a generation raised on powerpoint

In this Wednesday's Washington Post, PowerPoint Slides: the New Puppy-Dog Eyes presents a cute and frightening story about how 11-year-old Katie created a PowerPoint presentation to pitch her wish list to her parents. I know you can imagine it just as well as I can: red and green backgrounds, Santa clip art, hyperlinks straight to the items. But what about the holiday background music? The swooshing and fading transitions? All the cute buzzwords and marketing-speak?


Screenshot courtesy of washingtonpost.com

I will cut Katie a break though -- she took initiative to do something different (and in her mind, creative). I have to give her credit and find that endearing. What she doesn't know yet is she's trapped among a generation full of PowerPoint Pitchers. I'll let Edward Tufte from The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint clue you in on what I mean:

Slideware helps speakers to outline their talks, to retrieve and show diverse visual materials, and to communicate slides in talks, printed reports, and internet. And also to replace serious analysis with chartjunk, over-produced layouts, cheerleader logotypes and branding, and corny clip art. That is, PowerPointPhluff.

PP convenience for the speaker can be costly to both content and audience. These costs result from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous decoration and Phluff, and preoccupation with format and not content, an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.

This cuts straight to my point: a generation of students and professionals are trapped in this constrained style of thinking and presenting. Instead of sitting down and thinking about how best to communicate one's ideas and analysis, we're jumping straight to PowerPoint and making one sequential slide after another, which then drive the talk (sometimes it's not even a talk at all, it's just the author reciting what is on the slides). This is completely the opposite of what should be happening. The author's ideas and analysis (and outline) should be driving the talk and the slides (if they are even needed at all) should be supplementary visual aids.

Need more evidence? Tufte is the expert in this topic and I will defer to him in some excerpts from his forthcoming book, Beautiful Evidence. PowerPoint Does Rocket Science is an analysis of how PowerPoint was a contributing factor in the decision-making of the Space Shuttle Columbia accident. Corrupt Techniques in Evidence Presentations is a chapter that details what sort of techniques presenters use to skew things in their favor -- a worthwhile read if you are an audience member wanting to see through the Phluff.

PowerPoint-think (an oxymoron) has an especially strong hold here in Washington, DC. It's almost a de facto standard in doing business with or for the Government. Proposals, briefings, working group meetings, you name it, they are all driven by PowerPoint decks. And yes, one can build a career around here making flashy PowerPoint presentations for official Government business. It's so ingrained in standard operating procedure and it's hell on the audience members (I can safely say this from personal experience and I know you can too...). In an unrelated Washington Post blog, Reporting for Duty - Bert Stover's National Guard Service, Stover refers to a portion of his training experience, "...thrilling sessions of monotone PowerPoint slide regurgitation...," as "Death by Powerpoint."

If you're interested in making better presentations, check out Chapter 3 of Tufte's book Visual Explanations entitled Explaining Magic: Pictorial Instructions and Disinformation Design. Surprisingly, learning how magicians suppress context (never tell the audience beforehand what you are going to do) and prevent reflective analysis (never perform the same trick twice on the same evening) gives one a lot of insight of what goes into a good presentation. That is, if a magician's goal is to deceive the audience with illusion, our goal would be to do the opposite: enlighten the audience with truth. There's also some great irony in the chapter as well -- describing magic (the art of disinformation design) requires the best of good information design. Explaining the steps of a trick or an illusion requires translating four dimensions: three dimensions of space and a dimension of time into two-dimensional paper.