Innovation Science

TED Talks, We Listen

There have been lots of links to the recently posted videos of TED talks from the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, a yearly meeting where 1000 influential (board-of-director-level) people are invited to Monterey to think and talk big thoughts. There are currently six 18–minute presentations posted, including one by Al Gore. More are promised.

I wanted to comment on several talks, beginning with one by Sir Ken Robinson who speaks about the need to rework our education system to preserve the creative spirit in people. He suggests that the curricula at public school programs are designed to produce university scholars and that this is too narrow a definition for what schools should produce. Sir Ken says that children are boundlessly creative because “they’re not frightened of being wrong,” and goes on to say that we learn to be frightened as we grow older and that most people are indeed terrified of being wrong by the time they start working at companies, with their creative spirit dissipated. Sir Ken blames our school systems for not nurturing creativity, stating that

We are educating people out of their creative capacities…we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or rather, we get educated out of it.

Sir Ken is a charismatic speaker and engaging to the audience but unfortunately, to my taste, he spends too much time on jokes and stories and not building his case towards revising our public school goals. This is a particularly resonant topic given the work that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been doing. With only eighteen minutes to influence some of the top leaders in the US, I would have liked to have seen a more direct focus on his very important thesis.

Al Gore discusses the global warming presentation that he gave earlier in the TED conference and which forms the backbone of the movie An Inconvenient Truth. He also spends several minutes on jokes, at the beginning of his talk and of the self-deprecating kind, but he eventually gets down to business and he is indeed all business at addressing the issue of spreading the word about global warming. Not only is his presentation compelling, but he is clearly reaching out to the attendees and trying to make a difference.

Majora Carter gives an emotional and inspiring talk about bringing green space to the Bronx and the need to consider urban development as a way of moving our society forward.

My favorite talk is from Hans Rosling, director of Sweden’s top university, the Karolinska Institute. Hans gives a tour de force data-driven overview of world development that uses data displays that would make Edward Tufte weep with envy. His presentation was fascinating: compelling and rich with information. Anyone who watches this video and does not finish with an intense desire to do similar data mining in their own fields is a poster child for Sir Ken Robinson’s thesis that schooling eradicates creativity—see above.

Similarities Between Blogging and Giving Presentations

I just returned from my industry’s largest convention (the American Academy of Audiology) where I gave a talk on cognition with Prof. Hafter from UC Berkeley. As always, the audience had a mix of backgrounds, several of whom I met after the talk.

I value these interactions that arise from responses to my presentations, as I do the ones that have arisen from responses to my blog. The vast majority of those who read my blog are not associated with my field of work, and my communications resulting from the blog have been with people whom I would have never met otherwise. Thinking about these two ways of meeting new people with common interests, I thought about the similarities that exist between giving presentations and blogging—the former I’ve done for many years and the latter just for a few months.

Ideation

For me, both blogging and giving presentations have multiple purposes. Both are forums for conveying thoughts and ideas to others, a way to communicate with several people at once on a topic of common interest. Both require that I spend time to understand the topic in a coherent way. I try to express my ideas as a compelling story and with a logical structure, requiring that I be able to give the big picture on ideas but also tie them to supportive details. Giving presentations and blogging causes me to refine my thoughts and understand the topic at hand in a more thorough way.

Dedicated Audience Members

At the conference where I just spoke, there were many competing talks on a variety of topics. Those who attended my presentation therefore made the choice to invest their time to the one-way communication: they read the program, they planned their schedule to attend, and they spent a significant amount of time listening to what I had to say. I see this as similar to people who subscribe to my blog or are repeat visitors. They actively seek to hear what I have to say in my blog posts because we share similar interests, and they dedicate a certain amount of time to reading the posts. But, while the majority of people who hear my presentations fall into this category, the majority of people who read my blog fall into the different category of…

Drive-by Visitors

By analyzing the statistics of daily visitors to my blog, I can see that most of my readers are people who found my blog from a keyword search. They most likely skim the post that they were directed to and then go back to what they were doing. My post may or may not have been what they were looking for (“Those weren’t photos of Lindsay Lohan!”), and many spent negligible effort absorbing the thoughts that I was conveying. The equivalent of this for presentations doesn’t really exist. If it did, this would be a large and slightly unreal conference where attendees jump in and out of meeting rooms based on posted titles on the door or from snippets of words they hear from the hallway, making quick judgments whether to stay and hear the whole presentation or move on to something else.

Audience Feedback

I think that both bloggers and presenters hope to receive feedback from their audience on what they say, and that usually happens when people come up and talk to you after the presentation or when people add comments to a blog post. Most blogs that I read, though—as well as my own blog—have received few comments from readers, with most posts having none at all. As with presentations, the vast majority of a blog’s audience are passive receivers of information who choose not to become active participants in the discussion. In general, only the most popular blogs receive comments on every post. This could be because those blogs are so interesting that they elicit a desire in the reader to respond while other blogs are not, but I suspect that it is simply numbers: if only 0.1% of blog readers write comments, then there will be an average of one comment for every 1000 viewers of a post. Most of us do not have that kind of traffic.

FYI, the talk I gave was very successful. About 250 people were in the audience, and someone actually yelled out a cheer at the end of it! I got to meet several interesting people afterwards, including a cognitive scientist from Brandeis University, the author of the blog HearingMojo that I link to on my Squidoo site, and audiologists whose office is close to where I work.

Presentation Tips

Lifehacker recently had a post called Public Speaking Do's and Don'ts. It's a little basic, but there were a couple of points that I liked seeing: (i) know your audience and (ii) be flexible.

The first tip gets violated by speakers who give the same talk regardless of who their audience is, which produces some of the worst audience experiences imaginable: excruciating engineering details to clueless consumers, marketing jargon to annoyed scientists. I wouldn't, however, phrase this advice the way that Lifehacker did, recommending that you ask yourself, "Will the head of the company be there or just your co-workers?" The CEO may rely on the opinions of "just your co-workers" to judge the value of what you spoke about. Don't under-estimate or de-value your audience.

The second point is something I've mentioned before with respect to VC pitches: if your audience tells you they are really only interested in digging into your financials, don't spend all of your time reviewing your technology. Be flexible and able to adjust your talk on the fly--which, of course, means that you are not reading from a script.

I have a couple of other tips from my experience:

Once, twice, three times a message

Start your talk by summarizing for your audience what you key message is, then give your talk that explains your key message(s), then finish by summarizing for your audience what the key message was. Repetition like this makes it more likely that your audience will walk away from your talk remembering your key points. It also makes them recognize the key points in your talk when they occur because you've already told them up front what to look for and they anticipate the message.

Have a conversation

You should be able to give your presentation without your slides. This means that you know your talk well enough that your talk becomes more of a conversation with the audience rather than a read script. Every time you give your talk, the words should be different but the content should be the same. A speaker with this technique is more engaging to the audience. In order to be able to do this, you should be talking about what you know very well. If you don't know your content inside and out, you won't be as confident and be able to speak naturally and with passion.

Engage your audience

If at all possible, get some audience interaction. This only works, of course, in a less formal conference/convention/classroom presentation and may not fly in a formal business or scientific presentation. I saw audience engagement done extremely well during a conference at Stanford where audience members could send questions throughout presentations via wi-fi to the presenters. They also had individual response boxes that allowed every audience member to enter letters A-F and Yes/No, allowing presenters to frequently ask the audience questions and quickly show the results from the response boxes in their multimedia presentation. I recently gave an online presentation that allowed me to ask questions of the audience and then show the results after they responded using their computer. Most of us, though, don't have the luxury of having such polling technology during a typical presentation, but Powerpoint can be coaxed into simulating this--a technique that I will talk about in a future post.

Great advice on giving presentations without relying on a slew of bullet points can be found at Presentation Zen and on the Beyond Bullet Points discussion board.

Burning in Your Presentation

Creating Passionate Users has multiple bloggers who post on innovative business approaches in a whimsical yet thoughtful way. A recent post by Kathy Sierra provides a checklist to help determine if your product, presentation or other creation will be memorable to your consumer.

Kathy analyzes this issue from a cognitive perspective and nicely summarizes neural mechanisms that determine what gets sent to long-term memory and what doesn’t make it through the gate. Since we can’t exactly mix CREB-2 inhibitors into our audience’s coffee, following Kathy’s advice on how to “burn in” something into memory is a reasonable step to enhance the memorableness of a presentation, and her ideas are consistent with the cognitive approach and visual style prescribed by Cliff Atkinson. She even describes how the brain “tags” information for retrieval—I knew it, Web 2.0 is a metaphor for the brain!

Here are a few items from her checklist of characteristics that will make your presentation memorable:

• Surprise, novelty, the unexpected
• Counterintuitive failures or mistakes
• Varying visuals

Tufte's Seminar of Data Display, PowerPoint and Cognition

I saw Edwards Tufte’s seminar yesterday. I am not going to summarize his more well known ideas since his seminars have been well documented elsewhere. You can find one here and another here. Tufte’s work and thoughts on information display and Powerpoint are excellent, and I’m glad that I went. I’m going to add a few general comments that are perhaps different from the hundreds of seminar summaries published elsewhere, and I'll also talk about some areas where I disagree with Tufte.

Tufte’s Style

Firstly, Tufte practices what he preaches...partly. For most of the presentation, the projector was off and he only used it to show full-sized images or videos. Other than that, it was just him talking and no PowerPoint Phluff.  Not even the usual title slide when you walk in. I suppose we already know the speaker and topic, so a title slide would have been superfluous—makes me think about which presentations of mine don’t need a title slide.

Strangely, Tufte offered little evidence to support many of the design claims that he was making. His theories and ideas seemed sound, but there was no data presented that gave scientific weight to his advice on proper data design. In his seminar, he advocates that you view a presenter skeptically, making sure that they are a "detective" without bias rather than an "advocate" of their ideas. Tufte certainly sounds like an advocate in much of what he preaches.

Ancient Texts

Tufte brought several first edition books that were hundreds of years old to demonstrate data layout by the world’s geniuses. He talks about these examples in his books, but it’s amazing to see original books by Newton and Galileo in person. I felt sorry for the person wearing archival gloves who had to slowly and delicately carry the books around, pausing at each row so the audience could see the book up close.

 PowerPoint

Accommodation of presentation design to cognitive styles is a theme of Tufte’s, which I found interesting given the current discussion of this in the blogsphere and in my own blog. Tufte argues that eliminating bullet points from presentations accommodates a diversity of cognitive styles. While it’s true that many people expect to see bulletpoint summaries of what the speaker is saying, and a few probably assimilate information best in that style, the bullet point mode is not optimal for the cognitive styles of most people. By avoiding bullet points, more people in the audience are better served. 

The PowerPoint structure entices people to reduce their syntactic discipline and causal structure in our thoughts and arguments, so in a way it affects the cognitive process of the presenter as well as the audience. Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint should be read for detailed thought on this topic. My final thought on this is that there must be a way to effectively use PowerPoint that eliminates Tufte’s complaints, but Tufte doesn’t offer such a solution--he recommends that a Word report be distributed at a meeting instead. To that end, Cliff Atkinson is being more realistic in his work and advice on trying to work within the PowerPoint paradigm, and Garr Reynolds at PresentationZen gives practical advice on improving PowerPoint presentations consistent with Tufte's theories.

Sparklines

Tufte spent considerable time talking about sparklines, his concept for tiny graphics inline with text that will be a significant part of his next book to be published, Beautiful Evidence. You can find some discussion of sparrklines at Agile Testing and Anil Dash.

While the concept is innovative, Tufte over-values the amount of information that these can provide. As an example, he considers the plotting of a mutual funds price embedded inline with text (the chart is the height of an uppercase letter and the length around five letters). He argues that this tiny chart consists of over 250 data points with a resolution of at least two significant digits (or, say, over 7 bits of resolution). Therefore, there are 1750 bits of information in the space taken up by four letters. This seems like a reach, since certainly the reader isn’t assimilating that many bits of information. People do a considerable amount of data reduction in their perceptual space, and the amount of bits of information obtained from such a small graph is considerably smaller than the actual resolution of the graph (think of principal components).

The fact that people can discriminate two charts/sparklines that differ in one data point doesn’t mean that they will interpret the two charts any differently—the information to the reader is the same in both. This is the classic difference between discrimination and identification: two images might be discriminable but not differently identified. In my field of hearing, a one-second vowel sampled at 44.1 khHz with 16 bit resolution doesn’t mean that there is over 705,000 bits of information in that one-second sound sample. A vowel with a formants at 710 Hz and 1100 Hz will be identified as an /a/, as will a vowel with formants at 850 Hz and 1300 Hz even though the two data points are considerable different. The two vowels can be discriminated but are not differentially identified. I believe that the analytical value of sparklines is not nearly as large as Tufte calculates.

 Tufte the Artist

Tufte spent a small amount of time showing us pictures of giant sculptures in his garden. While interesting, I’m not sure what the point of this was.

Watching and Not Listening

While preparing for my recent talks, I watched videos of presentations given by Steve Jobs at Apple product launches. I first learned of Jobs' unique style, by the brilliantly informative analyses of his presentations at Presentation Zen, and learned a lot about presentation style by watching Jobs' presentations downloaded from the Apple site and reading Zen's analyses of them. I'd like to add my own observations the extensive analysis done at the Zen site.

 

An exercise that I found useful was to rewatch Jobs' presentations with the audio turned off. By eliminating what he was saying, I was able to pay complete attention to his use of the stage and, more importantly, his use of graphics. What I noted right away was not only the absence of bullet points, but for most of his talk the absence of any text at all on the screen. The majority of visuals that accompanied his presentation was graphics only. When, for example, he announced that for the first time Madonna's complete collection will be available online (on iTunes), all they showed was pcitures of her and her album covers. Not even a heading with her name at top of the screen. No text at all.

 

The primary times when he (well, his Marketing department) used text was for headline-worthy announcements. "70% Market Share!" "1 Billion Downloads!" By limiting the use of text to just these key moments, the words had that much greater an impact.

Travels in South Africa

A friend of mine at Microsoft, Jon Beighle, just posted an amazing account of his business trip to South Africa. Interesting comments on giving presentations in airplane hangers, nearly being attacked by an elephant at a game reserve, experiencing the poverty and HIV crisis in Soweto and Capetown.

Cognitive Approach to Font Design

The use of cognitive science on the design of Microsoft fonts is intriguingly mentioned by Scobleizer in his post on a visit to MS's Cleartype team (and supports my post on the application of cognitive science to product R&D).

When talking about the team's cognitive scientist, Kevin Larson, Scoble says:

He sticks people inside an MRI machine and asks them to read two pages of text. One with fonts that are ugly and poorly designed. One with beautifully designed fonts and aesthetically laid out.

He says they can’t see much difference in reading speed, but there’s a massive difference in the part of the brain used on each kind of page. Also, they measure the various facial muscles used when reading text. Turns out people frown more when reading the poorly-laid-out text.

The comments on this post mention a fascinating blog by the Cleartype team which discusses the arcane science of font design. I not only learned a lot about the problems and solutions associated with fonts, but why people have a tendancy to (improperly) use two spaces after a period-ending sentence.

I wonder if any of this can be applied to selecting the optimal fonts for Powerpoint presentations that use the Wabi-Sabi philosophy.

Tufte on Presentations

Some advice on giving good presentations from Edward Tufte, as relayed by someone who heard Tufte's lecture on the topic.

I got this link from a discussion on presentation tips at 43 Folders.