soa+d research manual - School of Architecture and Design, KMUTT

28 REsEARch NOTEs
its own problems and can lead to presentations that appear
rushed, shallow and, consequently, do not engage the audience.
The second also summarises the paper but does so in a more
flexible and open way. usually, you already have a distilled and
user-friendly version of your paper. Where is it? in your paper:
the introduction. your introduction summarises your research
and outlines your argument/ findings. Whilst it is too short to
simply read it (see below), it can serve as a useful framework
within which other material can be included to produce a more
balanced presentation.
inexperienced researchers do neither, they attempt to say
everything, speak as quickly as possible, skip through large
chunks of their eighty or more slides and when told to finish are
mid way through their introduction. Don’t go there, it’s not pretty
for presenter and audience alike.
bearing these comments in mind, the question still remains: but
what do i leave out? Whilst there is no off-the-shelf answer to
this a rule-of-thumb might be useful: prioritise and allocate time.
firstly, prioritise your material: what can you not do without,
which parts of the paper can be put to one side? for example,
in a twenty minute presentation there is little time to dwell
on the review of literature. far better to simply establish your
theoretical/ philosophical framework and mention key sources
than go into great detail. if anyone in your audience wishes to
question you about this they can do so in the Q and A session.
Once you have decided what to include allocate rough time
percentages to each component.
STRUCTURE & RHETORIC
(OR THE RHETORIC OF STRUCTURE)
The film director jean-luc godard famously noted that
every movie has a beginning, a middle and an end, but, “not
necessarily in that order”. The same goes for your presentation.
Does it follow the same conventional pattern mentioned
already above—introduction, methods, findings, discussion, for
example—or do you begin with your findings, move back to your
methods and conclude with a discussion.
The issue here is one of rhetoric. Rhetoric is an Aristotelean
concept that simply means the art of persuasive argumentation.
Every presentation is an argument (an argument in favour of the
argument expounded in your favour). The various presentational
choices you make will all impact on how well you convince your
audience of the relevance and rigor of your inquiry.
for example, decisions about structure and order are rhetorical.
Decisions about presentational media (see below) are rhetorical.
Decisions about the design of slides if you use them—
typographic treatment, colour, animation—are rhetorical.
Decisions about the relative formality of your speech are
rhetorical. Decisions about how you dress are rhetorical.
in making these decisions, much depends on what you want to
achieve with the presentation, what you want to communicate
about yourself and the nature and expectations of your audience.
for example, it has become a convention in certain conferences
for male presenters to wear a suit and tie. A decision not
to follow convention might be seen as transgressive or a
statement of difference. in either case the issue at stake is one
of presentation of self. in Asian countries, institutional image
often trumps personal expression, hence the tendency to follow
Western conventions of formal dress. in the West itself, a far
greater latitude is given and there is even a certain expectation
that architects, designers and artists will both flout conventions
and express individuality through their self presentation (the
architect’s bow tie?). At a recent design science conference i
attended every key note speaker dressed conventionally bar one.
The main keynote presenter—the celebrated veteran cognitive
scientist Donald Norman—delivered his speech wearing old
jeans, sneakers and an open neck shirt.
PRESENTATIONAL ERGONOMICS
Nevertheless, some of the issues mentioned above are not
simply rhetorical but ergonomic. you can’t persuade someone of
the merits of your argument if they can’t read your text because
it is too small, set in a blackletter gothic typeface or its colour
merges into the background. Every formal issue for you is always
a perceptual issue for your audience. That means a careful
consideration of the needs of your audience when making
choices about how you communicate your ideas.
This is true of each medium that you use. you will, for example,
need to make sure your audience can hear what you are saying
when you deliver your presentation. however, it is particularly
important that your visual material—text and image and other
media—are appropriately formatted for the perceptual needs of
your audience.
how? There are now plenty of books offering career salvation
through Powerpoint presentation. some of these offer good
advice. There are also numerous standards on offer that
advise about issues of legibility and accessibility. i would