Conferences without screens

I've thought long and hard. Why do I like holidays so much? It's not because of the sun, snow, or après-ski, but the fact I'm away from TVs and other screens for a week! In ancient times, speakers used flip charts, overhead projectors, and slides until the projector came to rule.  These days we are impressed and hypnotised by continual PowerPoint slides, YouTube clips, waves of Prezi presentations, and in the not-too-distant future, we'll probably see flashy new iPad apps. But anywhere a monitor appears, it shuts down contact. The speaker becomes a voice over.   Is that what conferences should do?

Let's take a look

We live in an image culture, in an irrepressible storm of images and screens. Talk shows such as DWDD and Pauw & Witteman say “Let's take a look” every few minutes. Many speakers in the conference world believe their presentations are only good if they use the projector a lot.  And yet the best speakers are plain, simple, and subtle. They prefer to make TRUE CONTACT with their audience and use as little technology as possible. Look how Maarten van Rossem or Youp van 't Hek fascinate us for hours at a time without one single PowerPoint slide. Or see how Flemish humorist Arnout Den Bossche works with a flipchart, or how Steve Jobs gave his legendary Stanford inauguration speech reading from some notes. The one I think is best is a presentation by a fellow conference director who had her slides printed on a number of t-shirts she had put on one-by-one. Form follows function and vice versa. She had real contact!  

Asking for attention

Since most conference visitors have a smart phone and an iPad with them, speakers need to do more to keep attention focused on them.  They find their refuge in - you guessed it - visual material. But then this turns their presentation into 'a broadcast’, so there is no interaction or contact. Conference visitors want to hold a conversation, have their say, ask questions, and keep asking questions.  And not via a screen. So leave Twitter to one side too. Make contact with the audience and turn the screen off, even when you're just answering a question, holding a discussion, or telling a good story.  

For those who are visually oriented

See what Prezi can do at www.Prezi.com. Marvel at Steve Jobs' inauguration speech at http://goo.gl/v1z2 Don McMillan laughs at us with his Life After Death by PowerPoint at http://goo.gl/RnF9m Laugh at Arnout Van Den Bossche's flipchart presentation at http://goo.gl/OaHMZ  

“Contact on?    Screen off!”