Books by author: Edward R. Tufte

This week, I attended a one-day seminar given by Edward Tufte, the noted Information Design guru. The seminar was excellent. Tufte is a gifted and entertaining speaker, and his appreciation of and enthusiasm for good design is contagious. I've previously scanned through his books, but now I'm motivated to study them in greater depth.

On the commuter rail ride home from the seminar, I read The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, Tufte's most recent (and least valuable) publication. In this 24 page essay, Tufte rails against the lightweight and often disturbingly misleading presentations that are endemic among users of PowerPoint. The centerpiece is the dissection of a slide presented by Boeing to NASA during the time between the final launch of the space shuttle Columbia and its fatal atmospheric reentry. Tufte points out several ways in which the slide is misleading, some of which are partly the result of PowerPoint's templates. The end result was an executive decision that mistakenly concluded that there was little risk for the Columbia's crew.

It's easy to point out that it's the presenter's responsibility to make a good presentation, and PowerPoint is only a tool. And there's a lot of truth to that statement. However, it's also true that PowerPoint's laser focus on bullet-point sentence fragments (not to mention its dreadfully limited capacity for displaying information) stack the odds strongly against speakers who use it. I certainly agree that one must be exceptionally careful when using PowerPoint to make presentations of scientific or engineering information, and that good presentations rely on much more than computer slideshows. That seems pretty obvious, but apprently it wasn't obvious to Boeing and NASA at the time.