Erik Spiekermann - It's time to break free of PowerPoint
At best many PowerPoint presentations are of limited value; at worst they can cause loss of life. Why rely on templates? If there is something to be said, say it, says Erik Spiekermann. Erik Spiekermann set up MetaDesign and FontShop, and is a teacher, author, designer and partner at Edenspiekermann.
PowerPoint has been around for a generation now. The program first went on sale in 1987 and was acquired by Microsoft soon afterwards. A whole generation of business people, educators and designers cannot imagine professional life without it. Dr Christof Wecker from the university in Munich has just published his research, PowerPoint and Learning. In a nutshell, Wecker found that .ppt presentations do not help comprehension, but actually obstruct it.
Students remember less when everything is presented on slides. They retain much more when teachers talk and the audience needs to focus and listen carefully. Lecturers talking over black slides get more attention. Adding the occasional slide to make a point that needs visual support can then be very effective. It is much easier for students to remember those few salient points than a whole slide presentation.
Death by PowerPoint is not a new phenomenon. 'It's dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,' said American Army Major General Herbert McMaster after looking at a presentation meant to show the complexity of American military strategy in Afghanistan, but looking more like a bowl of spaghetti. 'When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war,' one of the generals remarked afterwards. 'PowerPoint makes us stupid,' another general said.
Perhaps the most famous attack on PowerPoint came from Edward Tufte, expert in the presentation of data and author of many books on the subject. In one of them, Beautiful Evidence, he revealed the story of how a 2005 report on the 2003 Columbia space-shuttle disaster had found that the use of PowerPoint while the damaged craft was in orbit (foam had struck the wing during take-off) worked against a proper analysis of the risks and uncertainties. All seven crew members were killed when Columbia disintegrated as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere.
Loss of life certainly is the worst-case scenario. There is also enormous economic damage done by PowerPoint presentations -- those occasions where several adults all sit in the same room, watching some guy who tries to predict the future with the help of a few coloured charts. The expenses that incur because they end up trusting charts more than their own judgement and common sense reach billions every year. Add to that the damage done to the bodies and souls of the audience, the steady loss of visual culture, which cannot even be calculated.
When Colin Powell tried to prove the existence of WMD in his pathetic presentation to the UN Security Council in 2003, shortly before the USA invaded Iraq, it became evident how blue-graded backgrounds with yellow lines, in Arial on a drop shadow, had already destroyed all the knowledge about communicating on a page acquired since Gutenberg. With limited layout skills and an old version of Photoshop, almost everybody could have done a better job of showing chemical factories disguised as trucks.
Are presentations all wasted, even wicked? Or only those made in PowerPoint? Software itself cannot be evil. Blindly repeating tasteless templates, however, is habit-forming and dull. Software makers need to design for a worldwide market of millions of users, so they not only have to find the lowest common denominator of all visual cultures, but first present and sell even these lowly designs at their own countless meetings in-house. The people who design templates for the rest of us were probably students at some college in Ohio or Kansas. How should they know that other visual cultures exist elsewhere?
In the end, users get what they deserve. You can actually design very cool presentations in PowerPoint (and Apple's Keynote, for that matter). Although we designers usually only get involved in nicely packaging someone else's content, we ought to know a few simple rules for that sort of work. The first one says: Never use templates! If you have something to say, then say it. Then perhaps add pictures or graphs.
To quote Edward Tufte: 'PowerPoint may now and then benefit the bottom 10 per cent of all presenters. It forces the really inept to have points, some points, any points.'
