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Showing posts from December, 2011

Inside great presentations

Last night I was reading Before & After Magazine issue number 3. Their column "The thinking designer" was about what to look for (what to strive for) in good advertisement, but it could as well be applied to great (scientific) presentations: Their message is a surprise. They don't lose clarity. They involve the audience. They challenge curiosity.   They command answers. They let the audience think. They're always well executed. The "curiosity challenge" is also expressed in this quote from filmmaker Sheila Curran Bernard about documentaries At its best, documentaries [in our case scientific presentations] should do more than help viewers pass the time [or information]; they should demand their active engagement, challenging them to think about what they know, how they how it, and want more they want to learn. —Sheila Bernard Author of "Documentary Storytelling"

Design and Science

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My read these days is "Surely you are joking Mr. Feynman!", by physicist and Nobel-price winner Richard P. Feynman.  It is a good book, that among other things touches on the subject of scientific presentations. But that's not why I mention it, but rather for a shocking revelation. Feynman admits having little regard for philosophy, poetry and other activities where digressing is a common practice. I was shocked because my idea of people like him is of "universal geniuses" that acknowledge, respect, and admire multiple disciplines for what they are. I can't stop wondering what would Feynman think about design, a discipline guided by principles, guidelines, and subjectivity rather than by theorems and laws. If Feynman was a scientific genius, Charles and Ray Eames were design geniuses. The Eames office made a superb video on the sizes in the universe call "Power of Ten". Enjoy!

Please stop!!

Yesterday morning my wife told me there would been a talk about my home country and encouraged me to go. It was part of the "Public Colloquium — Area Studies and Political Order" at the local university. So yesterday afternoon I headed to the venue and arrived 15 minutes early thinking it would be good to get a seat on the back. I was surprised I was the first attendee and that the speaker hadn't arrived. That was the first signal of what was about to come. Earlier that day I had been having trouble with my phone, so tried to fix it while waiting for the lecture to start.  People started coming in and two minutes before five o'clock the speaker arrived, another bad signal. I guess it was naive from me to think the lecture would start at the announced time, it is Germany after all. When he arrived he looked more like a boxer going into a fight than like a lecturer, he barely smiled or greeted the audience. He got the LCD projector running and fired up his visuals. Hi

Presentation sin: Filler words

Filler words are a credibility killer. In this post, I link to the Six Minute blog for some answer to this problem. No matter the language of the presentation, filler words like "um", "uh", "ah", "am", "eh"are a pain to the audience. Thankfully, Andrew Dlugan's Six Minute blog on public speaking is again active and full of great advice. In one of his latest post " How to Stop Um, Uh, and other Filler Words " he  addresses the issue. I recommend you read it.