A whole new meaning to "death by Powerpoint"
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 10:33AM
This image has quickly become the most famous Powerpoint slide in the world. It's designed to demonstrate the nuances of the US/Nato intervention in Afghanistan and the complex context around it. After it had done the rounds on the web for a few days, The New York Times recently ran an article analysing the way in which Powerpoint has taken over the internal communications of the US army, featuring this as the lead picture. It's since cropped up in at least one UK newspaper. Justin spotted the article, Simon had some penetrating insights about it, and I have time to write it all up, so here goes.
The article makes some highly valid points about the way that Powerpoint "can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control", and the fetishising of the simple that pervades so much of management culture, not just in the military. It also points to a heartening backlash.
But there's an irony at the heart of the story: this diagram is a totally inappropriate representative of the dumbness and over-simplification of corporate communications. As someone whose knowledge of the situation in Afghanistan is as superficial as the next man's, I can't make any claims for the usefulness of the diagram in representing reality. But it does at the very least demonstrate an honest intent to visualise a difficult situation in a way that does justice to its complexity. It also points to some flaws in the paradigm of presentation that we've all come to know and usually detest.
It seems this image was indeed used as a slide in a Powerpoint presentation. I expect that was done in order to make a meta-level point about the complexity of the situation, rather than inviting anyone actually to take it in and understand it. That's a pretty cheap sideshow trick that I've been guilty of myself. But what if someone decided to take it seriously and make it the object of the presentation?
We in Unthinkable are passionately interested in the different ways information can be visualised and schematised, and firmly believe that visual models can go places where text alone can't in terms of helping us think and understand. We use Mindmeister for shared mind maps, and diagrams and graphical representations are important parts of our service offering for our clients.
On which point we stumbled across a couple of interesting developments recently in the representation of information. One is Google labs' launch of the "public data explorer". In 2007 Google bought Gapminder's underlying technology, Trendalyzer, from Gapminder, and they have now launched a service that produces Gapminder-esque visualisations based on public data from European, US and international sources (the World Bank features heavily). This is visualisation applied at a meta level across the public datasets that are becoming increasingly available (and which we blogged about recently).
At the other end of the manual-automatic spectrum, we have discovered a tool (thanks to a tip-off from our friend Charles Day) that enables a thoroughly authored approach to representing information and telling stories. Prezi is an online presentation tool which abandons the concept of the slideshow in favour of what looks like an animated mind-map on speed, but which also generates some very useful visualisations. Prezi's creators have some interesting points to make about the way in which the Powerpoint paradigm is based on the out-of-date technology of the slide show, and question whether this should continue to dictate the way we should think about information. How far the work that people have done so far with the tool actually transcends that essentially linear paradigm is debatable, but we applaud the intention and recognise the potential of Prezi and tools like it to revolutionise our communications.
The key point here is the possibility of an approach to presenting which need not sacrifice complexity for the sake of clarity - and perhaps the key to that is a move away from the need for a linear structure that has characterised so much of the culture around presenting.
Which brings us back to the supposedly risible image at the top of this post. If presented as a mind map with zoom functionality in the less linear format that tools like Prezi make possible, one can imagine a wholly different presentation and discussion taking place. And who knows? The impact these kinds of changes of approach could have might truly be a life-or-death issue.
