Situation
Prism is a personal project aiming to redefine modern knowledge work and creative collaboration.
In over 20 years of developing creating and presenting new ideas at digital product agencies, I adapted an approach for content development and presentation design - moving beyond slides and into conversation design.
I've been playing with this idea for a number of years, now - and I'm starting to experiment with enabling this workflow, concept and interface with modern AI/ML utilities.
Task
Making and orchestrating great presentations and meetings is very difficult and time-consuming.
Meanwhile, people can't stop making presentations - as documents. And the tools we use to collect and communicate knowledge work haven't evolved for years. Many years. Decades. Half a century or more.
Yeah - desktop publishing is old.
Here's the problem….
Modern work tools and methods renders the power of generative, information-rich collaboration inert.
The way we meet and work together limits how effective our collaborative conversations can be.
Presentation decks and hyper-documents are massively monolithic, linear work products - and they don't enable conversation. Conversation is the process of making ideas stronger.
Great documents take a lot of effort and time
It takes a ton of time and effort to build understanding from these dense linear formats
Hybrid and remote work force us to rely on documents and decks
Decks and documents aren't optimal for hosting in-depth conversation, dialectic and challenge
I started building a framework for a "full stack" presentation - starting with source material, guided by a communication map.
The presentation design process starts far before laying out text and images on slides. Most pre-visualized preparation is lost by the time a deck is assembled. Key elements that drive in-room conversation are starved as the paths of thought - from source to insight - are absent from slide decks and in-room assets.
Enabling this process of building up thought into explorable content became the crux of the solution - and has led to many new ideas about how the future of work might, well, work : )
Designing the solution…
The solution is a process, at it's core. And, it used to be very manual - using multiple platforms and systems. Incredible, impactful presentations must be simple, moment-to-moment - even if the overall journey explores very complex information.
The solution started to take shape as I was consulting with teams on how to build a stronger presentation in an environment where few team members shared a common language - where experts all spoke different languages - where "good thinking" looked radically different between each expertise.
If meetings and collaborative work - even asynchronous work - weren't shoved into a "reading the deck as a meeting" form-factor, we might be able to escape the massive waste of effort and time typically plaguing most teams and initiatives.
Action
What if our normal work process supported asynchronous sharing and collaboration as a simple feature?
What if we didn't need to spend 1-8 hours building a linear, monolithic desktop publishing layout in order to share progress and gather early feedback - even if my team is made up of various disciplines?
What if the work we do to build up ideas could construct presentations and explorable context for conversations?
What if information-rich collaborations, meetings and presentations didn't require the onerous labor of finished-document formulation?
What if heavy feedback, discussion and contribution didn't require massive cleanup efforts normally associated with workshops facilitated with infinite canvases?
Result
I've refined my approach to information-rich communication and collaboration strategy by exploring a possible future platform for story-building and exploration.
The product concept is strong - and with the advent of generative AI, RAG, LLMs and other tools, building this experience is becoming more possible and affordable every day.
With a bit more reseach and development, this product might just change the world.
One area I plan on exploring: MMORPGs, collaborative, cooperative gaming.
A recent experiment with some friends who are building a virtual table top system was very interesting.
Maybe patterns found in gaming cold hold an insight to a better way to approach collaborative work:
Shared goals. Interdependence. Mutual understanding.
