The Medium is Nothing, or, Why I Stopped Being a Tool and Embraced Powerpoint.
Tufte has
this rant he loves. He hates PowerPoint. Ok, I get it. That program blows! I can't even begin to describe to you the horrible
Six Sigma slides I have endured as we have run through an "Analyze Tollgate", one of the fun little steps in the
DMAIC methodology embraced by my greater organization. I can't stand them on so many levels that it is not even fun to enumerate them.
Here's the thing, though. PowerPoint is
the standard communication tool used at
an organization the scale of mine ([UPDATED] ~176,600 employees!) That's big, and the executives... they don't have time on a day to day basis to really look at detail. Sure, they will stop and smell the roses. They'll micro-manage as good as the next guy! The fact is, though, that in order for them to do their job effectively, they need broad brushstrokes. They need to have the confidence that their staff is going to tell them
what matters. Nothing more.
There is a joke I use all the time, when someone asks me what I will be using for my presentation. I state very matter of factly that I will be doing an interpretive dance. Imagine my surprise when yesterday in a meeting with our executive, a member of the team suggested writing narrative presentations. Thanks a lot Ed!
Very often, I will use a PDF. But my team has gone to great lengths to actually design a Visio template that outputs as if it were a PPT! Why? Because it is what people consider the de facto medium. Nothing else will garner respect or attention. If I follow Tufte's advice and hand out a datasheet for my presentation (which, in theory, I think is a fabulous idea!), I have one word:
round-file. That thing is going to be left on the conference room floor with a bunch of doodles on it, or in the recycle bin (in California), or it will end up in a stratified pile of detritus on a desk somewhere.
So, it all comes down to Information Architecture. You have an audience and a message as variables. You have a medium as a constant. Actually... this is freakin' great! One of the major sets of decisions in your work has already been done for you. Now all you need to do is craft your message.
Jon Winet, a great professor I had at UC Davis -- now a great friend,
told me this joke once that I think is highly relevant in this case: a printmaker is an artist without many ideas. Maybe that is a crappy metaphor here. Dunno. What I find is often the case with people who
loooove to bash PowerPoint is that they are either unable or unwilling to craft a message. They are focusing on the medium, not the message. But the medium is nothing. So shut up and use PowerPoint.
Some fab PowerPoint and PowerPoint-inspired works:
Lawrence Lessig: Google Book Search: The ArgumentDick Hardt: OSCON 2005 Keynote: Identity 2.0Clemens Kogler & Karo Szmit: Le Grand ContentClay Newton: Muny (requires IE, unfortunately)Labels: design, documentation, interaction, rant
