Re-imagining Presentations

I recently wrote about Umair Haque's work on smart growth. I spent some time today viewing his "Constructive Capitalism" presentation at Daytona, and it's a worthwhile investment of an hour to see it. One persistent thought I had, as I viewed his peripatetic slide flipping, was how ill suited the slide presentation format is to the way we think and speak.

Slides are assembled -- and meant to be displayed -- serially, moving forward one slide at a time. The presenter is supposed to put together a logical progression, the slides becoming a visual exposition. But thought is only artificially a linear progression. To appear polished, we force our thought process into an artificial presentation; the reality is much messier. We think interactively -- even if you're only interacting within your own mind -- and the connections are all over the place. Thinking moves forward, laterally, back, up down, all around. We go back to some ideas over and over again. And so, Haque keeps flipping back to a couple key slides over and over again, and while I appreciated the content, the experience could be disorienting at times.

This isn't the fault of the presenter - it's the fault of the ubiquitous presentation technology that we all use. I found myself wishing for the next generation of presentation technology. The presenter would have a command screen, with thumbnails of his slides. He would be able to move the thumbnails around to group them at will - and tap the one he wants to display it to the audience, push off the the side any that he's not interested in showing (now). The speaker notes would appear (for the presenter only) with a touch. The software would, in essence, work organically, like our minds do.

I'm sure there are speakers who like the imposed structure of the slide deck. It's the electronic facsimile of the old stack of note cards we used in school presentations: a compromise between reading a prepared speech and speaking ex tempore. But for people who don't want to read their presentation, who rather want to think on their feet and interact with the moment and the audience, we need another tool. How alert an audience would be, if rather than reading through a presenter's slideshow, we were offered the opportunity to engage with the mind of a presenter with something of interest to share. Seems like technology could support this, rather than defeat it.