This past March, I attended the 2014 Social Media and Critical Care conference held on Queensland’s Gold Coast (aka SMACC GOLD) to present some of my research on using Graphic Medicine to improve the wellbeing of junior doctors. It was an interesting conference which covered a lot of ground — from surgical techniques, to research ethics, to social media strategies, to everything in between.

My presentation was a simple “digital poster” coauthored with Kimberly Humphrey. Digital posters can mean different things at different conferences — here it meant a Power Point presentation of eight slides or less. The posters all lived on a bank of computers in the corner of the exhibition hall. You could walk up to a computer, scroll through the titles of various digital posters, and then pick one to watch. At SMACC GOLD, you could also vote on the posters (out of five starts), and leave public comments. To give you an idea of the set-up, here’s some covert pictures I took of people looking at OUR poster:

We got some nice, encouraging comments about our work from strangers with this system, and a pretty good, and a pretty good star ranking. I missed being able to talk to people in person though — at traditional poster sessions, you can stand near your poster and have people ask questions or discuss your research with you. The digital set-up makes it a little bit more anonymous. Overall, though, it was a great experience.

So far, SMACC has not put any of the digital posters online, but that won’t stop me from sharing my work with YOU! You can take a look at our digital poster from SMACC below:

I’ve become a bit addicted to using Prezi, a different slideware system which uses a scrollable, zoomable canvas instead of individual slides, so it was a unique challenge going back to PowerPoint. I think changing formats like that helps you to stretch communication muscles, which is always a good thing!