What is the carbon footprint of a conference poster?

The COVID-19 crisis delivered a shock to the academic conference scene from which it may never recover. We have seen conferences completely retooled and reformatted in a very short span of time, with varying degrees of success.

But we are also in a climate crisis. If the COVID-19 pandemic hadn’t arrived, the climate emergency would probably have forced a similar re-examination of how we hold academic conferences – although it probably would have happened over decades instead of years.

A forthcoming paper by Leochico and colleagues looks at how we should change conferences in light of the climate crisis. They have multiple recommendations, but this is the one that includes posters.

Avoid single-use items: Require electronic instead of physical posters; re-evaluate use of booklets, lanyards, plastic water bottles, coffee cups, and other conference items.

As a basis for this recommendation, they cite another very recent article by Milford and colleagues (2021). They make the same general statement about reducing single-use items at conferences.

These are good recommendations, but it’s worth digging deeper.

First, most of the time posters have at least one additional use. They can go on display at their institution, where they can have a role in showing work to students and colleagues.

Second, posters are not in the same category as coffee cups or lanyards. Posters are one of the reasons you hold a conference. Lanyards are not. So if you do not want to use paper posters, you must have some sort of substitute.

The substitute both articles recommend is to move from paper posters to electronic posters. But neither of them provide any attempt to show that the carbon footprint of an electronic poster is lower than that of a paper poster. They simply assert it.

Trying to come up with an estimate of carbon costs for these kinds of alternatives is mind-numbingly hard. I have noticed, however, is that people often tend to underestimate the carbon costs of electronics. 

For example, in a class I taught once on global change, students suggested that all students get tablets so that the university wouldn’t have to use so much paper. On the surface, it sounds great: less waste! 

But I started asking them if they considered factors like what it took to create a tablet. Consumer electronics like smart phones use almost every chemical element in the periodic table, and many are rare and hard to extract. But paper is from trees, so by definition, if you want paper, you are drawing down atmospheric carbon to grow trees.

There’s also an end-of-life question. Recycling components of electronics is a challenging engineering problem that people are actively trying to solve. One the other hand, recycling paper is so simple that kids in grade school can do it. (Though it gets more complicated if you have glossy photo paper.)

Then there is the power use involved in storing and displaying an electronic poster. Unless the power is sourced from renewable energy, there is going to be an ongoing carbon cost of storing an electronic poster so it can be viewed on demand during the conference and afterwards. Yes, paper costs energy, but the energy cost ends after it’s printed and transported.

I am not saying that paper posters are obviously more climate friendly than electronic ones. I don’t know, but I don’t think anyone else does, either. I would like to know.

Update, 1 September 2021: To be explicit, I am assuming a situation where people are traveling to the conference, regardless of poster format. Given the high carbon cost of flying, an entirely online conference probably has a lower carbon footprint than any in person conference, regardless of poster format.

References

Leochico CFD, Di Giusto ML, Mitre R. 2021. Impact of scientific conferences on climate change and how to make them eco-friendly and inclusive: A scoping review. The Journal of Climate Change and Health: in press. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joclim.2021.100042

Milford K, Rickard M, Chua M, Tomczyk K, Gatley-Dewing A, Lorenzo AJ. 2021. Medical conferences in the era of environmental conscientiousness and a global health crisis: The carbon footprint of presenter flights to pre-COVID pediatric urology conferences and a consideration of future options. Practice Management/Training 56(8): P1312-1316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpedsurg.2020.07.013

Link roundup for August 2021

Congrats to all the winners of the Royal Astronomical Society poster competitions!

You can find the work in the linked thread above. But I’m featuring Jo Ramasawmy’s poster because she was super nice enough to give shout out to this blog! (Yes, I can be flattered. Sometimes.)

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My Fonts has their latest primer on bullets and dingbats (PDF). Did you know there are em bullets and en bullets? I, for one, did not.

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That type workhorse, Helvetica, now comes in a variable font. See my introduction to variable fonts here.

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Pharmacy students think posters assignments help them learn, but they increasingly prefer digital posters over printed ones. 

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This article about virtual meetings suggests people prefer poster sessions online, but only supports it with a single quote from a single person.

With no cavernous exhibit hall to accommodate hundreds of posters, MSVirtual2020 replaced posters with brief presentations – 10 slides and, at the author’s option, a brief explanation of the findings – that meeting participants accessed at their convenience. Dr. Cohen, director of experimental therapeutics in the Cleveland Clinic’s Mellen Center for Multiple Sclerosis Treatment and Research, considered that approach to be a big improvement.

“I don’t personally enjoy trying to see 500 posters in a giant exhibit hall, walking up and down the aisles. I barely see the content because I end up just talking to my friends,” he said. “In essence, this was like a three-minute talk that presented the poster, and the audience could stop the presentation and look at something in more detail if they wanted.”

Presumably conferences have been surveying attendees about their experience, but I have yet to see any of that data shared.

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Marie Seggar walks through an excellent graph makeover from The Economist. The starting point is this interpretable mess of lines:

Because one of the major problems I see on many posters is “too much stuff,” this is a great example of how take a complex data set and make something that is more readable. Ultimately, you have to be selective and you have to emphasize some data over others.

The final version is much easier to read. Go check it out!

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And that’s what I found on the internet this month!

Critique: Bioremediation in the Philippines

Today’s poster comes from Vladamir William. It was presented at 2021 De La Salle University Research Congress in the Philippines back in July. Click to enlarge!

There is also a video presenting the poster here.

I appreciate that this summary is less that 3 minutes long!

Vladamir wrote: 

I wanted to highlight as much as possible the readability of the text when read on a screen, and put emphasis on the figures; opting to exclude any redundant design elements, and choosing a color scheme similar to my University's colors. I used Keynote for this poster, using the standard A0 size set by the guidelines.

 (Note to North Americans: A0 is a standard paper size in many nations It’s about 33 by 46 inches.)

The fundamentals of this poster are sound. It’s aiming for visuals and the layout is clear.

Vladamir described the colour scheme as following the institution’s colours. This makes for consistency, but the green is very saturated and intense. The bars for the headings carry a lot of visual weight. I worry that they are drawing too much attention to themselves.

Below, I try removing the boxes and making the heading text bold and green.

I took the liberty of revising the introductory paragraphs slightly. In particular, I added “But” to the second paragraph to make it clear what the problem to be solved it.

De-emphasizing the heading slightly would make the callouts, currently in boxes with dotted red lines, stand out a little more. 

The two callouts look a little different. The “Objectives” callout has rounded corners, while the one in the Results section has squared off corners. It would be nice to have both the same.

The results showcase one number: 587 ppm of nickel. Immediately below that, the callout provides context for that number, which is good. But putting the comparison in a callout disconnects the two numbers, which is less good. It makes it not obvious that the two are connected.

One possible revision might be to put something like, “Microorganisms tolerated over 7× more nickel than typical soil concentrations” as the graphic representation. Then, fine print could give the detailed numbers. For example, “Nickel in soil: 4-80 ppm. Nickel tolerated: 587 ppm.”

Finally, the “Future directions” list strikes me as a little busier than it needs to be. Big green checks, and highlighted text, and a shadow box behind each list item.

Let’s see what happens if we pull back on one of those three.

Or even two.

I like the checks and think those alone might do the job. But something that removing the other colours does make much more obvious is that the text is not aligned.

Here’s how those changes play out when you put that section back in context. Here’s no shadow boxes...

And no highlights.

The checks alone do the job, but that might be a little sparse and uninteresting. Particularly because the tan highlights are used above, in other parts of the poster. The highlights in the “Future directions” helps bring some balance in colour, so that the tan isn’t all stuck up at the top.

Sometimes the posters that show preliminary data are the best posters because they are not burdened down by too much stuff.

How is a conference poster like a joke?

It’s probably hard for people who grew up with pervasive Internet to understand that newspaper comics were important cultural touchstones for decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, one of the most successful was The Far Side, created by Gary Larson.

Academics got Gary Larson.

I lost count of how many Far Side cartoons I saw taped up on university doors and included in presentations. I once heard a presenter jokingly call him, “the official cartoonist of the Animal Behavior Society” (at the annual conference of the society, naturally).

But I suspect even academics went “Huh?” when newspapers ran, “Cow tools.”

People did not get it. 

They did not get it so much that this single cartoon now has its own Wikipedia page. Larson is lucky that this was published pre-Internet. He only had to deal with phone calls and not angry emails and Twitter notifications. If it was published today, it would have gone viral, been ratioed on Twitter, and been denounced by pundits on political panel shows.

Larson wrote in The History of the Far Side that he was trying to riff off how culture limits our ability to interpret artifacts:

(O)ne day I started thinking about an anthropology course I had in college and how we learned that man used to be defined as “the only animal that made and shaped tools.” Unfortunately, researchers discovered that certain primates and even some bird species did the same thing – so the definition had to be expanded somewhat to avoid awkward situations such as someone hiring a crew of chimpanzees to remodel their kitchen.

Inevitably, I began thinking about cows, and what if they, too, were discovered as toolmakers. What would they make? ... The “cow tools”were supposed to be just meaningless artifacts – only the cow or a cowthropologist is is supposed to know what they’re used for.

Larson was so far down the rabbit hole of his thought process that he lost the ability to judge his own work. 

This is a state that I know very well. Something about a project that I have been living with in my head for months or years that I might think is obvious is far from obvious to other people. It might not even be sensible to other people.

So to return to the question posed in the title of this post.

How is a conference poster like a joke?

If you have to explain it, you’ve failed.

As “Cow tools” shows, it’s easy for you to get in your own head and create something that makes perfect sense to you, but not to others.

If you have to explain something on a poster, you’ve failed.

Sticking with comics, here’s another example of the principle, this time more visual than conceptual:

The reading order of the page is confusing, and the artist knows it. The artist has to explain the reading order using arrows.

If you have to explain it, you’ve failed.

External links

The Far Side

How to read Nancy review (features Batman page)

Critique: Frog parasites

This week’s work comes from Anneke Schoemanan. This was created for British Society of Parasitology (BSP) Parasites Online 2021. Click to enlarge!

The influence of the billboard poster is evident here, with a bold as brass take-home message under the title. The title is practically unnecessary, because the take-home leaves nobody wondering what this poster is about. I personally think that if the title is right, it is the take-home message. 

The colour palette is extremely subdued. It almost looks like it’s been run through a “fade” filter compared to most posters I see on the blog. While neutral colours are useful and pastels are elegant, I found myself wishing for a little more brightness somewhere on the poster so that something would “pop” visually.

I asked Anneke to talk a little about what was asked for and how she went about creating the work. She wrote: 

 For this specific conference, the organisers asked for a static PDF of our posters. That was it. During the scheduled poster sessions, the presenters were supposed to be online to field questions and the attendees browsed all the posters in a virtual poster hall. (Below. - ZF).

Her supervisor challenged everyone to think visually and cut back on text. Anneke continued (lightly edited):

I approached my presentation from two angles. 

First, I wanted to rethink the traditional conference poster design in general. I relied on advice from Twitter and blogs. These resources are summarised in my tips and tricks blog post.

Second, I wanted to rethink the design for a virtual audience.

I asked, “What will attendees see before they zoom in?”, since they would be viewing it on a computer screen. I wanted design elements that conveyed my main message at this low level of magnification, so I added the main text box with the plain language explanation of my main finding.

I realised that after a viewer zoomed in, it might be difficult to navigate the page if there was no clear starting point that could “draw the eye in.” I visualised my results in a circular flow diagram and numbered the text boxes in the order that they should be read.

The flow diagram is a strong visual element. I might try some different directions for the components of the flow diagram so that the reader isn’t forced reading right to left (oval 3 to 4, and 4 to 5) or bottom up (oval 4 to 5) as often.

Anneke took advantage of the simple online format.

I also realised that the PDF could include hyperlinks in the virtual format (virtual version of the QR code). I thought it would be a nice personal touch. I added a link to a short video of what I would have said if someone walked up to my poster at an in-person conference and asked me what it was about. 

Besides her formal presentation, Anneke archived her poster in a nice blog post. It’s mobile friendly, too!

The accompanying blog post seemed like a good idea for a number of reasons:

First, the conference organisers did not require a narration or video but I wanted to introduce myself and explain my poster to attendees who wanted to know more without feeling obliged to send me an email and I had a platform to do it. In that sense, it was “bonus material” for conference goers.

Second, it gave me the opportunity to try my hand at my first “scicomm” video. I’ll definitely do some things differently next time but it was a fun exercise.

Third, I just finished my PhD and this was a way of advertising my blog and putting myself and my work out there.

Finally, the blog post and mainly jargon-free video are also targeted at the non-scientist audience that I am trying to reach. Now my conference poster and the information contained therein are accessible to everyone! – In theory. (I don’t think my blog has that many readers. 😉)

That may change, Anneke, that may change. Hey everyone, I suggest popping over to Anneke’s blog and checking out her poster!

External links

Some frogs carry more parasites than others – Why?

Less is more! Resources for an eye-catching conference poster