Christmas present(ation)

13.1.2009 von kirsten.

My wonderful ex-husband gave me Edward Tufte “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint — Pitching Out Corrupts within”, a very insightful booklet. How unfortunate it is to reduce our conversations to 5 bullets on a sequence of slides is especially apparent when you compare Lincoln’s Ghettysburg address to its rendition in Powerpoint

Speaking in bulletpoints naturally reduces the complexity of our thoughts, conjunctions and relations get lost (but aren’t they unnecessary complications, anyway?). Tufte quotes the Harvard Business Review, 76 p.44 (Shaw, Bron, Bromiley): “Bullets leave critical relationships unspecified. Lists can communicate only three logical relationships: sequence (…), priority (…), or simple membership in a set.” Necessary conditions, differentiation, causality cannot easily be expressed in a list (except, maybe, as members in a set).

One of my favorite Wittgenstein quotes is “I will teach you differences” (letter to Drury 1967, found in Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Perspicuous Presentations). How can we present to one another in ways that recognize and take into account differences? How can we design and deliver information in ways that make us think rather than lulling us to cognitive slumber? Presentations with subtitles for the hard of thinking are certainly not the solution.

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