Presentation skills--Renee

 

A good presentation should be attractive. How to make an attractive presentation? I think it could concert in different aspects: Strategy, context of talk, and visuals .

In terms of strategies, good speakers always start with jokes, stories, or common questions.  Speakers attract people’s attention directly.

In terms of context, as the same strategy of personal statement, speakers should use the simple language everybody could understand and have similar feelings easily. Using the simple words to explain a complicated topic is not an easy thing.

Finally, in visual aspect, we can combine pictures and videos together, and express our topic in visual way. All the visual stuff should serve our main idea directly.  We can also talk when we show those medias.

Lessons from TED

We watched the beginning of three talks on TED today:
Jaime Lerner
Vik Muniz
Doris Sung Kim

Jaime Lerner was speaking about city design.  He seemed very comfortable and earnest, but he was also not afraid to joke around.  He began with very beautiful photos of cityscapes and he also used slides of basic drawings, city plans, and text outlines.  He spoke about cars and cities not just factually but also metaphorically to engage the audience.

Vik Muniz had an interesting opening strategy: he appeared to be somewhat nervous and began by talking about a very serious subject (creation v. creativity) and then turned the seriousness on its head by showing a slide of a dog with a chicken pattern on its fur.  Through his introduction, which was a series of jokes, we learned that he was born in Brazil, he loved media, his first job was is advertising, and he was shot!  He then talked about his own work.  Some of his slides used text which introduced different categories of his work.

Doris Sung Kim was the most straightforward of the three speakers.  She began with a slide of girl with her out of the window and a personal story, which she then linked to a discussion about the energy that buildings consume.  She showed the special energy sensing metal she uses in her work as a prop and in a video.