Invitating interaction

October 10, 2013

Today’s poster comes from Giovanni Dall’Olio. Click to enlarge...

Before I get to the critique and makeover, I want to point out the cool thing that Giovanni did: he invited interaction. Giovanni writes:

One peculiarity of this poster is that it uses an advanced technology to show a live feed of what people are saying about the poster, like in Twitter. It is inspired from a book called Gamestorming by James Macanufo.

This technological trick allowed me to get a lot of useful feedback from the people attending. After the conference, I have collected these comments, and copied them to a table, which you can see here.

But perhaps even more effective is the ultra-simple low tech invitation to interact with this poster. Giovanni left sticky notes with his poster, and created a labelled space so people could comment. And guess what? People used those spaces!

Best example of inviting involvement since this flipbook.I think this is excellent, because it is the sort of thing that posters can do better than oral presentations. Giovanni created an opportunity for people to communicate with him that did not require his physical presence. When given an opportunity to express an opinion, people often will. It turns the poster into a participatory event rather than another thing to read passively.Moving on to the poster itself, it is generally clean, but there are a few points for improvement.

This is one of the rare times I don’t mind the boxes, in part because the boxes here are subtle, with light lines, ensuring that the reader goes in rows. Still, the title and bottom don’t need those boxes to clarify the reading order:

I got rid of the boxes entirely, but the spacing between the text didn’t seem to mark the rows out as well, so I tried thin lines between sections in place of the boxes.Also got rid of the shadowed text in the title and heading. The letterforms are cleaner and easier to read now.