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“The
Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”
by Edward R. Tufte, Graphics Press
LLC Cheshire
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The “powerpoint syndrome” is a well known disease, clearly diagnosed
not only by brilliant cartoonists
such as Scott Adams, but also in a
variety of analyses of corporate efficiency
and communication.
It’s called “disinfotainment”. It has been found that it can
seriously disrupt corporate communications.
Some companies, including Sun, have
banned it from their organization.
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In the September 2003 issue of Wired magazine
there was an article Power Corrupts,
PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely by Edward
R. Tufte, professor emeritus at Yale. (His
monograph, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,
is available from Graphics Press.)
Here are a few quotations
from his interesting comments.
Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription
drug that promised to make us beautiful
but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent,
serious side effects: it induced stupidity,
turned everyone into bores, wasted time,
and degraded the quality and credibility
of communication. These side effects would
rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.
Yet slideware – computer programs for presentations
– is everywhere: in corporate America, in
government bureaucracies, even in our schools.
Several hundred million copies of Microsoft
PowerPoint are churning out trillions of
slides each year. Slideware may help speakers
outline their talks, but convenience for
the speaker can be punishing to both content
and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation
elevates format over content, betraying
an attitude of commercialism that turns
everything into a sales pitch.
Presentations largely stand or fall on
the quality, relevance, and integrity of
the content. If your numbers are boring,
then you’ve got the wrong numbers. If your
words or images are not on point, making
them dance in color won’t make them relevant.
Audience boredom is usually a content failure,
not a decoration failure.
At a minimum, a presentation format should
do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely
disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content.
The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint
is a competent slide manager and projector.
But rather than supplementing a presentation,
it has become a substitute for it. Such
misuse ignores the most important rule of
speaking: respect your audience.
Of course presentation tools existed long
before electronics. There were blackboards,
slides, etcetera. Some of the most beautiful
paintings and sculptures of all times were
used to present or support an idea, a way
of thinking, an attitude, a project or an
action plan. But most of today’s powerpoint
presentations can’t be called a work of
art – or even an example of effective presentation.
Visual aids can be used effectively. To
focus on key points, to emphasize relevant
data, to make things clear. But it’s unfortunately
easy to do the opposite – to muddle, to
confuse or to deliberately warp facts, issues
and concepts.
We know that data, balance sheets, statistics,
trends, projections and forecasts can be
manipulated in many ways. Fifty years ago
this was explained very clearly in a wonderful
little book by Darrell
Huff: How to Lie with Statistics. It
was published in 1954, it’s still being
reprinted, and it’s as relevant today as
it has ever been. Darrell Huff explained
how data can be misused and misrepresented
– by mistake or by deliberate manipulation.
He also showed how they can be additionally
warped in a visual presentation. For instance
numbers can be shown using two-dimensional
shapes instead of lines, columns or bars.
The height of the picture indicates the
actual quantity, but the perception of difference
or change is twice as large.
By using pictures the effect can be even
stronger. The perception is three-dimensional.
If we use the picture of an animal to show
the increase or decrease of a species, or
a cow to represent milk production, we can
make it appear doubled when it actually
increased 30 percent. And further misperceptions
can be added by using movement. Can that
be done with money? Yes, of course. Instead
of figures or bar charts one can use banknotes,
coins or moneybags. It’s called “dramatizing”,
but it’s cheating – as Darrell Huff explained
fifty years ago, when there was no electronic
slideware to make it easier.
Visual resources, as such, aren’t honest
or misleading. They are tools – and the
result depends on how they are used. A well
planned presentation can be “truth well
told”. But if it’s deliberately manipulated
it can be a cheating device – or, if it
isn’t carefully planned and tested, its
effect can be quite different from what
the presenter had in mind. Standardized
tools and styles can make things even worse.
Presentations follow a predefined pattern,
bore the audience with repetitive mannerisms
instead of catering for its interests and
questions.
An effective presentation needs serious
work, care, competence. It needs to be tried
and tested, finding the most effective form
for its specific content, with precise coherence
of visual and textual devices to its intent
and purpose. Even when technical resources
were less easy and more expensive (costing
time, care and commitment as well as money)
there were mistakes and mishaps – as well
as deliberate cheats. But it didn’t happen
as often as it does now, because more effort
and specific competence were needed for
its preparation. Things are made worse by
the powerpoint intoxication.
It seems so easy. An elaborate show can
be put together in a few hours. The abundance
of tricks and devices encourages exaggeration.
The result is often depressing. The resources
offered by standard slideware are always
the same. As a result presentations often
look the same, though they are dealing with
totally different subjects. That is confusing
and boring.
We often see a presenter, imprisoned in
a predetermined format, unable to answer
a simple question. Because he or she is
trained to repeat, without any depth of
understanding, a presentation put together
by someone else. Even when people prepare
their own presentations, they often get
lost in the mechanics of form and format
– and miss the point of what they were supposed
to say.
Another ridiculous consequence is that,
after a meeting or a convention, instead
of a written document what is left behind
is a copy of the slides. It’s obvious that
slides prepared to support a presentation
are not the appropriate format for reading
– and lack depth of explanation and information.
But haste, habit, and mindless subjugation
to technology lead to the production of
useless papers that confuse the issue (even
when they are not deliberately deceiving).
There are also messy results of “personalization”.
It’s easy, with word processing, to change
a name. Too easy. A document (or presentation)
that on page 1 shows the name of a person,
or a company, in the publishing business
reveals on page 12 that it was originally
written for a car dealer. Things get worse
in the case of online communication. It’s
annoying enough to receive a three megabyte
powerpoint attachment to tell us something
that could have been said more effectively
in six lines of plain text. But there are
also websites that contain materials poorly
adapted from something tat had been obviously
prepared for another purpose. In addition
to the well known and widespread disease
of cosmetics prevailing on content.
After many years of serious discussion
about usability and content management,
the best website makers know that substance
matters more than appearance. (See The architect and the
gardener.) But many site owners
want things done poorly. Because they don’t
understand that the internet isn’t television.
Or because they are infected by the powerpoint
bug. Or because they don’t want to commit
manpower to produce meaningful content.
So we are still plagued with a proliferation
of empty boxes, shiny appearances with nothing
inside.
The powerpoint syndrome isn’t just the
misuse of specific technology. It’s a cultural
disease. The abundance of resources for
makeup and glitz leads to exaggeration and
superficiality. Where appearance prevails
on substance, scams and cheats are more
easily disguised. We must learn to tame
the wild proliferation of expressive tools
to bring them to obedience, to the service
of what we have to say. If and when there
is something that is really worth saying.
