 Hey, I'm Mike Morrison. So if you don't know me, I'm a research psychologist with a background in tech and design Kind of a weird hybrid person and my whole thing is bringing a user experience design principles from a tech industry To try to improve the system of science So what you're about to see is sort of a re-recording of a talk I gave at a corporate conference for medical and pharmaceutical researchers But it'll give you a preview of new technologies that are being worked on right now to improve the way science is distributed So with that enjoy this talk on the future of science What do you want from the future of science? You might say well, I want the world to fall in love with science I want to live in a world where science is much more central to everything we do in the future and people look to science first Instead of these other sources of information and if you're actually a scientist if you're in science Your answer might be a little bit more cynical. You might be like what do I want from the future of science? I just want science to feel like what I thought it was gonna feel like when I got into it I want to take away all of this stress and publish or perish and working through all of these like old outdated systems and Just focus on like being able to discover new things that help humanity. That's what I want Those are your answers if you're healthy But some of you watching this aren't fully healthy If you have to watch yourself for somebody you love suffer from a chronic health issue like cancer or cystic fibrosis or long Covid you don't care about this romantic idea of science anymore You just want science to hurry up and save you now before it's too late if you're watching this video you're part of the scientific system in some way and that means you probably have Something that you can contribute to massively accelerating discovery and speeding everything up for me for my part as a designer I see science in terms of its interfaces. There are basically three interfaces to science Every scientist publishes papers gives talks and a lot of them make posters if we can speed up the knowledge Transmission that flows through these three interfaces even by a little bit since they're so widely used that can have massive Impact on the acceleration and the pace of discovery So we're gonna go through each of these interfaces and try to answer the question. How can we speed up scientific discovery? Through better design for each of them right now each of these interfaces already serves kind of a useful role in Transmitting scientific knowledge and each one has its own valuable use case When you want to go really really deep on a narrow research question for like an hour You want to read a paper if you want to get a little bit broader a little less deep insight into an area of research You might go to a symposium and see like five or six talks in about an area of research in an hour So talks can kind of be like medium-depth medium with and when you want broad insight across everything That's going on in your whole field and learn a lot of very broad serendipitous things But kind of shallow in a short amount of time as something that posters can do a really good job at We need interfaces to fit each of these roles There are some common things that we can do to speed up sort of all of these interfaces And the biggest one is just stop hiding them from the world It's like you can find anything on Google except actual science So papers are obviously pay walled or log in walled by the conference, which is sometimes worse Talks are given only to like the few people who can make it to that room of that conference hall at that conference at that time And anybody who can't afford to attend the conference or misses that event. It just they just don't get to see it Posters get according to one of our studies an average of six and a half people to view them and then they're thrown away We can get more science to more scientists by just not throwing it away behind pay walls or in literal trash cans The other thing we can do is a little bit more subtle Kevin Kelly is the founder of wired magazine And after decades of seeing technologies evolve He came up with this sort of general flow of how technologies seem to progress He said they start out with a single unit You can think of this like a book like a printed book written by monks or something where there's only one of them And it's really really hard to copy then we get good at making copies of that thing I think of like the printing press This is kind of where we are with scientific articles where we can make unlimited copies of a scientific article PDF Right, then he says the next stage is that the content gets broken into pieces to where you can pull out the Individual chunks out of the thing and then remix those into new things Here's a poster you can think of like this figure right here as a single sort of brick of this broader structure right and you might want to use that brick in different structures You might want to use this figure in your poster in your paper Someone else might want to use it in their paper on a similar topic and just pull it in So the ideal feel for science is probably something like this Where you just have this bunch of Lego bricks of different previous works and you're sort of putting them together in new Configurations and making new science really really quickly and just snapping them together. This kid's a little bit disorganized No offense kid We probably want science to feel more like this like an organized set of Lego bricks that you can sort of snap together And form new science and every single brick Maintains its citation history so you can always trace each individual brick back to its original author This feel is I think where everything goes but let's deep dive on to each of these So let's start with the hard one We're going to deep dive on how to fix scientific articles now because that's the most difficult one Scientific articles are distributed as sort of print typeset PDF files still in like 2023 when you know The whole web moved HTML in the late 90s So scientific articles are still kind of 30 years behind most modern publishing technologies Many of them are pay walled But there's also this old design wall like you can't read a lot of scientific articles on your phone very easily A lot of the figures are still in black and white My special favorite is when a figure is in black and white and it's referring to variables that are colors like you know Like the checkered bar represents red or whatever and they couldn't make it red You know because they can't because color costs more to print, right? That's you can find articles in like the mid 2000s that still are black and white Scientific articles also don't have links, which is absolutely insane If I had one thing that drives me just completely bad shit crazy about scientific articles Is that science is the built on other people's work? It is inherently a linked format and we can't click a link to get from one article to the other Like you've been able to do on the rest of the internet for 30 years. It's that bad So you have this sort of old design wall with scientific articles that we've got to tear down The way to tear down these walls is a couple ways Obviously we can tear down the pay wall by going open access and making all scientific articles free to consume that takes care of the pay wall Right. It's a very hard thing to do, but we're moving that way anyway But for the old design wall, we want scientific articles that are really beautiful and interactive and contain that You know like sortable tables and like color figures and videos anything that helps Communicate right anything that helps communicate the science more effectively we want articles to be able to do and we want them to Reflow onto different device sizes just like the rest of content on the internet can right it's not a big thing to ask We're asking for something that the rest of the internet solved 10 years ago But science still hasn't quite figured out yet and one of the reasons this is important is because you know Sometimes your best ideas don't come to you when you're like sitting in the lab right a browse a PDF document Right like sometimes you want to check something out on your phone real quick when you get an idea Since science is about that discovery and insight we really want to help scientists Investigate a quick idea when they're outside the lab, but what if we pushed it further than that? What could we do with scientific articles if we got them further than just digital if we got them into these Reusable Lego bricks of their component pieces well then you can start combining pieces of scientific articles into all new things You could have an app that summarized the live best practices like like pulled real-time best practices from the scientific Literature you could have an app that helps you compare across theoretical models in different papers Instantaneously you can have an app that creates an interactive map of everything We know about a topic like this map of Parkinson's disease These are formats that newer AIs like chat GDP should be able to eventually create for us a scientist Should be able to go to chat GDP and be like hey Help me compare this theoretical model to this theoretical model and show them to me side-by-side and chat GDP should be able to spit out both the models and say that here's the difference between them right that can't happen right now But it's a world we could get to newer science search engines that use GPT like elicit here are starting to give you a preview of what this experience is going to be like so here in elicit I've asked like what is the current most effective treatment for long COVID and you see it tries right like you know Like the current most effective treatment for long COVID is a remission. It's like cool. Thanks, right? Like a range of persistent systems can remain long after you know, like it's not really It's trying to answer the question But it's trying to squeeze blood from a stone, right? Like it's trying to extract this from PDF files in a really heroic effort This is the best we have so far, but it's not quite there yet all the time sometimes is great by the way But it's just it's hard to do this with the way science is formatted And the solution to this problem is really to love the robots with scientific articles We want to really embrace machine readable science So right now a word file is really really hard for robots to read HTML does like a little bit better job like here's an HTML article, right? Google Scholar can read the goal here's the title and here's like a heading and paragraph, right? It can read all this much much easier than a can of PDF for a word file because it's starting to be structured text We know where the title is right, but there's a little bit of a problem with HTML for scientific articles And that's this so right here, you know as somebody involved in science that this right here It's their only PhD is the author, right? But the HTML is just a paragraph, you know that this right here is the abstract paragraph, right? That's a super super important part of the article, but HTML is just another paragraph, right? It doesn't know the difference between author and abstract Which can complicate the ability to search it really well What we want is a very science specific markup language like this where we can just tell the robots This is the author, right or a series of authors and the abstract Which we all know what an abstract is is this that would really really embrace the robots and help them digest science Much much more efficiently and be able to create much more accurate interfaces for searching science And this is where I have really really good news for you So I gave this talk like a year ago and I had to stop here I was like well, we need this markup language, but it doesn't exist so we're screwed But now a year later. I can tell you that we have it this markup language is called mist Mist is like markdown. If you ever use markdown Specifically for scientific articles It's an open source language and it has features that you just can't do with any language not built for science And I'll show you an example of this. It's kind of code So bear with some code here, but let's say we wanted to Write some code to output like a reference like you see at the top here like an open source markup language We'll change scientific articles forever and we want to cite Morrison 2023, right? I mean no not my idea I'm just showing you how it works. So We have HTML this would look like this this amount of code forget about the code specifically Just pay attention to how much code there is right And we have like the we have to code up like the the link to the reference you have to code up their reference itself, right? That's that's a little bit of code, right? You don't want to type that by hand markdown Which is this popular language that runs like Wikipedia if you've ever edited a Wikipedia article You've used markdown before markdown is a little bit better to write in right? You don't need as much code a little bit less code You can just sort of do this shorthand link format right and then copy and paste the reference paragraph, right? Watch what mist can do so in mist Mist knows what a reference is it knows what a DOI URL is because it's built for science So in mist you just say Morrison 2023 and just copy paste the DOI URL and it knows that it pulls everything else It builds your rep rate adds that to your reference section automatically like it's a markup language for us in science They can do all of these things that we need it to do to make our lives more efficient and easier But like this kind of efficiency is just the beginning of what mist can do the other thing mist can do is democratize these really advanced reading experience features and make them open source so like you've seen this in a journal where you have this little dotted link here and You can hover over it and get a preview of the reference that's in the reference section, right? That's something like newer journals will have well mist does that out of the box, right? Like it's free with mist you can go write an article in mist and it will just automatically do that for you And then you can do things like this like you can have figure previews So mist knows what a scientific figure is it knows what you mean when you're referring to like figure one or whatever First of all it auto numbers the figures which I absolutely love But you can have these figure previews right like that where you can hover over it like what figure was this? Okay, hover figure out you've probably seen this on again like really advanced journals where they spent, you know Millions of dollars in development to build a really good reading experience mist like it makes this accessible out of the box and that means that for Startup journals and min-sized journals and small journals they can have these really really advanced features for free You as an author can create a scientific article that has all these really advanced reading experience features for free and Eventually bigger scientific journals like the Elsevier journals and the Wiley journals I think it probably be good for them to move towards mist because they can if they can sort of outsource this component to the open source language They're saving a ton of money in all that development cost And mist has features that are beyond the state of the art right now that a lot of journals don't even have even at the Very expensive level so miss can do things that are called rabbit hole links already at least I call them rabbit hole links They work like this so you can hover this footnote here, right and you get this pop up I'm gonna pause it because this is already kind of an interesting meta footnote, right? It's like, you know, this is better than traditional academic citations And it says for example in head 2021 the authors the authors showed that you can speed up comprehension of a paper by 26% when showing information in context rather than requiring researchers to scroll back and forth to find figures in equations Imagine if all science was 26% faster, right? And you're like, wow, that's a cool study, right? You know like I want to see more about that that sounds like a really cool studying itself But I you know just like the citation says I don't want to leave this context, right? No problem in mist you just rabbit hole you hover over the footnote within a footnote And you get a layered pop up with a video that explains that study to you, right? And then when you're done you just go back you didn't lose your place in the original document You kept the context, right? That's really really powerful for a reading experience as you saw in that citation and miss does this out of the box For free you can write a scientific article and missed right now You can do this and journals can adopt this right now and get this technology that would cost a lot to develop for free But that's not the most powerful trick that miss does the most powerful trick that miss can do is it can convert To every other language miss files can convert instantaneously to html to LaTeX to Microsoft Word and To Jats you don't know maybe what Jats is but Jats is the language that you have to code up PubMed articles in so journals spend Like a ton of their like article processing charges paying people to manually convert word files into This specialized Jats XML for PubMed and things like that Misconverts to Jats automatically and it converts to a word file So if you you have a collaborator or something that's still in word you can just Export your miss document as a word file and send them the word version. I can show you this in action So here's a little bit of miss code, right? Like here is you know the math is a roll here's some LaTeX or whatever, right? You can here's the regular miss code Here's the same thing in html. Here's the same thing in LaTeX Here's the same thing you can download as a word file, right and crucially here's it presented in this specialized XML that PubMed needs that it can auto convert to in seconds for free This may not seem cool to you But it's about to and the reason it's about to seem really super cool to you and you're gonna understand why this is gonna revolutionize scientific publishing is because if you can convert your scientific paper To Jats and these other languages before you submit it if you created it in a language like mist It means you do not need this This miserable form that you have to fill out as a scientist every time you submit a paper The reason this form exists is this so when a scientist submits a paper to a scientific publisher The publisher has to pull all those pieces like your title and your authors and your abstract, right? And they have to get them to different people They have to like get the title and the abstract to the peer reviewers, but not the authors, right? They have to get everything to the typesetters who are gonna arrange it in different formats put the logo on it Formatted in Jats for PubMed, right? And they have to get it eventually to PubMed format it in the right Jats language, right? But those are all software systems sort of their own little publisher robots that send those information to those different people But they can't extract the stuff from your word file because robots can't read word files very well, right? So they need to do something to convert that word file You send them into something more machine readable that they can distribute through their software, right? And what their solution is to this is they make you do it They give you this form to fill out and what you're doing when you fill out one of those abstracts emission forms is you are Manually converting your word doc from human to robot, right? The robot is right here at the form. You're doing that translation But if we can get scientific articles written in mist first what it does is this it lets you submit a machine readable document from the start Just doing this just being able to get your paper written in mist first is like a silver bullet to this whole process If you can do that if you can submit a mist file instead of a word file You suddenly can talk robot to robot you don't need this stupid abstracts emission form anymore You can reduce or eliminate type setting right because once the document is machine readable You can wrap any logo or template on it you want instantaneously You don't need to worry about PubMed and Google Scholar if you're the publisher because it already converts to that language It needs right so that's already done right and the cool thing that happens is even peer review gets faster But that is the subject of another talk because you can do these streamlined things when you can distribute the information more effectively But the big question is how are we gonna get those scientific papers written in mist first? One answer is that we can create a word plug-in of some kind, right? So you've all sort of gone through your word document and you've marked up like you know Here's heading one heading two heading three when you're doing that when you're marking like this is heading one Is the paragraph is heading to right you're structuring your word document? You're giving it struck structured code behind the scenes, right? So if we had a system like that or a plug-in like that for word where you could do something like this where you're like Okay, here's my abstract. Here's my author. Here's my affiliation mark my keywords and export to mist right that would do it And this might exist someday and if you're and I think this needs to exist for people who just will not break out of word So if you're interested in creating an open-source version of this get in touch and we'll figure it out I can at least help you with the UX of it and with understanding the mist that it needs to output But even better it would probably be having our own editor Microsoft Word is a very generic writing tool What if we had like a Microsoft Word or versions of word like these whizzy-wig text editors specifically for science for writing mist So in the same way that if you've ever built a website with like WordPress or Weebly or Wix or you know Webflow or any of those softwares like you don't feel like it But you're actually writing HTML behind the scenes those sort of softwares are making it easy for you to sort of Code an HTML without any code right when you just highlight something say bold and behind the scenes it writes the HTML tag for that Right, we want a whizzy-wig editor like that for scientific articles and again This is where I have good news so a year ago when I gave a version of this talk I had to say well somebody go make it right, but now happily it exists So the first whizzy-wig editor that writes this open-source marking let markup language for scientific articles is called Curve note and this is the company I now work for because I was so blown away So Curve note is just like Microsoft Word or Google Docs It's more like Google Docs, right where you have the same kind of word-like editing interface where you can just whizzy-wig everything You have your comments and your version history But it can do all these special tricks because it's based on mist behind the scenes So it has all those special features that I showed you earlier that mist can do so it has the figure previews and the auto Numbering and it can even do things like interactive charts and things like that when you write your article in Curve note You're getting all of the features of mist in this nice easy-to-use kind of word-like format And you can export easily to your mist file for your publisher I think the user experience of writing a scientific paper in Curve note will get so good to the point where you can write a scientific paper Faster and with less frustration in Curve note that you can in Word or Google Docs Because Curve note just sort of anticipates your needs as a researcher better and its features designed to save you the time that you're Wasting in Word and Google Docs right now like one of those is formatting so even right now with Curve note If you write your paper in Curve note, you can instantly flip it between different templates There's an APA template a word template a Chicago template You don't need to worry about like your heading styles and crap anymore because you just have headings and you can format them in a bunch Of different professional templates that already look like journal articles This can apply like instantaneously in the future It really might be the case that you write your scientific article in Curve note It's exports to mist and then you submit it directly to the publisher You don't need to form or anything like I think that the user experience of Curve note can get to the point Where you literally have like a button inside of Curve note right next to your document That's like select your target journal submit and it's done one click journal submission I really think that's possible and it's something I'm going to try to work towards a curve note And that's the kind of thing that can save you hours So that's kind of the future of the scientific article is we have a world where you're writing in a tool like Curve note whether it's Curve note or whether it's something else that compiles miss behind the scenes You're exporting to mist and then that's what gets submitted to the journal and everything past that is much more efficient That's the kind of world that can really really speed up the submission and the writing and the processing of scientific articles So the future of the scientific article is really getting it into a machine readable format first And all of the incredible efficiencies that will come from that Now let's talk about the future of scientific presentations So right now only people who can afford to attend that Conference at that time and aren't scheduled to do something else and can make it to that room within that conference At that time can see a scientific presentation And if you can't make it to that room at that conference at that time, you just don't get that knowledge Let me ask you a question What is the most influential conference talk you've ever seen the most influential scientific talk? Could you share it with me? Could you post it in the comments right now for a lot of scientists that answers no for me? One of the greatest conference talks I ever saw was by this legendary professor in our field named Mickey Hebel And she gave us incredible talk on gender equality that was only two minutes long at the end of it She like called out all of the leadership of our conference and like our society or whatever and Drop the microphone. It was incredible like like everybody in the field was talking about it for like a year afterwards But I guess you had to be there Except you didn't have to be there because somebody in the audience Recorded her talk with an iPhone and put it on YouTube. It's only two minutes long. We can watch it right now Enjoy Pigs might actually fly before that happens and if that happens, I'm gonna get on a pig and I'm gonna fly with it No, seriously If gender didn't matter as much there would not be more CTOs named John or David than all female CTOs in the S&P 1500 Women would no longer fill 96% of secretary positions, but to reach parity the next 66 secretaries of state would be women Eight more women would be in cabinet positions 30 more in the Senate 125 house, and then the US would no longer be listed as 45th out of 172 countries in terms of gender equity Half naked men 74 US colleges would no longer have pending sexual violence Investigations and one in five women on college campuses would not experience sexual assault Stores would start making more creative and lower-cost baby accessories and in Texas y'all that would be great The 231 year old wage gap would cease and this site would not look so foreign Side itself would see differences women comprised only six out of the 21 side fellows this year and five of the 25 major award recipients yesterday were women So what you just saw was probably one of the greatest diversity researchers in our entire field giving like a talk very short Relatable talk that is full of like expertise and like good presenting in a short time period That's like an incredible piece of scientific content You just saw and the fact that you saw that right like you've seen it now You're one more person that that talk reached Because it was recorded with an iPhone and posted on YouTube instead of just thrown away afterwards If you look at the views on this video you're watching That's that many more people who are impacted by your talk if you go to YouTube search on this talk and look at the views on that What is it like we can look at it right now, right? What is this views? This is you know, oh 1300 views right that's a thousand three hundred more people that saw this talk That's probably triple the actual audience size in that room Afterwards that saw this talk that wouldn't have been able to see it otherwise I guess so powerful even just an iPhone recording on YouTube can reach so many more people literally like Over a thousand more people plus you watching this right now. We can flood YouTube with Scientific conference talks we can upload them all to YouTube and the sites like YouTube just like Ted does Ted's a great model Right, even though we don't have to have these super produced talks They can be iPhone recordings like that that worked pretty well, right better than never being able to see it But Ted is obviously the model for this So Ted will take a single talk and get as many eyeballs on it as possible, right like they'll take a talk And they'll put it on Ted comm they'll do a version of it on YouTube, right? They'll tweet about it. They'll do an Instagram like Instaposter, right? We're here's like, you know five mind-blowing facts about fungi, right and then like summarize it in the comments, right? And it links to the same talk they'll create these sort of like Spread of content pieces Across a single talk right to promote a single talk They'll charge people to go to the conference But then they'll drip out one talk at a time on social media and on YouTube like over the course of the year to build Hype for their next conference So it hits their marketing goals and they're getting the knowledge out like it's okay that you know It takes a year to get them all out because they you know They need the business goals too But they eventually all get out online free and promote it like this, right? You can get all the science out in a really really broad fashion when you take this approach And this is something I talked about if you saw my virtual poster cartoon So on YouTube if you go virtual poster of Mike Morrison or whatever You'll see this concept which is like, you know This idea of creating a single sort of five-slide PowerPoint file and turning it into something that's mobile-friendly Turning it into like an animated GIF for Twitter and then exporting it as like a slideshow for Instagram And then like recording it real quick to be a talk on YouTube You take one piece of content and you sort of make it accessible on all of these platforms including Google Scholar This way the science just has more chances to reach other scientists where they are instead of having to go to the Conference and this is more accessible So we did a study on scientists with accessibility needs and the number one requested a combination for people with disabilities across disabilities Was like some kind of online access to conference talks after the conference which makes sense You know like you want to be able to sort of watch it again or like you know like make it bigger You know things like that just then turn on closed captions You know like things you can do when talks are online that are harder to do in person are way better for Accessibility to so like when you upload these talks to YouTube after the conference You're not only getting them much much more impact and getting more science to more scientists You're also increasing accessibility a lot They're part of this is training right like I talked to a lot of scientists I try to get them to you know put their talk on YouTube or whatever and they'll start out being like Oh, I don't know it's early stage and whatever and I keep asking them eventually they're like look I I'm just not really confident in my public speaking ability Right and like my favorite story is it like I knew one scientist where like she was like that She was like I don't want all my stuff on YouTube and then she gave a talk that was like really well received Like people came up to her there like I was amazing or whatever right and they gave her all this positive feedback on her talk That was really good and after that she gave up to me and she was like okay How do I get on YouTube? You know like like it just this the smallest amount of positive feedback to scientists sometimes can give them that sense of Efficacy to want to get more impact out of their talks right instead of being afraid of their audience all the time You can give them a little bit of positive feedback Can really help motivate them to want to spread their talk to more people I'm part of that is giving them a better at talks and better at the technique right and so there are resources for this So Stephanie evergreen is my favorite favorite data visualization designer She has a bunch of free content on YouTube for training you how to make better data visual data visualizations She's also very very entertaining on social media So she's definitely worth a follow for data visualization skills one of my favorite presentation designer teachers presentation design teachers is Ecoravira Ecoravira has just an incredible quantity of knowledge and skill training Available free on YouTube for improving your presentations. You can go access this right now So if you show videos like Ecoravira's videos to your classes or you watch them yourself and just help scientists Feel a little bit more confident about their presenting ability That'll help motivate them to want to get their talks on YouTube actually uploading them. It's pretty easy It's just sort of having that motivation to like yeah, I have my friend record it with an iPhone and I'll put it up on my channel You know, that's all it really takes to make them available Or you can rerecord your talk afterwards like I'm doing right now So that's the future of scientific talks They will all be available online if we can get every single conference talk online We're almost none of them are right now that'll dramatically increase the quantity of science It's available in this like pre translated engaging format So that's talks now. Let's talk about posters How do you really speed science and scientific discovery way up through the design of scientific poster sessions? That's partially through their purpose, right? The purpose of a scientific poster session besides networking and things like that One of the key purposes of like the poster design self is to give you this broad shallow knowledge Like scientific poster sessions are the only time in the world where a scientist walks into a room with no expectations They just want to learn stuff across their whole field and they're open to anything, right? They want a lot of stuff, you know it and this can be really incredible for promoting discovery because there's so much serendipity That happens in poster sessions my research specialty is like The psychology of like detail orientation and like abstract processing, right? That was my dissertation I remember like having like a lot of knowledge transfer like really enjoying learning from a poster about like Creating a language for factory robots or something, you know, like and I still think about it It's still kind of like impacts how I think about things, right? Like you can get all of this really tangential Seemingly unrelated knowledge that can really inspire a lot of creativity So poster sessions whereas a paper is about going deep poster sessions are about going very very broad and Getting a lot of broad insight really really quickly walking through a poster hall They can be of an experience where you walk into a poster hall and you get like a software update on everything That's going on in your field and make some contacts. It can be like right now It's like one of the most miserable experiences of the conference. It can be one of the best If we design them right the problem is we're not designing them, right? So scientific posters have been designed mostly the same way for 30 years since before the internet And this should be a huge red flag to you like nothing in science should stagnate like this This is should suggest to you It's something else is going on here like there's a lot of conformity and a lack of sort of design training going on So everybody just copies each other right because that's the easiest thing to do and they're sort of they feel like they're going to be Penalized by doing anything different, but in the last 30 years We've learned a lot about the science of instructional design There's been a lot of new findings that have come out You'd think that with 30 years of additional findings something would have changed on the poster, right? Surely something and all that had to have an implication again The fact that they're not changing despite all that research means something's very very wrong here, right? Like science should always progress if we were really applying the latest science to posters They would change and improve every single year with new findings, right? That's the future we want for posters We don't just want one better format We want them to constantly keep pace and improve with new relevant research findings right now You have a situation like this where you walk through an entire poster session and you leave all of this insight, right? You like here like these are like the like one Two three posters that the scientists collected some knowledge from right and all the other posters She walked by just have their insights still on them She was not able to learn it you walk through a poster session you walk by 75 posters You learn something from two of them and you don't learn anything from like the 73 that you walked by and glanced at right because they're built to only teach you things when you stop and get trapped You don't learn anything on the walk by if we can just make one change to posters and make it possible To take something away from the poster while you're walking by it instead of having to stop you get a world like this Where you're learning something you're taking she's just taken the light bulbs off the posters, right? So she took away light bulbs off the majority of these posters you're learning, you know 50 or 60 new things in a poster session instead of two that's the world we can create You still get to stop at two posters and spend 10 minutes each and meet people and go really deep, right? And probably get a better experience through better design on those two, right? But you also get to learn from the ones you're just walking by so it's not a question of sort of changing What poster sessions have been to something completely different? It's about preserving like what they are now with the social connection and learning going really deep on a couple posters You still do that you improve that too, and you also add all of the insight transferred from the ones you walk by changing poster sessions From something where you're only learning two things in an hour to something where you're learning 70 things in an hour and every scientist who walks through that poster session is learning 70 things instead of two That's the kind of massive acceleration and knowledge transfer that can really do some good on curing diseases faster So I spent the last three years kind of focusing on researching posters And what I've mostly arrived at at this point is something like this what you're seeing on the right is a version to better poster design It has a main takeaway on the left, right teach people something cool You learned in five seconds as they walk by or scroll by if they're online Key visualization of your finding and then just methods that you can scan results You can scan you can have this really these really big generously sized figures, right that you can look at at a Glance these really big figures are important because like you're not always paying close attention to the poster Usually you're paying attention to the person right you need to be able to just glance the poster and understand the figure or understand Like what it shows and be able to see it big figures are also much more important for accessibility We did a study again the same study of conference attendees with accessibility needs and we found that designs like this the original better poster were preferred over Infographic posters over Traditional posters like the wall of text we think because of they have like much bigger figures clear takeaways like if you have a visual impairment You the bigger figure is helpful In the same way that you're standing far away from the poster because you're in a wheelchair or something or just because it's crowded a bigger Figure is helpful, right clear takeaways in negative space are really really helpful if you like having ADHD or a processing disorder or like Maybe you're just busy because it's stress because it's a poster session. You still like clear takeaways, right? These designs aren't just like my opinion They're what the research seems to suggest to me like even eye tracking studies of posters I found that they really just people sort of tend to focus on clear takeaways and big figures So I made a poster that is just clear takeaways and big figures and so far. It's going well But getting people to switch to these new layouts is really really difficult Because you can always just grab a template from a friend from ten years ago and use the old wall of text You put all your content in there And it feels like you did a good job you look at it you get the sense of man Look at all that content. I mess it in a lot of work or whatever, right? And like getting people over that feeling of safety of like all my text is on there, right? It's really hard because it's laziness, right? They don't want to they don't want to have to do be creative or do something different They just want to like throw all their text in a poster and get it over with right and not look stupid That's a really hard barrier and conferences have a hard time Getting people to try any new poster format because people are so comfortable with the old one even though it goes against the evidence And it's a huge problem in science where we have this conformity pressure Where I really think like the evidence keeps building behind better poster in a positive way And I really think you could have a poster that is like absolutely perfect Like like just like just rock solid evidence behind it like better learning outcomes You get more stops all of these things, right? And people would still use the traditional one the majority would because there's this just Incredible inertia behind every single scientific department and one of those things is that People don't like designs that feel too simple, especially in science. They don't like them that feel too simple They don't mind if it's too complex, right? So even if the design on the left is like goes against the evidence It's too visually cluttered, right? It's too overwhelming. It's fatiguing, right? Realistically people will read almost none of that content in a poster session It feels dense and effortful, right? And for that reason it feels more science-y than the one on the right even though the one on the right communicates more clearly and So for that reason that feeling of safety a lot of faculty a lot of professors will be afraid of anything different than that, right? But just do the traditional way to template and that's enough to make a grad student be like fine. I'm busy or whatever So even with an answer to posters, I don't know the solution to that That's a huge conformity problem in science. We've gotten a percentage of people to try these newer layouts I don't know how to get more adoption on them Even as the evidence builds behind them But if we can get more of these posters in a billboard-like format where people can learn the main finding as they walk by and learn from 70 posters That will help considerably The other big thing we can do for scientific posters is give them an afterlife upload posters to a site like Figshare So again in one of our studies, I think the average scientific poster got like six and a half Stops or something like that but on Figshare your poster can get like 10,000 views, right? That's a high number but like anything more than six like it can be like 60 is like 10 times, right? It's a low bar giving posters this afterlife for people again Who couldn't afford or were too busy or whatever didn't make it to that poster session at that time and notice that board Everybody else doesn't get to see the poster usually because he is thrown away If you upload them to Figshare, they'll have this afterlife. They'll be indexed in Google Scholar Doesn't have to be Figshare any place that gets them a DOI URL so they can show up in Google Scholar We'll give posters an afterlife and make them much much more Bigger contributions to like scientific knowledge and to getting more science to more scientists But the next thing we could do of course to posters is to get them marked up and missed, right? Remember I said missed is really good about sort of marking up chunks of information on scientific articles There's no reason you can't create a poster in Miss Markdown So if you use this open source language for scientific articles Missed Markdown to mark up your poster You can have each component of the poster beam a machine readable Lego brick and that's where they really go Once you can get your scientific article or your conference abstract coded in Missed where it's broken into machine readable chunks There's not really a reason why you couldn't have a button that Pulled out your key takeaway pulled out your limitations pulled out your key figure, right and made different poster designs with it Right you might have to pick like the colors and an image or something, right? But you could have a tool that basically auto generated of poster version of your paper if you coded it in Missed Markdown So posters I think that's where we can solve the conformity problem, too Is that we can have a button which generates a poster from your paper? And that's going to be faster than the traditional approach, right and common comforces can do that too It's like don't even worry about creating a poster just select from these options that we created out of your missed file It can be like that or you can still get creative with your posters Which I'd much prefer to see but a lot of people aren't doing that But that's a lot more effort for the few who want to go have fun with their poster so that's what the future of science can be you have scientific articles that become open access and Start life as machine readable Missed Markdown and open source Markdown Maybe written in a software or a whizzy wick like curve note instead of Microsoft Word and Google Docs So they're all open access and all extremely machine readable and they're broken into these machine readable Lego bricks We're like each figure sort of is a chunk and then we want every single scientific conference talk uploaded to YouTube and freely available That's thousands of new scientific talks every single year that you can't see right now that you will be able to see in the future And maybe one day we can get the transcripts and the figures in those talks Marked up in open-source mist because that'll make those talks and the pieces of those talks Lego bricks that other people can refer to in their talks and their presentations that maintain that authorship chain We want the pieces of the talk to be Lego bricks to for building new science out of and for posters Eventually somehow we will end up with poster halls whether e-posters or physical posters Where I hope that every single poster in the room Whether it's a better poster or not is designed so that you can read and learn something From every poster in the room instead of two and then you can still go deep on a couple Still get those networking and relationships, right? and of course probably code up posters in machine readable mist and Put them on a site like figshare so that they can be accessible forever and open access forever and part of scientific knowledge and Being in mist will help people pull pieces of posters with the authorship attached and use them in their own new scientific discoveries This is the kind of system where everything is open access. Everything is very machine readable Where we can create incredible tools like the map of Parkinson's disease and we can have this feel of science like in the beginning remember that stressed out scientists where scientists can feel like they're just taking these cool Lego bricks of previous work and Designing them into all new discoveries and discovering much much faster through systems like pure even peer review systems that run much much more Efficiently, I mean like not just saving hours saving months of time per scientist because they're built to be machine on these machine readable documents first That's the future we can have to extremely Accelerate scientific discovery to rescue people who are suffering a lot lot faster And this is the future that I'll be trying for the remainder of my life to help build feel free to reach out I'm on Twitter and on YouTube as you can see. Thanks for watching all of this I've got YouTube videos on better poster part one and better poster part two cartoons of those two by the way Better poster part one is the viral funny one better poster part two actually includes all of the research It's still a cartoon. So I hope it's still entertaining the better poster part one is the one that went crazy So I also video on Twitter posters which is like creating animated gift posters for Twitter And then I have a new video on virtual posters Which is about how to do like the cross social media promotion How to create a single format for your poster for your virtual poster that you can then launch on all these different platforms Thanks for watching. I'm on Twitter at Mike Morrison and company. I work for is curve note Thank you so much curve note also for sponsoring this talk in a way I'm letting give me time to put this talk together and post it on YouTube for you