Poster Session

Poster SessionPresent ideas, concepts, and insights in a visually appealing way.

50 – 95 min5+ Participantsworkshop text team

Summary

Presenting insights, ideas or concepts can be boring and hard to follow. With a Poster Session, all participants can present their thoughts and findings in their own visually appealing way. This creates discourse, new ideas and approaches. In addition, the method helps to break down or simplify a lot of content to the most important and elementary parts of it.

Step-by-step

Prepare a room large enough for all participants to create their own poster. Flip charts, large sheets of paper (e.g. A3), pens or other craft materials should be available for everyone. Magazines, stickers and other things can also help to visualize ideas. The distance between the individual participants should be large enough so that one is not distracted or influenced.
If all participants are gathered, then a short briefing can help before the session begins. Give all participants a certain amount of time to visualize their idea, concept, or findings on a poster, e.g. 15 - 30 min. There are some rules and recommended actions that they may want to draw participants' attention to.
1. Look: Use different materials. The poster should not consist entirely of text, nor entirely of images.
2. Self-descriptiveness: The finished poster must be self-explanatory to the other participants when viewed.
3. Content: It makes sense for each participant to address the same three questions: “why?”, “what?” and “how?”. Why should the idea be implemented? What is the mission? What exactly is the idea? How can it be implemented?
After the posters have been created, they are attached to boards (white-, black-, pin board etc.) using pushpins, magnets, tape etc. The posters do not all have to stand next to each other, but can be distributed within the room as in a gallery. Now the main part of the Poster Session will started: The participants are allowed to move independently through the poster gallery and get their own picture of the visualized ideas.
To end the poster session, either a dot-voting on the posters can be done to look more closely at some of the ideas afterwards, or a discussion starts. Here, participants can exchange ideas about a particular poster, talk about it, or even ask the creator questions.

What you need

Craft materials: flipcharts, paper, pens, stickers etc.
Pushpins, magnets or tape
White-, black- or pinboard
Dot stickers (optional)

These methods might seem simple, but applying them in a real project is another story. We’re there to help. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to get in touch with us at the User Experience Strategy & Design team.

Ask Away!