Continuing the focus on visual presentations, two nights ago I talked with Anne Burdick, who chairs the Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design. In her own work, Anne has focused a lot on the intersection of writing, design and the book, and is exploring notions of "transmedia" publications. So it should come as no surprise that her conference presentations are jaw-droppingly beautiful. For example, she gave a talk for the MAKE Symposium on Design Research at Parsons called "Designing: A Research Practice, or Tools and Spaces for Reading and Writing" and the presentation component, made in Keynote, is breathtaking. A large section of it is organized around a very wide photo of a wall on which she physically pinned up a series of images and sticky notes that build a 10-year annotated timeline. The presentation glides back and forth along this panel, zooming gently in and out to highlight key ideas in a method that can only be described as cinematic. There are no cheesy transitions, and not a bullet point anywhere. Instead, form follows content to chart a history of thought as if you are in motion with the ideas; indeed, it's like inhabiting "a space for reading and writing."
Key for Anne is the idea of timing. "I like to use the timing - the slight pause - in order to introduce a new idea or place in the presentation," she explains. She adds that while some of her presentations may be very elaborate, often all that's needed to make a presentation memorable is a sense of attention to detail. "I have a format that I use over and over, with a group of colors and typefaces; it has a distinct character, and that can be enough to just pitch the presentation, to show that it's been considered. And sometimes all you need is that small gesture."
Like Julian Bleecker (interviewed here yesterday), Anne also creates many of her own images rather than collecting them from other sources. "You have to think about backgrounds, and you have to stage the photographs in terms of what you want to communicate at a particular moment in the talk," she explains.
Asked about new kinds of composition practices that work back and forth between images and text, Anne says that "making these presentations is the most intensive form of writing, in the sense that's it's a kind of organic creation with the showing and telling and writing all happening in tandem." Filmmakers have at various points talked about writing with images - Agnes Varda, for example, uses the term "cinecrieture" to describe her mode of filmmaking - but this practice, of writing, showing and telling, is at once different and oddly similar; either way, it's increasingly a much-needed literacy.
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