Looking around on TED I stumbled upon this remarkable presentation, I was intrigued by the suggestion of using dance to illustrate a lecture.
This prompted me to go find the dance your PHD finalists and was in store for quite something different..
Ranging from quite nice and strange

To completely absurd and hilarious

To stranger still

Have a look on the website for more and this years entries

So why was the TED presentation effortlessly natural (quite a feat considering the original approach) and did even the best of these seem so absurd? Well part of it is off course production value, John Bohannon’s presentation has the slick camera rig of TED’s ever more professional broadcast crew at his disposal. There is also the quality of the dancer’s themselves and the compactness of their presentations, while some of the contestants were good dancers non matched the obviously well rehearsed and thought out dance routine of Bohannon’s troupe. So both of these are forgivable enough as contestants don’t have the time or money to match, now we get to some interesting points.

What where the other things that made them fall short?
The lack of an actual verbal explanation, non of the videos featured have a presenter who talks us through it. Some of the videos do offer us text slides/ overlays, but its clear that these not only lack the charm of the human voice but also the detail, The text is sometimes so vast as to be too large to take in and often inconsistent in pointing out crucial detail. Even if improved and tweaked I feel this method would fall short, as it eats up screen space and time which could be used more efficiently and could never deliver as much information with clarity as speech.
This proves beyond a doubt that even though I am persuaded that dance can be a useful tool for explanation it is not a way of explaining in itself. The grammar of dance is way too limited to express the fine grain detail of science. In other words, dancing should be used in a complementary role to a, preferably verbal, presentation, otherwise like in the videos above the plot is completely lost and it becomes absurd.

The other crucial point is the clarity of the analogy, what physical posture or movement corresponds to what action. Where Bohannon’s dance is crisp all the other dances have a considerable amount of noise, movements are not as clearly corresponding as they should be. Also the choice of what the actual movement represents is quite poor, their dance grammar fails to be holistic, what, for instance, do jazz hands stand for? I appreciate this is very hard to get right because it is quite an abstract (or only novel, one could argue) transformation from science to dance, it requires a good understanding of both science and dance, most contestants are light on the latter.

Even though I do admit laughing quite loudly while watching some of the entries, I also applaud the effort, it is a brave thing to attempt. As someone interested in designing interaction it is also fascinating to see which types of symbols operate in what way, this is definitely thinking outside the box. Additionally anything that tries to replace the utterly uninspired power point gets my support.