Poster sessions as a creativity tool and source of ideas
High-throughput browsing of information can lead to making new connections, if you're going to poster sessions in 'creativity mode'
Poster sessions are a common feature of conferences or project meetings. Not always fully loved, if we’re completely honest, given the effort that goes into making an appealing poster, and how little time is often (but not always) dedicated to the sessions at major meetings.
Posters at such meetings are primarily conversation pieces, nuclei for low-threshold communication and for making connections with other researchers. And they serve to convey information on a more even level than during a talk.
But can you also use them as creativity tools? I believe you can, especially if the poster sessions are sufficiently broad and not just on one narrow topic or method. Often, at conferences posters are all displayed together, and one can easily hop from one topic to another. And the same can happen at project meetings, especially in the case of larger projects of an interdisciplinary nature.
Why then can poster sessions help you get ideas? A secret sauce to having new ideas is to be exposed to multiple, divergent inputs and to make unexpected connections between them or between the different sources of input and whatever you’re thinking about at the time.
This can certainly happen at poster sessions, because they are essentially high-throughput displays of pieces of information that you can use to browse. But you need to adopt a certain mindset to make this happen: not just looking at the information displayed on the posters, but rather trying to connect between the problem or questions you are pondering and what you see on the posters, or even to connect between the posters. This can happen at a very general and abstract level. Even the general topic of a poster can give you ideas, without reading (or understanding) much of the detail. Added bonus during a poster session: you can bounce that idea right off the person presenting their work.
This happened to me during a recent poster session. The posters varied extremely widely in topic, and that offered the opportunity to make connections that were new to me, at least.
Did you have a similar experience at posters?
How can we maximize this sort of connection? One has to more actively consume the material on the posters and turn them over in one’s mind, trying to directly connect them to other problems. I think this would require maybe two passes through a poster session, one to try to absorb the information per se, the ‘normal poster session mode’, and another pass, the ‘creativity mode’ to actively try to make such connections.
Can the presenters of posters cater to this additional use of their work? Probably, but likely not by doing anything different than making an appealing, clear poster that presents findings and their context in an easily-digestible fashion - as any good poster would do anyway.
But maybe we can do even better? Can we design part of a poster to help others make creative and novel connections more easily? Perhaps adding a very brief, very general summary ‘in a nutshell’ to every poster. What do you think? Let me know in the comments!