Story time. Back when I was a PhD student, my university ran an annual postgraduate research event – much like the AUT Postgraduate Research Symposium. I went along as a first-year humanities student, excited to see what everyone else was working on. There were fascinating talks on a huge range of topics, performances and demonstrations, and of course free food. It was a stimulating and educational day out, and made me even more enthusiastic to enter the world of postgraduate research.
But walking into the poster session, I was truly surprised. I had assumed that, because posters are a visual medium requiring design skills, they might appeal to researchers from creative disciplines. I expected to see work from my colleagues in the arts and humanities prominently displayed (perhaps even overrepresented) on the posterboards. But instead, the posters were almost all from the sciences – and in fact largely medical sciences. Why, I wondered, were posters so ubiquitous in those fields, and so absent in others?
As it turns out, the popularity of posters at scientific conferences has been studied. A research team interviewed 89 delegates at a healthcare conference, and found that posters were valued in that context specifically for their capacity to give a rapid ‘snapshot’ of multiple research findings, while enabling networking and discussion (Soon, Tudor Car, Ng, Tan, & Smith, 2022). With a poster, you don’t need to rely on audience members sitting down for a 20-minute talk; you can still engage in conversation during the poster session, but you can also take advantage of foot traffic past your poster throughout the whole conference.
Traditionally (and of course this is a generalisation) those in the arts & humanities have tended to favour oral presentations over posters. But I’m a firm believer that all researchers can benefit from communicating research in a variety of ways, and that posters can be an impactful mode of research dissemination across all disciplines.
In the second year of my humanities PhD, I contributed a poster to the postgraduate research showcase. I was the only researcher from my department to do so. And honestly, I found it so useful! Not just for disseminating my research (though yes, for that too); but moreso for looking at my own project through a new lens.
I had been hyper-focused on my written thesis, and so my default mode of expression was to use words. A lot of words. Abundant and bounteous quantities of verbiage. But showcasing my research on a poster forced me to switch gears: using text economically, adding pictorial elements, and grouping concepts for easy visual interpretation. The work that had previously existed in my brain in a kind of amorphous ‘word soup’ took on a newly clarified shape. The process of producing a poster enabled me to reconceptualise my research, and helped me to distill it into a form that I could communicate much more easily.
In other words: making my research visually clear for others helped to make it clear for myself.
I gained even more perspective when I attended the poster session and spoke with attendees about my research. As a poster presenter, you can have unique interactions with audience members that aren’t always possible in other types of presentations. You can watch people respond to your work in real-time, and have informal conversations that allow you to discover what people find exciting (or confusing, or revolutionary) about your research. I noticed when eyes glazed over; I noticed when they lit up. Those reactions helped me to identify the elements of my research that had the most popular appeal.
So presenting a poster really worked for me. But why should you do it?
If you are in a discipline that commonly uses posters as a means of communicating research findings, then practising your poster design skills will have a direct payoff. Anyone aspiring to a career in scientific or medical research will probably need to know how to communicate complex information in a clear and visually appealing format, and there’s no better time to build those skills than during a PG research project.
But even if posters aren’t frequently used in your discipline, there are real benefits to giving it a try. Not only can it open up new ways to think about your research, it can also give your communication muscles a different kind of workout than they get during your everyday thesis-writing.
Want to have a go? We welcome poster presentations for the AUT Postgraduate Research Symposium on Thursday 11 September. All you need to do at this stage is submit an abstract by Friday 4 July, and then we’ll be in touch about preparing and submitting your poster.
You can find loads of tips on producing a great poster from the Better Posters blog, and AUT’s Centre for Person-Centred Research helpfully publishes examples of their excellent research posters here. You can do the actual design in the software programme of your choice – PowerPoint and Canva are great options for design novices; whereas Adobe Illustrator or InDesign can suit more experienced designers.
However you prefer to create your poster, I highly recommend going through the process at least once.
Reference
Soon, C. S. L., Tudor Car, L., Ng, C. J., Tan, N. C., & Smith, H. (2022). What is the utility of posters? Qualitative study of participants at a regional primary healthcare conference in Asia. Medical science educator, 32(6), 1405–1412. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40670-022-01657-z
