Our Next Lab Experiment

The dynamic between presenter and audience has taken a bizarre turn in the past few years. First there were notepads. It’s flattering for an audience to take notes while you speak. Your words are worth writing down. Then the laptop came along. People were no longer only taking notes. They’re determining, on a minute-by-minute basis, if your presentation is worthy of their full attention. Most often, you lose. Email. CNN. Facebook. You’re constantly competing with other channels.

Recently, with the advent of Twitter, the back channel has taken the dynamic into yet another direction. People aren’t only sporadically ignoring you. They’re reporting out to the world their observations about what you’re saying. All the while, they’re reading up on what others are tweeting about what you’re saying while you’re saying it. And hundreds or thousands of their followers learn about these judgements in real-time as well. Your audience has become entranced not by you, but by the meta-activity around you. You, the presenter, are no longer the center of attention. You’re more like a backdrop. You’re the talking head on cable news, but it’s the ticker that streams below you that steals our attention.

This all may be construed as criticism. It isn’t meant to be. All these new behaviors are just new capabilities and technologies butting up against the old ways of doing things. None of it is bad, it’s just new. Maybe what we need to do is reboot the presenter-audience dynamic entirely.

At Arc90, our lab experiments are our Op Ed pieces. It’s easy to criticize and suggest how things should be. It’s far more fun to build something that can potentially change or at least cast a different light on the status quo.

Try to imagine a presentation that goes down like this:

• Once the audience assembles, the presenter kindly asks everyone to log in via their Twitter account and enter a provided hashtag into a specific Web app.
• Once entered, everyone’s laptops and phones light up with the first slide of the presentation.
• Behind the presenter on the large screen is some summary information about the attendees: who they are, where they’re from, etc. Gradually, the avatars of everyone attending begin filling the screen in a tile view.
• The presenter flips to slide 2 and simultaneously everyone’s laptops and phones coordinate. Behind the presenter, the slide is shown, but as the back channel begins to fill with chatter, the projected screen shows ambient information about that particular slide. The app begins to glean sentiment from the back channel.
• The system recognizes a simple scoring mechanism for each slide. Append your tweet with a numerical range of –5 to +5 and it will account for it visually. A +2 tweet conveys agreement. Such scores are visualized individually and in aggregate for all to see.
• All the while, those outside the room can follow along, slide-by-slide and sentiment-by-sentiment.
• Polls are redefined in this new dynamic. Presenters are no longer limited to asking the proverbial “raise your hand” question. Instead, attendees can enter information and the results can be visualized and discussed instantaneously.
• Once the talk ends, a rich artifact is made available for all time. As you navigate through the timeline of slides, you can see the ebb and flow of mood and sentiment.

The above is a working draft. We’re really not sure where this goes. The goal is not to replace an old paradigm with a new one, but rather to upend our conventional thinking about the presentation dynamic and maybe discover new and better ways to interact.

Now here’s the wrinkle: our plan is to build this lab experiment and debut at SXSW Interactive 2011 if this panel gets approved by you and the SXSW board. The talk is called Tossing the Projector: Redefining the Presenter/Audience dynamic. If you’d like to see this experiment become a reality, please vote for it and share the link with others. We will debut the experiment at the very session scheduled at SXSW. Once the talk is done, we’ll open up the application for others to use for free at SXSW or anywhere else.

Tim Meaney and myself will be the helmet-wielding guinea pigs ready for wherever this talk takes us. This is the plan for the mechanics of the talk, but what are we going to talk about?  Tomorrow Tim will post to this blog about the content of the talk, and how it relates to the method of the presentation.

Update: Our talk has been accepted. See you at SXSW 2011!