Brand Mix

Photo: Microsoft Live Platform by Niall Kennedy (Flickr)

Think about this. PowerPoint is on about 300 million computers and, every single week, TWO MILLION PowerPoints are presented causing untold damage to the brain cells of the employee masses. No wonder that feelings are running strong:

1) Militant arm of the infoviz movement gets serious about PowerPoint: boingboing

By Mark Goetz

Let's see. That would be 2 million kittens a week. According to this, that would mean the complete elimination of all cats in America inside of a year. But, don't worry cat-lovers, Mr. Tufte could never keep up that rate of killing. He'd have to shoot three kittens a second without a break, week after week. He'd never keep up.

2) PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Report: Edward Tufte
Mark's poster is funnier if you actually know who Edward Tufte is. He's a Professor at Yale, known for his work on informational design and his intense dislike of PowerPoint. It's more than just an aesthetic critique. As you can read in this link, he argues that the use of PowerPoint by NASA engineers contributed to the Columbia shuttle disaster.

3) Mother LA PowerPoint from SXSWi 2010 - Devo, The Internet, and You: Devovision



Meanwhile, Devo has integrated PowerPoint into its whole de-evolving, surrealist, which-way-is-up schtick. Its agency, Mother LA, used it to perfect effect at SXSWi 2010 in a presentation called: "Devo, The Internet, and You" which explains, among other things, why "e-utilization of people networks" is sexy, fast and interesting.

4) Simultaneity vs. seriality: what to do now that we have no attention span: Grant McCracken
Rather than follow the PowerPoint format where a presentation unfolds slide-by-slide, how about have one slide (or poster) that tells the entire story all at once? Grant makes the case for "simultaneity" (the all-at-once approach) arguing that it's: "Good for the big picture and it’s good for scrutinizing the finer points of the argument." Plus it doesn't depend on the audience having an attention span long enough to stay with a presentation all the way to the ....

5) Rethinking PowerPoint: Ron Galloway


Ron Galloway is devoting his latest film project to PowerPoint, exploring where most people go wrong using it and how they could do better. He interviews experts in the field including Dan Roam (featured in this YouTube clip). Dan talks about his talking-and-drawing technique and why lightbulbs over our heads are sexy.

6) Death by PowerPoint: Alexei Kapterev
How about this? The most-viewed business presentation on slideshare is this one by Alexei Kapterev. Seems to perfectly sum up our love-hate relationship with PowerPoint. Do you think we'll still be using it in ten years time?

That's it! Off to Dubai and Mumbai next week so I'll try and come back with some "..ai" stories. More thoughts and comments also available on Twitter (@martinjbishop).