Inventing Virtual Poster Night
Virtual [< L., virtus, virtue], possessing the strengths of the original form
When my annual professional meeting, The Information Architecture Conference, got shut down this spring, the organizers hustled to create an online version that would continue to be the thought-provoking and engaging event we look forward to each year. I’m curator of the conference Poster Session, and my challenge was to figure out, not just the technology of a virtual event, but also its spirit.
Long story short — yes! We can bring complex social and learning events online and make them work. To support other people in re-envisioning interactive conference sessions, I share here the approach we took, the tools we used, where things worked well, and where they fell short. Interestingly, the challenging issues were not about the technology, but about the design of the experience.
- Approach: Brainstorm the solution together
- Technologies: Discord.com for audio/video and Mural.co for visuals, with a technical rehearsal
- Artifacts: Posters in Mural plus downloadable files and video
- Assumptions vs. Realities: Greater accessibility vs. Greater loneliness
- Iteration: A second poster session at the end of the conference let us fix some things
Our Approach — Solve it Together
All suddenly in lockdown together, we were dealing with a host of new problems together. In that spirit, the best approach was for poster presenters and curator to collaborate, rather than for the curator to dictate the solution.
We started by exploring the nature of the gathering we were trying to bring online. A poster session is a sort of science fair for adults. In the physical world it takes place in a large space, where rows of posters and tables are set up in a pattern that facilitates circulation and discussion. Second, it’s a fairly low barrier-to-entry way for people to present at a major conference. The format allows many more people to share their ideas than could otherwise be accommodated as individual talks. Third, it’s a social event. Presenters and attendees mill around with drinks and canapés, chatting with people they haven’t seen for a year, looking at posters from a distance, then getting closer and having discussions with the authors of the posters that look most interesting to them.
As information architects, we’re user experience professionals, so we started our redesign with a collaborative exercise to figure out the experience we wanted to create with the poster session. We decided our organizing metaphor would be the Gallery Opening. Our virtual “place” needed to enable the different modes of engagement that make a poster session work: from casual viewing from a distance to one-on-one discussions with a presenter. Attendees needed to be able to move freely from one poster and discussion to another, and presenters needed to be able to share multiple types of poster artifacts (images, videos, downloads). At the same time, we wanted to minimize the need for people to create new accounts or master new tools.
Technologies
We selected two main technologies: a visual space for finding and viewing posters, and an audio/video space where discussions with each poster presenter could take place in separate a/v rooms. We used Mural.co as our visual space because this was the conference’s official visual collaboration tool and conference attendees would already have become familiar with it, but any virtual whiteboard would work. We went with Discordapp.com instead of Zoom as our a/v space. This was a bit of a gamble, as it required attendees and presenters to download and learn a new tool, but it paid off very well. Discord is a group chat app that is very popular with gamers. It supports text chat, audio, video, and screen sharing, but its main advantage is that it allows people to move in and out of small group discussion channels at will. The Zoom paradigm is one of central control. If breakout rooms are used, people need to be placed there by the host. With Discord, people can move around as they like.
What Worked and What Did Not
Poster presenters from Los Angeles to Ottowa to Berlin to Tokyo participated in the design and delivery of the poster session.
Over the course of about a week we set up our spaces in Mural and Discord, uploaded posters and artifacts, wrote instructions for poster session attendees, and conducted a technical dry run. During the event itself we found that the experience design and the technologies worked remarkably well, though not without issues. We had over 100 visitors at Poster Night (a good turnout for our small conference). People were able to navigate from the Mural board to the Discord channels. Many wonderful conversations took place. Discord worked for most people, and enabled presenters to screenshare additional materials. Attendees were also able to take in the content on their own terms, with less social pressure than we sometimes feel at in-person events.
We discovered, however, that while technologies made the event possible and even enhanced the experience in many ways, the online setting also amplified the things that are difficult about a poster session in the first place. Being a poster presenter in real life can be a lonely experience if there’s nobody at your table. But if you’re in a large room with other people, you at least can see and hear folks around you. A few folks will invariably talk to you, and you can go get a drink and a plate of food. But if you’re in a Discord channel all by yourself, it can be a very lonely experience indeed.
Following a group email discussion after the event, we decided to try and fix these problems and do a second iteration of the poster session. The infrastructure was already set up, so the level of effort for a second event was minimal.
We decided to put in more structure and engagement and to get presenters out of their sometimes silent rooms by having a “Poster Presenter Peregrination.” At specified times, groups of presenters (for instance, last names starting with A-M), would leave their Discord channels and view posters and have discussions in the channels of other presenters. After an interval, the presenters would switch. We also set a firm end to the event, and built in time for a quick presenter retrospective, which helps bring closure. This worked very well, and even with a lower attendee turnout the second time, all the participating presenters left with a positive experience.
Making Virtual Better
The main takeaways from this experience were:
- As humans, we want and need to communicate, and we will find a way to do it.
- We’re willing to be tolerant of awkward or challenging technologies as long as things work in the end.
- The virtual world makes communication possible when we can’t be in person, and can even enhance our experience in many ways.
- However, technology also amplifies whatever is difficult or poorly designed about the thing we’re doing in the first place.
In taking a user-centered design approach we were able to successfully bring the poster experience online. By brainstorming the design together, selecting technologies that fit our needs (rather than cramming our needs into the technologies at hand), and by evaluating how well we’d done and trying again, we can re-envision all kinds of good online experiences and environments. By designing outside the box we can improve our classes, work meetings, workshops — and even our weekly family online calls.