(I had a great entry last night get gobbled up when my browser crashed, but since I was a bit loopy from a long day with little sleep and a couple beers from dinner, its probably for the best. Still, it sucks when you write something and it disappears into the ether like that. Anyways....)
Here is a neat little article that Edward Tufte wrote up analyzing a PowerPoint presentation given by underling engineers at Boeing regarding the issue of insulation foam impacting the shuttle wing. It's interesting for its implications regarding the shuttle, but I found the analysis regarding the actual use of PowerPoint even more intriguing.
On a different page, Tufts writes:
In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation isto talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years,overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mmslides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early inthe 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning outtrillions of slides each year.
Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?
The Boeing shuttle analysis piece convincingly shows hows this works. He takes them apart, point by uh, powerpoint (sorry, couldn't resist). When a presentation so misleads the audience, I have to wonder if it was intentional or an unanticipated result of thinking in PowerPoint? Of course there are cases of both happening, but in general, I suspect that thinking and planning in terms of presenting in PowerPoint has dulled us to the consequences and thus we end up acting unaware of it all. Are we becoming servants of the software?
Regardless, its obvious to me that PowerPoint makes you dumb. That's why I use Keynote now.
Posted by Nutrimentia at May 15, 2003 12:27 PM | TrackBack