Presenting at RISE
A postmortem and tips for future presenters
Shout Your Worth is a toolkit to help you communicate your value. This is an article in a series about the development of the kit, done as part of the Interaction Design capstone at Northeastern University in 2018–19.
Toward the end of our second semester, our professor encouraged us to present our work at Northeastern’s Research, Innovation, and Scholarship Expo (RISE). Since this was our first time showing our work at a research-oriented expo, RISE ended up presenting its own set of challenges.
Our team gave a strong presentation, and people we talked to seemed impressed with our project. In hindsight, however, there was definitely more we could have done to be prepared to present our work.
For anyone interested in presenting at RISE in future years, here are our tips:
Designing the poster
Upon submission of our abstract, we received templates for the poster we then had to design, which would outline our research process. Initially, we considered straying from the quadrant format that was suggested (but still including all of the information!) though we returned to it for the sake of clarity and ease. Keep in mind that the poster and accompanying template is massive. Start designing with placeholder images that are low resolution so that your computer can keep up.
In terms of information hierarchy, we devised a typographic system that allowed us to communicate on several levels. Our largest heading clocked in at 78 pt, and our smallest body copy was 18 pt. While this seemed small on the computer, it was legible in person and allowed us to include all of the information that we deemed important.
Practice your pitch
This was a rookie mistake, but we had felt confident that after repeatedly presenting our work to our class, we would be able to confidently talk about our project to the judges. While this did work to an extent, we soon realized we were accustomed to an audience that was familiar with our topic. To try to “catch people up,” we fell back on walking them through our poster, starting with the early research into our topic and ending with the description of our final solution — which was the most interesting part! A few times we could actually see people starting to zone out and nod politely as we talked about all our research, only perking up when we finally started describing the actual game.
Start at the end, then show how you got there.
Given the chance to do RISE again, we would reverse our pitch to talk about our toolkit first and only dive into background information as needed, based on what our audience asked us about.
Take shifts
We realized when pitching that having more than two people by our poster was simply unneeded. Due to our schedules, it worked out that three of us could be there for the whole time while the fourth could only make it at the very end. In our nervous excitement, the three of us ended up staying near the poster for almost the entire expo, until an hour from the end we all decided to take a lunch break at the same time.
In retrospect, we should have taken shifts so that one of us was stationed by the poster at all times while the others explored or ate. We were supposed to have at least two judges come by to evaluate our work but only met one, and it is possible that we missed the second while getting food (in our defense, we left a note saying when we would be back, as was recommended!).
Categorize correctly
When registering for the expo, we submitted to the Arts & Humanities category since that was where capstone projects from past years had submitted to. At the expo itself, we noticed that many projects in our category were oriented explicitly toward museum or art-related areas. It’s possible that our project would have appealed to judges more if it was in the Social Sciences, Business, and Law category, given that our toolkit touches on trying to solve the gender wage gap.
Our project also ended up grouped under the Khoury College of Computer Sciences (instead of the College of Arts, Media, and Design) since that was the college the user who created our myRISE account belonged to. We’re unsure if this grouping affected who our judges were, but it probably would have helped to be grouped under CAMD.
Know your audience
Probably the biggest takeaway was that RISE may not have been the right target audience for our project. RISE is heavily research-focused, and emphasizes innovations that could lead to “game-changing technological advancement, lucrative commercial pathways, and pioneering joint research projects” (About RISE). While we did conduct field research to inform our design, it was different from the academic research that was the focus at RISE. A game development showcase similar to the Boston Festival of Indie Games may be a better platform for our toolkit, and if we choose to continue developing Shout Your Worth in the future we will be more mindful about where we chose to present our work.
Have fun!
Even though we didn’t end up being finalists, presenting at RISE was a useful learning experience for how to pitch and present our project, and a great opportunity to see other exciting work being done at the university. If you’re interested you can explore the other research here.
