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Posted Jan.03.05 :: To The Real World
It’s pretty rare that you find an intersection between information design, interaction design, politics, and war but as James Fallows writes in the December 2004 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, such an intersection most surely exists in the form of Microsoft PowerPoint. In his article, “Will Iran Be Next?”, Fallows describes a war game organized by the Atlantic Monthly. The war game was basically an exercise in role-playing, with the participants discussing the various options available to the U.S. President if and when there is incontrovertible evidence that Iran is on the verge of creating a nuclear weapon.
Although the results of the game were disturbing enough (simply put, Iran is most definitely developing a nuclear weapon and there is no military option for stopping them), perhaps even more disturbing for those of us aware of the inherent limitations and weaknesses of PPT-think, was Fallows’ observation about the role of PowerPoint in military planning.
Case in point are these two paragraphs, separated in the original article by a few pages:
His commitment to realism extended to presenting all his information in a series of PowerPoint slides, on which U.S. military planners are so dependent that is is hard to imagine how Dwight Eisenhower pulled off D-Day without them. PowerPoint’s imperfections as a deliberative tool are well known. Its formulaic outline structure can over-emphasize some ideas or options and conceal others, and the amateurish graphic presentation of data often impedes understanding. But any simulation of a modern military exercise would be unconvincing without it.
…
Then there was option No. 3. Gardiner called this plan “moderate risk,” but said the best judgement of the military was that it would succeed. To explain it he spent thirty minutes presenting the very sorts of slides most likely to impress civilians: those with sweeping arrows indicating the rapid movement of men across terrain. (When the exercise was over, I told David Kay that an observer who had not often seen such charts remarked on how “cool” they looked. “Yes, and the longer you’ve been around, the more you learn to be skeptical of the ‘cool’ factor in PowerPoint,” Kay said. “I don’t think the President had seen many charts like that before,” he added, referring to President Bush as he reviewed war plans for Iraq.)
It is, to put it mildly, extremely disturbing to learn that the most powerful military in world history is heavily reliant on PowerPoint — a tool which so easily affords the dangerous combination of engaging graphics and sloppy thought.
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Comments
I sort of agree, and sort of not. Powerpoint is a tool and like many tools there are many productive and unproductive ways to use it. At the most abstract level it is a way of sequentially displaying screens containing text, images, video and audio. That's a pretty amazing feature set and it can provide a rich framework for all sorts of activities from interactive demonstrations to rapid prototyping.
Now I think the problem with Powerpoint is one inherent to many tools -- i.e. what you get out of it is a function of what you put in. If you throw together a presentation in 15 minutes using all bulleted lists, then your thinking was sloppy and it shows. But a well done bulleted list can aid incredibly for analysis of a complex whole (it is less good for understanding emergent system-level effects).
I have read Tufte's full report on the matter and it has its own share of engaging graphics and sloppy thinking. Not to slam him too much, but his understanding of the role of electronic tools is pretty narrow (and his insistence on high quality printed graphics as the answer to everything gets a little tiring). I see Powerpoint as a tool that is sort of a lower-budget version of Director or Flash. You get object-based graphic manipulation, you get limited interactivity, and there are affordances to use text more naturally. Not a perfect tool, but by no means flawed by design.
Posted by: Tom Chi on Jan.03.05
it's great to read you again! Sorry not to have noticed starting up again. Powerpoint is certainly tempts people into lazy thinking despite it's capacities to be used for good not evil, etc. Any tool that has caused so much cognitive harm should be regulated I think, semiotics 101 credit required for activation key. That said, Robert McNamara gave lucid, beautifully thought out presentations that impressed everyone no end and took us straight into the crapper...
Posted by: Ben Clemens on Jan.03.05