Prezi had the great opportunity to cooperate with the World Economic Forum’s IdeasLab sessionthis year organized as a part of the annual world leader’s meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Five speakers have chosen Prezi to visualize their messages at the event, including Sir Tim Berners Lee, the MIT professor who invented the WWW protocol. The meeting is now over and we thought it would be a cool source of inspiration for all of us prezi authors to have the Davos experiences shared.
Putting together the agenda, faculty manager of the IdeasLab Anne-Sophie Duprat works with speakers from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, the MIT and INSEAD throughout the year, she knows what it takes to create a compelling presentation. Anne-Sophie kindly accepted our interview request and shared her experiences with us.
What do you think makes a good presentation?
From my experience with the IdeasLabs, it’s also challenging for top speakers to produce a good presentation. In my opinion, what makes a presentation successful is its capacity to capture the full attention of the audience, therefore a reasonable duration is an important quality. Another key element for a good presentation is to keep the audience in mind: for example, in the IdeasLab, not all participants have the same level of experience or knowledge of the topic and do not all have the same professional background, which is why we recommend that our speakers keep their presentations simple and use evocative visuals instead of text as a form of communication – details and questions can be addressed further in smaller groups. A good presentation should also create lasting memories for the audience.
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How do you think a presentation can help in delivering thoughts in IdeasLab?
When sharing ideas to address complex issues, a visual support helps to make a concept more concrete. Be it through
keywords or powerful images, it allows for an easier and immediate understanding of an idea, which is crucial in the IdeasLab where each slide is shown for 20 seconds only and the total duration of the presentation is only 5 minutes. The time constraint is a challenge for our speakers who have to communicate their idea efficiently and effectively – that’s why the use of text is limited to avoid diverting the attention of the audience.
Speakers have to deliver special pecha kucha presentations at IdeasLab. How does this help in creating a buzz about the topics?
Visuals have an amazing impact on people’s minds. If you ask an array of people to react to one single picture, you are likely to collect a mosaic of different views. A succession of pictures combined with the speaker’s words triggers multiple associations of ideas and opens up new angles of discussion around a topic. In the IdeasLab, the facilitator of the session takes a minute after each presentation to capture quick reactions from the audience and given the cultural and professional diversity in the room, these initial insights are fascinating. This feedback is then used as a basis for the smaller group discussions which follow to explore new dimensions of the issue and idea.
How do you think Prezi affects the audience?
Prezi has the powerful ability of attracting the attention of an audience. First, in contrast to traditional presentation softwares, its design features facilitate the creation of harmonious and creative presentations. The dynamism of its format also helps to track the idea being presented and create a narrative: the zooming function takes an audience on a journey through different levels and can be leveraged to show how an idea evolves from the speaker’s perspective. I personally think Prezi is well adapted to the IdeasLab: the presentations end up being more dynamic, visually attractive and engaging which is what we aim for in this session format. I hope we will have more of them in future.
What would you advise to Prezi authors to make a good presentation?
I think Prezi offers lots of interesting options that can enhance the artistic dimensions of traditional presentations. I would advise Prezi authors to be creative and use visuals which communicate concepts rather than text or bullet points. They should keep their presentations simple and remember to put themselves in the shoes of the audience.
What is a pecha-kucha presentation?
pronounced “pe-chak-cha”, it means chit-chat in Japanese and was created by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein-Dytham Architecture in Tokyo. It’s a presentation format, where a presenter shows 20 images for 20 seconds apiece, for a total time of 6 minutes, 40 seconds. The first “pecha kucha night” was organized for young designers to generate conversation and cooperation. Prezi has a dedicated pecha kucha mode, you can try now. Just go to “show mode” press and hold the right arrow in the navigation bar and you will see an option layer sliding out. Here you can set your prezi to autoplay in every 2, 10 or 20 seconds.About IdeasLab:
Launched at The World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2009 in Davos, the IdeasLab is a World Economic Forum session format in collaboration with MIT, Oxford, Yale and INSEAD. In the IdeasLab, faculty from major universities and members of Forum communities have the opportunity to share their innovative ideas. A typical IdeasLab session involves brief presentations in a pecha kucha format followed by a deeper conversation on the implications of the ideas presented. The goal of the IdeasLab is to build an informal but well-structured environment where powerful ideas and concepts can be presented in a visually stimulating and highly interactive format.