Posters 2.0

[mythbuster]

This NPR piece has been making the rounds among all my science friends this week : https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/06/11/729314248/to-save-the-science-poster-researchers-want-to-kill-it-and-start-over

Here is the link to the your tube video that initiated it all : https://youtu.be/1RwJbhkCA58

My take is that this student just doesn't get the purpose of a poster or a poster session. I find it highly ironic that his main issue is tr;dr for most posters and then he puts up a 20 minute video on how to fix it.  However, I also feel like there is a real critique buried in here.  I'm headed to a conference next week and presenting a poster that I submitted the abstract for 6 months ago.  Because of this ridiculous lead time, my title abstract is by necessity vague about outcomes.

So I'd love to hear the thoughts of the rest of the fora.

[ergative]

I think this is a wonderful idea, and I'm going to send it around my lab. What is it that you think the student doesn't get? It's absolutely true that if you're going to stop and engage, you don't need the text to be huge; and it's absolutely true that most people wander around scanning titles.

[fast_and_bulbous]

Disclaimer: I did not watch his 20 minute video justifying his method.

I say, knock yourself out with this method if you wish - but I'll probably give your poster the time it deserves if it's mostly blank space. I do agree that some people cram wayyyy too much text in small print on some posters, and that many are just not laid out very well. I've seen other people try to "shake things up" with radically different poster designs and they always end up looking gimmicky to me (my field is within the earth sciences).

I would never do what this guy advocates, why waste all that space? Why not just include the bar code thingy on a decent poster that uses all the space? My work is visual and I can display a lot of information with imagery, and support it with focused text. I always print a poster that is the maximum size allowed for the conference in fact. But I am not filling my posters full of tiny text.

I mean, if you're just going to stand there in front of a mostly blank screen with a few bullet points you might as well just stay home, I can read about your research from the URL embedded in your scan code. It really doesn't take much work for someone at a conference browsing posters to scan the title and main text and decide if a poster deserves more time and/or interaction with the presenter. Edit: The NPR link has en example where the main text in the center of the poster is nearly identical to the title of the poster - exactly what is being accomplished here? https://twitter.com/DrHydration/status/1134193977572372480/photo/1

What has me more excited are digital posters where you have a big LED screen that can contain animations and can have advancing slides - essentially, anything you can put in a video. I could use the heck out of that kind of "poster" but it has not been an option at most of the conferences I present at.

In short, I think he's got a solution looking for a problem. The real problem may be more along the lines that some conferences are too fricking big and you have to decide where you're going to target ahead of time, rather than just wandering around a echoey warehouse full of sweaty expectant looking academics hoping you'll (metaphorically) swipe right...

[mythbuster]

Ergative, my big issues with his approach are as follows.
     First he's giving the end conclusion for his study, which may be totally wrong. But I can't determine that now since he doesn't have any of the data displayed. My posters tend to be filled with graphs, charts, and a cartoon of the experimental design. The only large block of text is obligatory abstract. Even the conclusions are in bullet points. These are the parts that I use extensively in my "tour of the poster". But even if you came by without me there, you should be able to determine what experiments were done and by what methods. The devil is in the details, which is what that discussion with the scientist is often all about. And sifting though the data on my phone is not really a better way.
    Second, he's totally missing that a major purpose of a poster session is to foster interaction between scientists. His entire video is about how he doesn't actually want to talk to anyone but rather just skim through. He admits in the video to being lazy, and this just reinforces the lazy. He's also not using the conference program to skim the titles in advance and target those you think are most relevant. I teach all my students in my lab to do this in advance of the poster session.
   I love the idea of a digital board so you could expand images and pull up animations etc. I have seen presenters bring tablets loaded with videos as a counterpart. I also would love to be able to write a poster title reflective of the final results, but I don't know how to do that 6 months in advance of the meeting. I have a colleague who had to submit an abstract over 9 months in advance for another meeting. Why? These are long established meetings who know that they will need a big room for posters. I just don't get why it has to be so far in advance that everyone defaults to vague titles.
  The QR code also brings up issues for me of unpublished data and what people would be willing in share.
   

[fast_and_bulbous]

Second, he's totally missing that a major purpose of a poster session is to foster interaction between scientists. His entire video is about how he doesn't actually want to talk to anyone but rather just skim through.

How inefficient; you can accomplish that by looking at the program ahead of time, as you state.

Your point is absolutely spot on regarding what poster sessions are really about, at least in my own experience. It's about face to face interaction and forging new potential collaborations. Every time I groan about going to a conference (I don't really like to travel much but my research is getting a lot of attention right now, so....) I come back glad that I went because of conversations that happen between myself and other researchers I wasn't necessarily seeking out. I have started extremely fruitful collaborations that began at conference poster sessions because someone took the time to carefully go through my poster (or I did for them). I would not have gotten to that point with a title and a bar code. As mythbuster states, the "boring stuff" is extremely important scientifically.

I do agree with the general idea that most posters cram too much information in small text - a poster isn't just a big-assed flat journal article for crying out loud! But his "solution" to the problem is built upon faulty premises IMO.

[eigen]

It's pretty much the opposite approach of what I tell my students, which is that your poster should be interesting figures and pictures that draw people in that you can then use to talk to them about your work.

Like a good powerpoint presentation, in my opinion a good poster has very little text relative to the graphics.

I also have a fundamental disagreement with the premise, which is that a poster is to shout your conclusions and "takeaway". To me, scientific communication is all about sharing the work (method, data, outcomes) and letting other people interact with it to draw their own conclusions.

When I teach my students to read scientific work, it's that they should focus on the methods and data, and not be overly swayed by the authors conclusions.

[sprout]

It's pretty much the opposite approach of what I tell my students, which is that your poster should be interesting figures and pictures that draw people in that you can then use to talk to them about your work.

Like a good powerpoint presentation, in my opinion a good poster has very little text relative to the graphics.

Agreed, and I think this is a great way to illustrate the importance of labeling your axes, figure captions, etc.  If I'm looking at a poster and I can't tell what the h*ll that graph or diagram represents, I'm not going to bother wading through paragraphs of results or methods to figure it out.  (And I prefer not to be walked through a poster by the presenter, because I'm usually far less interested in all the minutiae of what they did than they are.)

[polly_mer]

which is that your poster should be interesting figures and pictures that draw people in that you can then use to talk to them about your work.

This.  A good poster should have enough text that it can live on the wall outside the office after the conference, but the main point of having a poster at the conference is all the discussion while standing in front of the poster.

I didn't understand that during my very first poster session, but that's what I do on both sides of the poster now.  The more preliminary the results, the more likely I am to plan for a poster so I can have the discussions on the next steps.

[zyzzx]

which is that your poster should be interesting figures and pictures that draw people in that you can then use to talk to them about your work.

This.  A good poster should have enough text that it can live on the wall outside the office after the conference, but the main point of having a poster at the conference is all the discussion while standing in front of the poster.

I didn't understand that during my very first poster session, but that's what I do on both sides of the poster now.  The more preliminary the results, the more likely I am to plan for a poster so I can have the discussions on the next steps.

The more I think about this poster design, the more I kind of hate it.

Yep, the point of a poster is the discussion and feedback. I love to present preliminary stuff on a poster - it can be incredibly helpful to get responses and feedback. I have little interest in just advertising my conclusions to a ton of people - that's what talks and papers are for. Same as an attendee. It's really not that hard to look at the title and see if something will be interesting for me or not. It's also really not hard to quickly skim a poster, even if it is crammed with stuff - nobody is forcing you to read every word (same as skimming a paper to see if you want to bother reading it, which is a skill that every grad student should learn). I'm very happy as a presenter or attendee if I have a few interesting in-depth discussions where we go into details with figures, data, maps, and so on. But you can't do that if those things aren't on the poster.

This isn't to say that posters are perfect and there's no room for improvement. A conference I frequent is using a new format that combines both advertising and discussion goals - everyone in the session gives a 2 minute oral presentation (which takes about 30 minutes), then it goes into an hour of electronic interactive "poster" discussion on big touch screens. So attendees get an overview of everything, and then choose a few to engage with and discuss further. I think that mixed formats like this have way more potential than just lazy empty poster making.

[polly_mer]

This isn't to say that posters are perfect and there's no room for improvement. A conference I frequent is using a new format that combines both advertising and discussion goals - everyone in the session gives a 2 minute oral presentation (which takes about 30 minutes), then it goes into an hour of electronic interactive "poster" discussion on big touch screens. So attendees get an overview of everything, and then choose a few to engage with and discuss further. I think that mixed formats like this have way more potential than just lazy empty poster making.

No.  Just no.

I refuse to sit through something like that ever again.  The effort required to get good two-minute oral presentations is far more than people generally prep and that's on top of the effort to get a good poster with enough meat to discuss without filling every white space with 8 point font.

I'd rather be in a roomful of posters and be able to choose to interact with a student who has clearly been mentored by wolves to help engage a budding scientist keep at it than sit through a bunch of bitsy presentations that were less informative per minute than skimming a list of titles.

I love 10 minute presentations as APS does.  A good poster session that has wide enough aisles and enough echo suppression so I can hear people is a wonderful thing.

But the soundbites around the whole freakin' room followed by getting to the actual posters means I'm coming late and only going to the posters on my list.

[fast_and_bulbous]

This isn't to say that posters are perfect and there's no room for improvement. A conference I frequent is using a new format that combines both advertising and discussion goals - everyone in the session gives a 2 minute oral presentation (which takes about 30 minutes), then it goes into an hour of electronic interactive "poster" discussion on big touch screens. So attendees get an overview of everything, and then choose a few to engage with and discuss further. I think that mixed formats like this have way more potential than just lazy empty poster making.

My work is numerical simulation and I create loads of animations that show what is going on better than a single image, or block of text, can. So I typically bring my iPad Pro with me to poster session where I'm presenting. I know of no more effective method to convey my science - so I'd love more of this interactive touchscreen stuff. For much work, however, it's not clear that it would be of benefit (as effective as, say, ineffectively using that awful Prezi software in place of the somewhat less awful PowerPoint).

But beyond how work is conveyed, be it paper or computer, the most valuable part of a conference to me is face to face interaction with new people and unfortunately I've found nothing more effective as just standing there and talking to people. I wish virtualization would catch up to what we really need. However, I recently virtually attended a conference and found the experience pretty good, surprisingly so; it's in an emerging field and it was the first instance of the conference. So put me down for new novel ways to present our work in person that include more, not less (except travel - less travel would be good).

[ab_grp]

Disclaimer: I have never made a traditional poster myself.  I have attended such sessions.  I have also done an electronic poster session similar to what I think a few folks have mentioned here (a small number of advancing slides on a loop, me there to chat).  As much as I dreaded that experience, I ended up really enjoying it and the interactions I got to have with other researchers, and I think it probably worked out better than a typical poster.

I ran across this new poster style a few weeks or month ago and thought at first that it was pretty ridiculous.  I watched the youtube video and had to admit I agreed with some of his points, at least about the experience of attending a traditional poster session.  I'm sure it varies by field and conference, but it can be very difficult to physically locate "targeted" posters amid the sea.  And then once you've found a poster with an interesting topic, undoubtedly someone else will be engaged in discussion with the presenter.  What to do? Try to read the whole shebang while waiting? Doesn't that ever feel at all uncomfortable? Or trying to read it while the presenter is idle? Maybe that's worse.  Or in that case, should you just ask the presenter to explain (probably re-explain) the whole study?

I am all for interaction, but this guy comes from a user experience background and has (I think) some good ideas about how to make poster presentations and communication more productive and efficient.  The NPR article doesn't really provide a good impression of his design.  It's not that he is being prescriptive about the exact way in which the poster is constructed.  However, I think the general idea (main takeaway visible in the middle; "silent presenter" panel with important background, design, analysis, results descriptions; "ammo bar" that has the supplemental graphs, tables, etc. for more detail) has some merit.  I personally would not want to take up the entire middle the way most examples show, but I would probably consider a variant of the design (which he encourages).  I also think his point from user experience to get comfortable with negative space is useful, too.  Sometimes it seems researchers just want to cram every last detail on there.  What's the point? With his general model, you can just walk by, scan the takeaway, snap the QR code to get the full paper or get to a project website; check out the silent presenter panel to get a brief idea; engage with the presenter if you want to know more.  So, whatever amount of time and interest you have, you can still get something out of the research.  It seems well suited for interesting graphics, too.

[the_geneticist]

One flaw with the Posters 2.0 design is that is assumes that you are allowed to scan and/or take images.

The last conference I attended had a strict and strictly enforced "no recording, no taking pictures, no social media" policy.  We weren't supposed to have phones out at all during the poster sessions.  It made it a bit awkward for the few folks who used the Posters 2.0 style.