SIMPLIFY THE COMPLICATED SO THAT YOU MAY SHARE IT WITH EVERYONE

This conference is set up for those who feel comfortable expressing their thoughts and research in a multidisciplinary setting. In contrast, in the traditional academic conference format, where most of the delegates hail from the same discipline, researchers seek to demonstrate how they incrementally advanced knowledge in their field. As a result, presentations tend to be highly specialized in nature, interspersed with jargon, symbols and technical terms unique to the discipline. 

This structure and style of presentation falters in a multidisciplinary conference setting where a high percentage of the conference attendees lack the expertise and knowledge of the presenter.    As a result, presentations in a multidisciplinary conference should be modified and simplified to ensure that   the audience gains an appreciation for the speakers’ contribution.  Formal presentations utilizing  specific methods, analytics, language and scholarly references are more than likely to serve as a barrier to communication,  given that most members of the audience are not familiar with the  discipline. If you have never participated in a multidisciplinary conference, take a look at the format used by speakers in TED conferences.The speakers at TED excel at reaching different segments of their audience and getting their message through by avoiding unnecessary jargon. They seize the most sophisticated insights and research and simplify them in communicating with the audience. This is what we professors are supposed to do when we lecture in class. The challenge is to do the same in our multidisciplinary conferences. In the age of mass media, those who cannot communicate cannot teach. Many research readers fail to make it past the abstract, or at most the first page. Multidisciplinary conferences encourage speakers to simplify, without dumbing down, their presentations. The audience is just as intelligent and curious.

If we meet that standard, we do more than inform a room of specialists: we make ideas portable across fields, and we give research a chance to travel farther than the first page.

1. You meet ideas outside your own field. Specialists in adjacent disciplines often frame the same problem differently, so a talk that is routine in one area can be a useful surprise in another.

2. You have to explain your work without relying on shared jargon. An audience that is intelligent and curious, but not trained in your methods, forces clearer claims and tighter arguments—the same skill that makes a paper readable.

3. Collaboration becomes easier to start. Shared sessions and informal conversations put people who would not normally read one another’s journals in the same room, which is often how joint projects and new questions begin.

Source: Why Multidisciplinary Conferences Matter in the Age of AI