Reimagining the Scientific Poster Session: From Defense to Dialogue at Locarno BaseCamp

At Locarno Film Festival’s BaseCamp, I presented work that challenges one of academia’s most entrenched communication formats: the scientific poster session. While these sessions have enormous potential for fostering meaningful exchange, they often become barriers to genuine conversation. My poster explored how we might deconstruct and reimagine this format for interdisciplinary collaboration.

Three Factors That Enable Conversation

My analysis identified three key elements that make poster sessions powerful when they work well:

Alignment: The unwritten social contract of shared context. Conference talks align participants into similar ways of thinking, create expectations for networking, and establish domain-specific language that enables efficient communication.

Environment: Dynamic spaces that allow natural flow between ideas. Posters provide visual backdrops that hold attention and divide space without creating rigid barriers. Crucially, the environment cannot be static—people need freedom to move and return to conversations as thoughts develop.

Excitation: Motivators that spark genuine exchange. Poster titles encourage questions, the act of reading creates shared presence, visual information provides reference points, and presenters have inherent enthusiasm for discussing their work.

The Promise and Problems of Poster Sessions

Scientific conferences create unique conditions for productive dialogue. The poster session, in particular, offers a powerful space where academics can display their work while moving freely through an environment designed for informal exchange. At their best, poster sessions lower barriers to conversation and create opportunities for serendipitous connections.

However, traditional academic posters suffer from three critical design flaws that undermine their potential:

Walls of Text

Dense information compressed into A1 space makes posters incomprehensible without the author present. Ironically, this approach is often adopted so authors don’t have to be there to explain their work—but it ensures that only they can make sense of what’s displayed.

Complete Stories

The presentation of entirely finished works fundamentally limits conversation in three ways:

• Monodirectional communication: Authors tell stories while audiences listen
• Stagnation: Finished narratives provide natural endpoints that encourage people to move on
• Closed systems: Completed storylines resist collaborative exploration or meaningful challenge

Performative Presence

Authors often “stand guard” at their posters, ready to defend rather than discuss their work. This creates transactional interactions—ask a question, receive a summary, move on—rather than the collaborative exploration that drives innovation.

The BaseCamp Experiment: Ideas in Motion

Locarno’s BaseCamp provided the perfect laboratory for reimagining academic communication. This temporary community brings together 200 interdisciplinary talents—filmmakers, designers, musicians, writers, performers, and thinkers—creating an environment where traditional academic boundaries dissolve.

For this context, I designed a poster session that treats posters as starting points rather than conclusions—spaces to show ideas in motion with visual backdrops facilitating structured, playful dialogue. The approach embraces open-ended, interdisciplinary exchange while maintaining enough structure to enable productive conversation.

Fundamental Questions for Reimagining

The workshop component of this work challenged basic assumptions about academic presentation:

Narrative Structure: Should poster sessions be limited to completed works, or can we display ideas in development? What storytelling formats work better for interdisciplinary audiences than purely academic ones?

Authorship: Must posters represent individual work, or can collaborative presentations foster different types of dialogue?

Visual Design: Do we need standardized formats, or can varied presentations spark more interesting conversations?

Content Requirements: Should posters be interpretable as standalone articles, or can they function purely as conversation catalysts?

Spatial Considerations: How should poster session spaces be arranged to optimize different types of interaction?

Building New Guidelines

The workshop aims to create rigorous new rules for poster sessions that prioritize conversation over presentation, collaboration over defense, and process over product. By questioning everything from poster titles to spatial arrangement, we’re developing frameworks that could transform how interdisciplinary communities share and develop ideas.

Beyond Academic Boundaries

This work suggests that meaningful innovation in academic communication doesn’t require new technologies or venues—it requires consciously redesigning the structures that shape our interactions. When we move from defending completed work to exploring ideas in development, we create space for the kind of collaborative thinking that drives breakthrough discoveries.

The poster session format, reimagined for environments like BaseCamp, becomes a tool for fostering the interdisciplinary dialogue increasingly necessary for addressing complex contemporary challenges. By treating our communication formats as design problems rather than fixed traditions, we open possibilities for entirely new forms of scholarly exchange.

A Framework for Metaphor: Unlocking New Scientific Directions Through Language

At this year’s Locarno Film Festival, I presented a poster exploring how metaphors fundamentally shape scientific understanding and discovery. The work introduces a structured framework for examining metaphorical thinking in science—and demonstrates how consciously changing our metaphors can unlock entirely new research directions.

The Hidden Power of Scientific Language

Science relies heavily on metaphor to make abstract concepts comprehensible. From Schrödinger’s famous cat to protein channels, the language we use doesn’t just describe our science—it fundamentally shapes our ability to understand and build upon existing knowledge. These metaphorical frameworks both limit and expand our capacity for discovery, often in ways we don’t consciously recognize.

A Simple Yet Powerful Framework

The core contribution of this work is an elegantly simple structure for examining metaphorical thinking:

[Abstract ≡ Known]  →  Existing understanding.
[Abstract ≡ New  ]  →  What new implications emerge?

This framework allows researchers to consciously examine their current metaphorical assumptions and systematically explore what happens when we substitute new comparative concepts. By making our metaphorical choices explicit, we can deliberately experiment with different ways of thinking about complex problems.

From Heat to Light: A Historical Revolution

One compelling illustration comes from the evolution of organic chemistry. For decades, chemical reactions were understood through the metaphor of heat as an energy source, leading to what we know as classic reactivity. This framework was productive and well-established, generating significant understanding within its bounds.

But when scientists began conceptualizing light as an energy source instead of heat, an entirely new field—organic photochemistry—emerged from this seemingly simple metaphorical shift. The same abstract concept (energy source) mapped onto a different concrete understanding opened up previously invisible research possibilities.

Channels, Canals, and Biological Transport

The poster explored how metaphorical thinking has shaped our understanding of biological systems, particularly through the extraordinarily productive metaphor of ion transport as a “channel.” This conceptualization has led to decades of fruitful research by giving scientists a clear target to aim for.

But what happens when we shift our thinking slightly? Instead of a simple channel, consider a canal with its sophisticated infrastructure. Suddenly we encounter the concept of locks—spaces where vessels wait for water levels to change before proceeding to the other side.

Map this “lock” concept onto protein function, and we arrive at the idea of “lock proteins”—molecules that confine other molecules, wait for internal changes, and then release them on the opposite side of a membrane. Fascinatingly, this describes carrier proteins, a concept that emerged decades ago through different reasoning, demonstrating how alternative metaphorical paths can converge on the same scientific insights.

Solutions: Puzzles or Chemistry?

Perhaps the most thought-provoking example came from linguist George Lakoff’s account of an Iranian student at Berkeley who heard Americans speak of “solutions to problems” and interpreted this as a beautiful chemical metaphor. Rather than viewing problems as puzzles with single, permanent solutions, he imagined a bubbling laboratory beaker where problems could be dissolved temporarily.

This reframing suggests a fundamentally different approach: instead of seeking permanent fixes, we focus on discovering catalysts and conditions that maintain desired states while preventing unwanted complications from “crystallizing out.” Problems never vanish completely—they shift states, and our job becomes keeping them in solution as best we can.

Expanding Our Metaphorical Vocabulary

The poster concluded with additional examples demonstrating the framework’s versatility:

Time: River (linear flow from A to B) vs. Lake (a surface we navigate)
Love: War (aggressive conflict) vs. Dance (coordinated partnership)

Each substitution opens different possibilities for understanding and action, revealing assumptions embedded in our current ways of thinking.

A Tool for Innovation

This framework offers a practical methodology for researchers, educators, and anyone working with complex abstract concepts. By consciously examining and experimenting with our metaphorical foundations, we can potentially unlock new directions for inquiry that were previously invisible.

The work demonstrates that breakthrough discoveries don’t always require new equipment, funding, or techniques—sometimes they simply require us to think about familiar concepts through fundamentally different metaphorical lenses. Our next scientific revolution might be waiting in a metaphor we haven’t yet considered.This idea has been explored in Metaphor i just wanted to introduce it to a wider audience.

Reversing the Direction of Metaphor: When Abstract Concepts Illuminate Experience

The third poster in my Locarno Film Festival series explores a provocative question: what happens when we reverse the traditional direction of metaphorical thinking in science? Instead of using concrete experiences to understand abstract concepts, can abstract scientific frameworks help us better understand lived experience?

The Conventional Flow of Scientific Metaphor

Scientific metaphors typically follow a predictable pattern: we take abstract concepts and map them onto concrete, embodied experiences. We speak of electron flow because we understand rivers, protein folding because we know fabric, cellular channels because we grasp waterways. This conventional approach—abstract → concrete—makes complex scientific ideas accessible by grounding them in familiar physical experiences.

This established direction has proven extraordinarily productive. By connecting abstract concepts to bodily experience (movement, touch, weight), we create cognitive bridges that make the incomprehensible manageable. The metaphor of electron flow works precisely because we can grasp a flowing river much more readily than the quantum mechanical reality of electron behavior.

Experimenting with Bidirectional Metaphor

My poster investigates whether we can reverse this flow, using abstract scientific frameworks as concrete domains to explore other abstract concepts or even everyday experiences. Rather than abstract → concrete, we experiment with concrete → abstract, where “concrete” paradoxically becomes the scientific diagram itself.

This approach draws on Lakoff and Johnson’s understanding of metaphor as a fundamental structure of thought, not merely decorative language. By creating bidirectional relationships—represented by chemistry’s equilibrium symbol (⇌)—we open possibilities for dialogue between different conceptual domains.

Knowledge as a Jablonski Diagram

Jablonski diagrams map electronic transitions in molecules, from solar panels to phone LEDs. These diagrams show molecules absorbing photons, electrons jumping to higher energy states, and eventual relaxation back to ground states through photon emission.

What if we map the process of knowledge acquisition onto this framework?

Known knowledge becomes our ground state (S₀)—stable, low-energy, familiar territory. To change our thinking, we need inspiration that promotes us to a Free thought state (S₁). This requires energy input: reading, conversation, grief, showers, dreams, repetitive tasks. This inspired state is highly energetic but short-lived, typically operating within known contexts but without normal limitations.

Through hypothesizing, we can transition to a Test idea state (T₁)—longer-lived but requiring additional energy to embed into our knowledge canon. Crucially, when this test knowledge relaxes into New knowledge, it doesn’t simply return to the original ground state. Instead, it creates a new energy level (T₀) that’s subtly different from our original Known state.

This mapping reveals something interesting: the difference between T₀ and S₀ might only be noticeable under specific conditions, suggesting that new knowledge doesn’t replace old knowledge but exists in productive tension with it.

Conversation as a Reaction Profile

Reaction profiles show the energy barriers reactants must overcome to become products. By treating this abstract scientific framework as our “concrete” domain, we can explore the dynamics of human conversation.

In this mapping, being outside conversation represents our reactant state (A), while being in conversation becomes our product state (B). The energy barrier between them explains why conversations can be difficult to initiate, and chemical principles suggest methods for overcoming these barriers.

Excitation: Raising the energy level well above the barrier—like cancelled trains or bad weather that prompt strangers to talk.

Catalysis: Adding intermediary steps that break large barriers into manageable stages—book clubs, philosophy talks, or structured social settings that provide conversation scaffolding.

Environmental Changes: Altering conditions to lower the barrier itself—ensuring people don’t feel trapped or uncomfortable, creating spaces that naturally facilitate exchange.

The Dialogue Between Abstract Domains

This bidirectional approach creates genuine dialogue between conceptual frameworks. The Jablonski mapping suggested that new knowledge exists at different energy levels than known knowledge, leading to the insight that learning doesn’t simply replace old understanding but creates complex relationships between different knowledge states.

The conversation-as-reaction-profile mapping generated practical strategies for social interaction by applying chemical principles to human dynamics. These weren’t merely analogical decorations but genuine transfer of understanding between domains.

Expanding Metaphorical Possibilities

This work suggests that our metaphorical toolkit is far richer than conventional science communication assumes. Abstract frameworks can serve as “concrete” domains for understanding other abstractions, creating unexpected pathways for insight and innovation.

By treating scientific diagrams as embodied experiences rather than mere representations, we open new possibilities for both scientific understanding and practical application. The equilibrium between abstract domains (⇌) becomes a space for creative exploration where familiar scientific tools illuminate unfamiliar territories of human experience.

These remain unfinished ideas—experiments in metaphorical thinking that invite dialogue and refinement. The poster format itself, with space for post-it note comments, embodies this exploratory spirit where ideas develop through conversation rather than monologue.

The Open Poster: A Template for Dialogue and Community Feedback

The fourth and final poster in my Locarno Film Festival series took a radically different approach. Rather than presenting completed research or even work-in-progress, this poster served as a bridge between established ideas and future possibilities—a template designed purely to facilitate conversation and gather community input.

Beyond Content: Structure as Communication

This poster represented the logical extension of my critique of traditional academic presentation formats. Instead of filling space with dense text or complete narratives, it provided a structural framework that guided participants through different types of engagement, from concrete to increasingly abstract thinking.

The design itself embodied the principles I’d been advocating throughout the series: treating posters as starting points rather than conclusions, prioritizing dialogue over monologue, and creating space for collaborative exploration rather than defensive presentation.

A Journey from Concrete to Abstract

The poster’s layout deliberately moved participants through a progression of engagement levels:

Concrete Ideas occupied the top section—a space for established concepts and tangible starting points that could ground conversation in shared understanding.

Context provided adjacent space for situating ideas within broader frameworks, helping participants understand how concrete concepts connected to larger questions or existing knowledge.

Ideas Up for Debate formed the central section, explicitly inviting disagreement and alternative perspectives. This space acknowledged that the most interesting conversations often emerge from productive tension between different viewpoints.

The lower sections became increasingly open-ended and questioning:

Ethereal Ideas welcomed speculative thinking and half-formed concepts that might not survive rigorous scrutiny but could spark unexpected connections.

Active Questions invited participants to pose their own inquiries, turning the poster into a collaborative investigation rather than a one-way presentation.

Designed for Participation

The most innovative aspect was the dedicated Community Feedback section with visual emphasis on post-it note spaces. This wasn’t merely an invitation for comments—it was an integral part of the poster’s function. The feedback spaces were as important as any content, making visible the collaborative nature of knowledge development.

The question “Where are we going next?” served as both prompt and philosophy, acknowledging that the poster’s purpose wasn’t to provide answers but to help a community collectively determine productive directions for future exploration.

A Meta-Commentary on Academic Communication

This open poster functioned simultaneously as practical tool and meta-commentary on academic communication practices. By creating a template that could be adapted for any topic or community, it demonstrated how poster sessions could become vehicles for genuine collective inquiry rather than individual promotion.

The minimal content forced focus onto structure and process rather than information transfer. Participants couldn’t passively consume content—they had to actively engage with the framework to make it meaningful.

From Individual Work to Community Process

The progression from concrete ideas through increasingly abstract concepts mirrored how genuine collaborative thinking often develops. Communities typically need shared starting points (concrete ideas) before they can productively explore more speculative territory (ethereal ideas and active questions).

By making this progression explicit and providing dedicated spaces for each type of thinking, the poster created scaffolding for conversations that might otherwise struggle to find productive structure.

A Template for Future Sessions

The open poster represented a practical solution to the challenges identified in my poster session critique. Rather than requiring authors to defend completed work, it invited communities to collectively explore emerging questions. Instead of monodirectional communication, it facilitated multidirectional exchange where every participant could contribute to the developing narrative.

The design could be adapted for any disciplinary context or community gathering, providing a framework that prioritizes process over content and collaboration over individual presentation.

Embodying the Philosophy

This poster embodied the philosophical shift I’d been advocating throughout the series: from treating academic communication as information transfer to understanding it as community dialogue. The visual emphasis on feedback spaces and collaborative questioning demonstrated what poster sessions could become when designed explicitly for conversation rather than presentation.

The open poster served as both conclusion and invitation—a culmination of my critique of traditional formats and a practical tool for implementing alternatives. It represented the ultimate expression of treating posters as starting points, creating space where communities could collectively determine their own directions for exploration and discovery.

By stripping away content to focus purely on conversational structure, this final poster challenged fundamental assumptions about what academic communication could be and offered a template for more genuinely collaborative approaches to sharing and developing ideas.