Public-speaking notes: Talked about BROKEN at the Institute of Design, IIT

Presentation icon designed by Daniel Flp from The Noun Project collection

I had my first opportunity to discuss BROKEN: Navigating the Ups and Downs of the Circus called Work with a small group at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, in Chicago. This was my first time publicly presenting my new book.

I’ve been reflecting here and there on my public-speaking experiences, because public speaking is a good skill to have. It’s one that I try to excel at, if only on a basic level. Here are some things that stuck with me concerning presentation skills, and that you may corroborate with, in making your presentations.

Courtesy

Most attendees at my talk were busy graduate students, with packed schedules. So it was great when one of them told me prior to my talk not to be offended when she and her work group slipped out early during my presentation. Proactive courtesy feels good.

Presenter tip: Be courteous throughout your appearance.

Nerves

My nervousness gradually faded around the time I started speaking. When my nervousness abated, my comfort level rose. What particularly helped to manage the nervousness was physically not keeping still. I wandered away from the podium and treated the floor like a mini-stage.

Presenter tip: Acknowledge the fact that once you dive into your presentation, you’ll float and swim (in my case, a steady doggy paddle). Stay afloat by finding a technique to calm your nerves.

Script

I had a script, written per slide, but rarely used it. This isn’t to say that the script wasn’t handy, it’s a great safeguard, especially for a scatterbrain like me.

Presenter tip: Write out everything you want to say, but give yourself permission to go off script. Off script is risky, but you’ll act less robotic.

Feedback

Specific and constructive feedback is useful. One such piece of feedback, I received, addressed a gap in my presentation, while another praised my plainspoken tone as “refreshing.” Still another comment highlighted how an aspect of my presentation gave a necessary nudge that proved, as the attendee put it, “inspiring.”

With its hardwired reflexes, my brain quickly attached to the criticism about the gap—what my presentation primarily lacked. It was one of those darn-I-wished-I-had-fully-satisfied-this-need reactions I kept echoing, to myself. What helped minimize this echo was acting on this feedback. It motivated me to adjust the content of my presentation. On the following morning, I took the collective feedback and responded to it with a revised version of my presentation (for presentations are highly subject to iteration as they should be).

Presenter tip: When it comes to feedback, you can either dwell on it or put it to productive use.

Phrasing

After I left the talk, I realized a number of things—certain phrases, different expressions—that I wished I said to add emphasis and color to what I was telling. Ultimately, something always gets left out.

Presenter tip: It’s ideal if you can say everything you wanted to say in the way you set yourself to say it. If not, accept how you presented and try to learn from it. It’s annoying to not connect what you originally had in mind to elegantly say. This feels sharply unforgiving, but it paves the way for turning that could-have-done-better-then to doing-it-better-now.

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Big thanks to Rachel Dean and Raina Russ at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Chicago, for giving my first opportunity to talk about my latest book BROKEN!

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This is the sixth post, after the launch of BROKEN, that reflects on how this book was made. More to come in this series about aspects related to writing and self-publishing. Read the previous write-up: Choosing the right fonts for BROKEN.

• • •

Learn more about the eBook → BROKEN: Navigating the ups and downs of the circus called work.

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A Recent Design Lecture, An Opportunity to Doing It Better

I recently lectured to a class at Harrington College of Design. The class dealt with “Design Issues” and was taught by Alma Hoffmann. I was referred to her by a mutual colleague, Jeffrey Jensen, who happens to also be a fan of Design Feast. After my poor presentation to a “Design Ecology” class at the Art Institute of Chicago, I had no inclination to do the “lecture thing.” But when the opportunity came to present to Alma’s class, it was a strong hint to reconcile my bloated overpass to the “Design Ecology” students.

Before, I aimed for broad coverage of topics, resulting in a thin lecture and diluted focus. This time, I strived for a compact set of topics that were essentially tips. Tips on being and staying creative; some about being and staying professional. Graphic designer Frank Chimero said, “Tips are easy. And shallow.” Frank’s absolutely right. This was why personal experience backed up each of my tips. The sole hierarchy dictating these tips was when I wrote them. Tips can drip a lot. They were kept to a handful such as these:

• Honesty is the best policy.
• Not engaging the web is stupid.
• Defending your thinking is hard.
• Referrals rule.
• The cool people are those who build an audience
  and care about them.
• Good designers write.
• Honoring your spouse, parents and loved ones is more important than anything.

The format of tips enables a presentation. It proved to be in an ice-breaker in what to share in a lecture. Making them sound enlightened was an easy temptation. I gave into it, resisted, then backed out and honed in on ones that were worded in a straightforward way.

To supplement my presentation, I brought along one of my rare design books for show-and-tell. It never hurts to bring in presentation-props. In this case, the prop was Bauhaus teacher Herbert Bayer’s “World Geo-Graphic Atlas” published in 1956. The book’s wealth of information-design demonstration mesmerized the audience. Like the Q&A following the lecture, the object provided another Q&A in itself.

Afterwards, I solicited feedback directly from the audience. One student replied: “Personally I thought you did a great job. Thorough reinforcement of the concepts and practices you presented.” Alma expressed, “It was WONDERFUL!!!”

The only gripe dealt with my pace of delivering the presentation: “…you pushed right through your 10 tip title screens, was trying to keep notes and some of them just flashed before I could get them down.” Slowing down is hard once one gets into starting the presentation and talking it through. I’ll try to treat transitions as pauses in the next opportunity to speak to an audience who proved captivated this time.

Speaking of the audience, Alma’s class consisted of only two students. I assumed that there would be more. But I’m glad that this assumption was debunked. No matter the size of the audience, whether the members consist of two or two thousand, each deserves the presenter’s complete attention. One’s lecture, including the Q&As and props, is only a success when the audience is a success.

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“Hypercriticism” about My Design Lecture

I was invited to lecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago by a colleague, Adam Kallish, who teaches a course called “Design Ecologies.” The lecture consisted of two parts—presentation and then a workshop—and was given to graduate students of the course.


Notes of a graduate student during the presentation

I began working on the presentation several weeks in advance. I essentially captured words, phrases, and websites that piqued my interest, and that I thought would interest the class. Along with these notes, I made slides in PowerPoint (some, if not many of you, especially Keynote users, are cringing). Each slide was something from my captures or an interpretation. Being a believer that slides are talked to, rather than a form of dictation, most of my slides were solitary words or pictures intended as triggers for me to pipe up on what was shown.

There was back and forth with Adam about the presentation’s content. 37signals’ Backpack was used to store and organize our exchanges and control presentation versions. The presentation date came. I talked, participated in the workshop afterwards, and then left. I honestly didn’t know how I did. A few weeks later, Adam shared the feedback, which wasn’t in my favor.

Lessons Re-learned

I was naturally disappointed with the unfavorable response, but something funny happened—I was elated with the criticism. Actually, not “elated,” but, in essence, pleased. If you could see my face, it would be straight. Rather than dismissing the students’ feedback as counterproductive, I decided to convert it into lessons—good ones for anyone who is passionate about presenting. They’re especially good lessons for me, someone who doesn’t make it a practice to be on the “lecture circuit.”

Critique 1: “His talk seemed a bit scattered. Maybe the nature of scouting out trends. It seemed a little overly broad and hard to relate to what we’re doing here.”

Working on Design Feast increases my embrace of people and projects across design disciplines. I couldn’t help but take on the quality of everything-ness, because design is an immense body of thought and practice. Exploring design as everything or engaging the phenomenon of everything is a lot (but not too much). The course’s esoteric title of Design Ecologies speaks to everything, like an ecosystem. The course’s overview is filled with an ever-everything voice. This does produce a scatterbrain effect, but I tried to condense my showcase of creative people and their projects to these tips:

• Pick an idea, not any idea—One that you’ll stick with for awhile.
• Just do it and mostly DIY.
• Give yourself the opportunity to get passed along.
• Generate content, lots of it, because content is plastic.
• Practice patience.

Yes, I could have sharpened the link between showcased designers and their projects with these tips in order to help ease the translation of why (am I highlighting these people and projects) to what (tips). Better translation and focus now and next time.

Takeaway: A former teacher of mine always prescribed to take the content of your presentation and cut it in half. Sound advice. I didn’t edit enough, to the point that tackling a sliver of everything becomes diffused.

Critique 2: “The thing that frustrated me most is that he was not prepared in knowing who his audience was. I have found this frustrating with almost all of the speakers, in fact.”

When the workshop commenced, I expressed interest in seeing student projects. Adam responded that there was going to be a final showing of graduate work. Perhaps this would have been keen at the start, to help my understanding—“knowing”—of the audience and more accurately “target” my presentation. Assuming that graduate design students are designers themselves—who can make connections, however slight—was an incorrect assumption in this case.

As a step to improve future presentations, a more thorough orientation of future speakers may be done.

Takeaway: Never hurts to go beyond first impressions, treating the initial description of the audience as merely preliminary.

Critique 3: “I was most bummed about not talking about trends since his talk was titled ‘Design Trends’ in the course overview and then he dismissed the notion of ‘trends,’ which confused me. Then I was disappointed that he didn't touch on the online videos we watched ahead of time.”

There’s that word again: Trends. I was stumped when asked about other trends besides “Web 2.0” technologies. In retrospect, it’s interesting how trends are quickly associated with technology. The aforementioned tips were my take on “trends” that I identified. Then again, I view them as more than ephemeral trends. They’re recurring truths, to me.

Regarding the online videos, this list, in its sequence, was provided a week before the presentation and workshop:

• A Loft Filled with Dirt, the Man Who's Cared for it for 19 Years
• The New York Earth Room and Its Caretaker
• The Universal by Blur
• Twyla Tharp on the Subject of Motivation and Creativity
• SOS by 16mm
• Hillman Curtis’ Artist Series: Lawrence Weiner
• New York 2008
• Elizabeth Gilbert: A different way to think about creative genius
• Designer’s Quest(ionnaire) by Shawn Hazen

These diverse videos helped me galvanize the tips. I was also stumped about being asked why I chose these videos, because the values of persistence and self-discovery flowed throughout them, particularly the interviews with innovative choreographer Twyla Tharp and author Elizabeth Gilbert. So I was surprised to be asked why they were chosen. I assumed that the graduate students would pick up the demonstration of creativity, especially from the candid interviews.

The act of making connections (however slight) between design-related subject matter and one’s way of thinking-and-doing echoes here. Must everything be spelled out? Yes and no. I steered toward the latter because I assumed that the students would glean what was self-evident to me. Herein lies the lesson: Be sensitive to audience sensibilities, which, as related in the previous critique, I didn’t adequately know.

I’m wondering if the graduate students apparent desire for trends, though forward thinking, minimizes what’s fundamental: Namely, to embrace a good future with the help of design. Chasing the next trend sounds like a blind-spot for what’s here and now—whether these be words, images, colors, textures, raw materials, etc., and the guts and imagination to engage these elements.

Takeaway: Parallel to previous takeaways, clearly articulate the connection of what is being presented and how it relates to the sensibilities of the audience, even a design-oriented one.

Critique 4: “I think it’s not very good practice for a presenter to continually put down the quality of his own presentation. I have no doubt that he worked hard on it, but the fact that his work didn’t really translate shouldn't have been something he was so eager to disclose.”

I thought I was being provocative, in a good way, by being brutally honest—because speaking about design in the vein of everything is tough—but such honesty disqualifies one’s content. Therefore, another to-do for me: Content must breed confidence.

Takeaway: Honesty, in the form of self-deprecation, is not the best presentation policy.

The criticism was thoughtful and I anticipate that their post-graduate work will match, even transcend, such thoughtfulness. In particular, comments about making clear transitions amongst diverse topics within a presentation are well taken. Ensuring clarity is always a moving goal.

Trying to be hyper-proactive on criticism

Expectations were not fully met in this instance, but it tees up the next opportunity to better meet the expectations of another audience in a different place and time. Criticism can be tough, but it offers an upside in learning.

Here’s to a better presentation in the future. Because, as technologist and writer John Siracusa put it in his article Hypercritical, “Every day is a new chance to do something a little bit better, to find something wrong with what you're doing and understand it well enough to know how to fix it. If this is not your natural proclivity, you may have to work at it a bit. I think you'll be pleased with the results…but not completely, I hope.”

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