Dear Colleagues,
Some months back, this list had a thread on
PowerPoint.
Today's New York Times ran an article that
will interest those who still follow the topic.
I'd also suggest a visit to Edward Tufte's
elegant web site for deeper discussions on
PowerPoint in general and the Columbia
PowerPoint slides in specific.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/index
Note Tufte's hilarious political cartoon
titled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.
Best regards,
Ken Friedman
--
Excerpt from NYT article:
--snip--
The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide
September 28, 2003
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Is there anything so deadening to the soul as a PowerPoint
presentation?
Critics have complained about the computerized slide shows,
produced with the ubiquitous software from Microsoft, since
the technology was first introduced 10 years ago. Last
week, The New Yorker magazine included a cartoon showing a
job interview in hell: "I need someone well versed in the
art of torture," the interviewer says. "Do you know
PowerPoint?"
Once upon a time, a party host could send dread through the
room by saying, "Let me show you the slides from our trip!"
Now, that dread has spread to every corner of the culture,
with schoolchildren using the program to write book
reports, and corporate managers blinking mindlessly at
PowerPoint charts and bullet lists projected onto giant
screens as a disembodied voice reads
- every
- word
- on
- every
- slide.
When the bullets are flying, no one is safe.
But there is a new crescendo of criticism that goes beyond
the objection to PowerPoint's tendency to turn any
information into a dull recitation of look-alike factoids.
Based on nearly a decade of experience with the software
and its effects, detractors argue that PowerPoint-muffled
messages have real consequences, perhaps even of life or
death.
Before the fatal end of the shuttle Columbia's mission last
January, with the craft still orbiting the earth, NASA
engineers used a PowerPoint presentation to describe their
investigation into whether a piece of foam that struck the
shuttle's wing during launching had caused serious damage.
Edward Tufte, a Yale professor who is an influential expert
on the presentation of visual information, published a
critique of that presentation on the World Wide Web last
March. A key slide, he said, was "a PowerPoint festival of
bureaucratic hyper-rationalism."
Among other problems, Mr. Tufte said, a crucial piece of
information - that the chunk of foam was hundreds of times
larger than anything that had ever been tested - was
relegated to the last point on the slide, squeezed into
insignificance on a frame that suggested damage to the wing
was minor.
The independent board that investigated the Columbia
disaster devoted an entire page of its final report last
month to Mr. Tufte's analysis. The board wrote that "it is
easy to understand how a senior manager might read this
PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a
life-threatening situation."
In fact, the board said: "During its investigation, the
board was surprised to receive similar presentation slides
from NASA officials in place of technical reports. The
board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides
instead of technical papers as an illustration of the
problematic methods of technical communication at NASA."
The board echoed a message that Mr. Tufte and other critics
have been trying to disseminate for years. "I would refer
to it as a virus, rather than a narrative form," said Jamie
McKenzie, an educational consultant. "It's done more damage
to the culture."
--snip--
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
For the complete article, go to URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/weekinreview/28SCHW.html?ex=1065741375&ei=1&en=a33dce291d5ed347
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Leadership and Organization
Norwegian School of Management
Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University