NPR

To Save The Science Poster, Researchers Want To Kill It And Start Over

Scientists often share their latest research on posters displayed at big conferences. Posters are a long-standing tradition, but one reformer says they're mostly terrible and need to change.
Michigan State University doctoral student Mike Morrison has a redesign for scientific posters to spell out their main point in big, easy-to-read letters.

Mike Morrison hardly looks like a revolutionary. He's wearing a dark suit and has short hair. But we're about to enter a world of conformity that hasn't changed in decades — maybe even a century. And in there, his vision seems radical.

"We are about to walk into a room full of 100 scientific posters, where researchers are trying to display their findings on a big poster board," says Morrison, a Ph.D. student in psychology at Michigan State University.

The idea of a science poster is simple. Get some poster-making materials and then slap on a title, the experimental methods and the results. Almost everyone has created a poster like this at some

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