Gave my dissertation presentation today - it went OK. Could have done with not staying up till 3 to write it, though.
Whilst spaced out on caffeine, I came up with an experimental way of writing my notes for the speech. As I’ve noted before, I hate PowerPoint and the way it forces people into using bulletpoints as a system of organisation (I am not the only one who thinks this). I also dislike writing my speech out in full, as it ends up with me reading out a monologue.
Concise notes, therefore, are the way forward. But even these present a problem; what if I get lost, or dwell on insignificant points? And what if I start running short of time - how can I quickly decide what to drop and what to concentrate on?
The design solution I came up with is inspired by (or ripped off from) the design of folksonomy “most popular” displays like on Flickr or del.icio.us to show which are the most used tags etc. Firstly, I reduce the notes to stubby one or two-line sentences, and get rid of punctuation and capitalisation to discourage me from treating them like sentences to be read out monotnonously. Then (and this is the dinky part), I size the words and phrases according to how important they are; thus I make sure I include all the important bits quickly by checking along the big words. If I ever need to drop stuff because of time, I can ignore the sentences with mostly small letters.
A quick example:
intellectual property ownership has been defined, both morally and legally, as an exclusive right attached to a single entity
the promise of being able to secure a temporary monopoly serves as incentive to create
free/open source is the opposite; the rights provide inclusivity by allowing others to use and rework your work
subtle differences between ‘free’ and ‘open source’, relating to whether disclosing the source of one’s derived work is mandated, or merely permitted
It was not a total success (I was slightly unused to the style), also I didn’t provide much whitespace in the printed version so the conflicting sizes crowded each other out a bit; a 1.5 line spacing would have been a help. But, it did help me keep track of myself, when I felt confident to expound on a topic without the notes’ assistance I could do so, and then I could look down quickly to find my place again without having to concentrate on reading too much.
This is by no means a final design - I’m sure it can be tweaked. Comments welcome.
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August 3rd, 2005 at 22:46:06
I like the idea. Seems a bit free-flowing to provide a usefull structure/framework. Maybe some slight segregation of the points…? or maybe people will just get it from the font sizes.
Much as I also dislike powerpoint, I do like bullet points…
August 4th, 2005 at 00:46:54
I like the idea. I do think it would make me want to SHOUT the important parts VERY LOUDLY, though :-).
I think if one were designing a “better than PowerPoint” app to help you do this (which you’re not, I know, but hey) you’d want to also link different statements togather, or even different parts of statements, so if you end up dropping one bit it’ll remind you later on that a follow-on statement referred back to something you didn’t actually use…
With that in place, it could also suggest to you which parts needed to be made bigger, because many following statements were contingent upon them. Once you’d linked everything together (crazy Ted Nelson style), the app would even show you what it thought the most important parts were, based solely on the self-folksonomising connections you’d already made.
Hey, maybe it could be a little animated paper clip! “You appear to be ignoring a fundamental premise. Don’t you think this fatally undermines your entire argument?”… and so on…
August 4th, 2005 at 09:41:46
Have you seen Cliff Atkinson’s “Beyond Bullets”? He suggests a storyboard approach to a PPT presentation that stresses a single idea per slide put over in a true multi-media style. Probably not as quick to prepare, but I imagine that the story-driven presentation style will have more impact.
August 8th, 2005 at 23:14:28
Love the idea of using different font sizes. I’ve tried something similar using *bold* to make the key hooks stand out, but this way could work better.
For the really brave, try departing from the linear (what Tufte calls “the death march of bullet points”) by putting key points on a grid and tackling as the mood takes you.
Sometimes two orthogonal ways through the topic suggest themselves and you can make a structure that encompasses both, e.g. go insight1, example1, insight2, example2 etc.. _or_ insight 1, insight 2, example1, example2.
Listen to your audience. Watch their faces. Maybe even ask them upfront if they’d like to see more examples or move onto the next point.
How about a Powerpoint alternative that supports conversations, instead of monologues?
Matt
August 8th, 2005 at 23:47:12
I used a similar technique a few years ago to design a book. The source material for the project was emails, videos and images sent from the competitors in a round the world sailing race - which sounds dorky until you get into the material, since these men and women were sailing in pretty extreme conditions, alone, in small boats, for the better part of a year.
In any event there are some sample spreads online at:
http://book.stamen.com/books/whitbread/book/index.html
We used this technique alot in our presentations; it was well suited for multimedia storytelling. The idea was that you should have a different experience looking at the screen/book from 10 feet away than at 10 inches, but still be able to get some sense of what was happening from all those distances.