Need: How PowerPoint Adversely Mediates Thought and Possible Remedies

No communication technology is a simple conduit for information.PowerPoint inevitably mediates; it shapes the presenter’s message. The verdict of Edward Tufte and other popular commentators is that PowerPoint’s “cognitive style” is to “dumb down ideas and make us stupid.” Although Tufte’s attack on PowerPoint is deeply flawed, PowerPoint does distort the visual representation of the presenter’s logical hierarchy-primarily by flattening hierarchies. The main reason is that the slide metaphor (which forces content to be displayed in discontinuous chunks) and the presence of slide titles in almost all the default slide layouts jointly create an upward vector in the representation of logical hierarchies that presenters have difficulty managing. Flattened hierarchies (along with other kinds of distortion) are problematic when audiences are processing complex or unfamiliar information, and they invite presenters to avoid making careful distinctions in their own thinking. Fortunately, these adverse mediational effects can be addressed through better deck design and through changes in the PowerPoint application.

Speaker Details

David K. Farkas is a Professor in the UW Department of Technical Communication. He studies and teaches information design and professional communication and has written and presented extensively on such topics as software user assistance, hypertext theory, and structural features in expository texts. His two current projects are QuikScan, an innovative document format that employs within-document summaries (with Ph.D. student Quan Zhou), and PowerPoint deck design. His professional website is http://faculty.washington.edu/farkas.

Date:
Speakers:
David K. Farkas
Affiliation:
UW Department of Technical Communication