The Leonardo da Vinci of Data
Do you know why you hate powerpoint?
I attended the Edward Tufte presentation in
A cult of friends have Tufte’s first book, and will reference the Minard map of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow occasionally, but if you have the opportunity to see him the next time he’s in your neighborhood it will be a day well spent.
Tufte begins by laying out the basic principles of presenting information. When he tightens them up later in the day, the contrast between how you like to receive information and how information is normally delivered in powerpoint becomes progressively more obvious.
Key elements of Tufte’s position on presentations:
- “Don’t use the dreaded “Slow Reveal”
- Powerpoint should not be an exercise in cognitive denial
- “People haven’t become stupid just because they are in your audience”
- It’s a actually great thing if the audience looks at your material ahead of time
- An 11X17 page provided as a handout can contain 50 to 250 times the information of a PowerPoint slide. It can show adjacencies, comparisons, causality, By using a high resolution data dump beforehand, a presenter can then orchestrate a directed conversation, versus the information denial system of powerpoint.
- A wall chart can be even better, especially for projects – the viewer can absorb the whole thing at once, 24-30 inches away, and integrate an intense amount of data. It’s not chopped up in 50 slides, and shows sequential events and responsibilities adjacent in space, which is how people think and understand.
- People like intense content. “There is no such thing as information overload, only bad design” - which is the reverse of the five bullet rule.
- Essentially – and I liked this – powerpoint should only be used as a “Projector Operating System”.
- Try and show information “adjacent in space, Vs. stacked in PowerPoint”
- The iPhone does a lot of things right as a wireless UI:
- It leverages a flat model to show information
- Great resolution allowing dense data
- Data doesn’t ‘disappear’ – it slides or flips, versus going up or down in a pile of menus, where you lose your place
- And you can zoom in or out, controlling the density of your data in a given screen
- It leverages a flat model to show information
- Graphics are no longer a “Special Occasion” – he introduces a concept he has coined as Sparklines, which concentrate graphics into spaces equivalent in size to words in a line of text.
- Lastly, he gave four keys to consuming presentations-
- ‘Figure out their story”
- “Figure out their credibility”
- “Domain Specificity” – keeps presenters from making a leap, creating a shaky tangent relevant to your area of interest
- Figure out “what should I be seeing – Vs. what I am being shown”
Of course I’m violating all his principles by blogging on this topic without any graphics. Part of his presentation includes four really rich hardbound books, which are referenced throughout his talk. If you make presentations, take a look at his site and consider attending the Tufte seminar on “Presenting Data and Information” when it is in your area.
-John Reed