Why do national laboratory presentations contain so much info per slide?

Question

I've seen many, many examples of scientific presentations from the National Laboratories in which virtually every slide is oversaturated with information. If this were an isolated event, I wouldn't have given it any thought. But I've noticed this pattern in presentations over many years from among presenters hailing from US national laboratories. Though my field is computational science, I've seen talks from national laboratory scientists in other fields and their presentations also have this same characteristic.In academia, I've been taught to keep slides as simple as possible, with as little info per slide as necessary. My understanding is a presentation should be though of as an "advertisement" for the paper to be published. Thus, presentation slides should be designed to preserve the audience's interest. One method of keeping the audience interest is to not overwhelm them with too much information all at once (e.g., not too much text and not too many pictures in a single slide). I presume this is universally true, regardless of discipline.However, the overwhelming majority of national laboratory presentations that I've seen seem to fill up virtually every available space with as much information as possible. Why do presentations from national laboratories tend to contain so much information per slide? How does this meet the needs of their target audience?

Answer 1

You are correct.

Highly technical people are rarely personable, let alone able to communicate well. Also, the slides and the printed report should appear very different. I like the idea of "advertisement" or brochure. How much information can a driver safely read from a billboard?

Talk to procurement, management, or marketing people in the National Labs. There may be a way to submit an unsolicited proposal for "guidelines for preparing slide presentations" that could incorporate many of the best practices that you mention. You could even make it a seminar for technical types who must make a presentation.

Today, adding color, animation, sound, etc. is very easy [see Youtube].

There is clearly a market that needs this.

p.s., Your question contains too many words in a few lines; few tutors know how to read.