting different study phases & data categories allows quickly finding way in a complex information heap.
HelloPrint Research Posters: Specialized in printing research presentation posters as well as thousands of posters. The sturdiness of printed materials is also a consideration - conferences can last several days, and flimsy signs break or are no longer legible.
While poster sessions were born in the sciences, humanists are increasingly embracing visual presentation. Timeline display of thematic development across centuries in the Literature departments. At philosophy conferences, visual argument mapping is used to visually represent the logical connections between claims. Even a subject as visually resistant as mathematics now includes geometric proofs and relationships between theorems on tangible screens that conference-goers can pick up to get a closer look.
Researchers of disparate fields discovered that visual displays were more approachable than jargon-laden oral presentations, leading to unlikely collaborations.
HelloPrint is the go-to online printing service for academic institutions, offering high-resolution print quality for complex graphs and detailed diagrams.
Moving toward a more visual-first approach to scientific communication is more than a preference for good design; it is the recognition that we need time and we need to mull complex information over and over again before we can expect that people will understand what we mean when we talk about things in science.
by a HandWiki contributor