[Mb-civic] PowerPoint: Killer App? - Ruth Marcus - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

PowerPoint: Killer App?

By Ruth Marcus
Tuesday, August 30, 2005; Page A17

Did PowerPoint make the space shuttle crash? Could it doom another 
mission? Preposterous as this may sound, the ubiquitous Microsoft 
"presentation software" has twice been singled out for special criticism 
by task forces reviewing the space shuttle disaster.

Perhaps I've sat through too many PowerPoint presentations lately, but I 
think the trouble with these critics is that they don't go far enough: 
The software may be as much of a mind-numbing menace to those of us who 
intend to remain earthbound as it is to astronauts.

PowerPoint's failings have been outlined most vividly by Yale political 
scientist Edward Tufte, a specialist in the visual display of 
information. In a 2003 Wired magazine article headlined "PowerPoint Is 
Evil" and a less dramatically titled pamphlet, "The Cognitive Style of 
PowerPoint," Tufte argued that the program encourages "faux-analytical" 
thinking that favors the slickly produced "sales pitch" over the sober 
exchange of information.

Exhibit A in Tufte's analysis is a PowerPoint slide presented to NASA 
senior managers in January 2003, while the space shuttle Columbia was in 
the air and the agency was weighing the risk posed by tile damage on the 
shuttle wings. Key information was so buried and condensed in the rigid 
PowerPoint format as to be useless.

"It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this 
PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening 
situation," the Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded, citing 
Tufte's work. The board devoted a full page of its 2003 report to the 
issue, criticizing a space agency culture in which, it said, "the 
endemic use of PowerPoint" substituted for rigorous technical analysis.

But NASA -- like the rest of corporate and bureaucratic America -- seems 
powerless to resist PowerPoint. Just this month a minority report by the 
latest shuttle safety task force echoed the earlier concerns: Often, the 
group said, when it asked for data it ended up with PowerPoints -- 
without supporting documentation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/29/AR2005082901444.html?nav=hcmodule
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