Little boxes made of ticky-tacky:  A review of The Cognitive Style of Power Point

Valley News, March 15, 2004 (est.)
Donald Maurice Kreis

One of 2003’s most important and satisfying books is not a book at all, but a 28-page pamphlet that may be the most revolt-inducing use of this literary form since Thomas Paine incited the American Revolution with Common Sense .

Dryly called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, Edward Tufte’s manifesto is a hilarious but devastating indictment of the ubiquitous computer program referenced in the title.   To anyone who has ever suffered through a brain- and spirit-numbing PowerPoint presentation – and, in this era of world dominance by Microsoft, who among the office-bound hasn’t? – this little document is well worth its $7.00 pricetag.   Tufte, a Yale University professor emeritus whose field is “analytical design,” proves what every bureaucrat in public or private employment surely suspects:   that PowerPoint has outrun even commercial television in our culture’s technology-hastened race to the bottom.

For the uninitiated, PowerPoint is a Microsoft program of the category known as “slideware” – software designed to create a series of electronic slides that can then be projected on a screen during presentations at meetings, conferences, lectures, &c.   As such, PowerPoint appears to have largely replaced the once-common practice of using transparencies and overhead projectors at such gatherings.   PowerPoint slides can easily be reproduced in printed form – usually several to an 8x11 page – and, as Tufte laments, this practice seems also to have supplanted the custom of distributing an outline, formal paper, supporting data or other documents to be taken away from the gathering.

To prove that such a seemingly benign innovation has, in fact, become a threat to civilization itself, Tufte offers two major exhibits into evidence.   The first, created by Google, Inc.’s Peter Norvig, is simply a set of PowerPoint slides, generated via the program’s handy AutoContent feature, to accompany Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.   A glimpse: The first slide, entitled “Organizational Overview” and designed to go with Lincoln’s famously sonorous “four score and seven years ago” opening, is a graph (whose y axis measures “new nations,” in tenths of a nation) with a bar at 1.0 labeled “-87 years” and a second bar at 0.0 labeled “Now.”

Vastly less funny, but far more damning, is the other piece of major evidence:   A real PowerPoint slide, entitled “Review of Test Data Indicates Conservatism for Tile Penetration,” prepared by someone at Boeing during a critical few days of January 2003.   The slide is part of a presentation made to NASA officials.   Tufte makes a convincing case that the slide bears a healthy share of responsibility for the tragic loss of the space shuttle Columbia.

The November 2003 issue of The Atlantic Monthly contains a detailed and riveting article by William Langewiesche describing how bureaucratic muddle – specifically, the concerns and recommendations of low-level engineers with regard to damage during launch of the shuttle’s left wing failing to reach executive decisionmakers – can be blamed for the disaster.   Tufte’s argument fully comports with Langewiesche’s analysis, in a manner that ought to disturb anyone who works in a multi-layered organization that does anything important.

Ten bullet points follow the slide headline’s reference to the possibility of foam insulation having damaged the shuttle’s heat-resistant tiles.   A fine example is the penultimate one:   “Flight condition is significantly outside of test database.”   Whatever this doublespeak means, Tufte points out that the words “significant” or “significantly” appear five times on the slide, “with de facto meanings ranging from ‘detectable in largely irrelevant calibration case study’ to “an amount of damage so that everyone dies.’”

It is hardly news that an engineer would use an amorphous word like “significant” to fudge data in order to support a reassuring determination that everything is probably hunky-dory.   Tufte makes a more powerful point:   that the nature of PowerPoint itself, with its prescribed outline form, and word-count limitations that dictate the use of telegraph style, inherently limits rigorous analysis and discussion of the subject at hand.   Or, as Tufte wonders:   “How is it that each elaborate architecture of thought always fits exactly on one slide?”

Naturally, Tufte is not shy about pointing out that the Columbia Accident Investigation Board agreed.   The Board’s official report concluded that “the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers” illustrates “the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”

Tufte practices what he preaches in the realm of graphics.   The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint is a visually beautiful document, a humble pamphlet worthy of the coffee table.   If you cheat and get someone to photocopy it, you will miss the word Pravda in luscious Lenin red on an otherwise black page.   (That and the statue of Stalin pictured on the cover give you a hint of how well Tufte thinks PowerPoint would have worked in the USSR at its totalitarian worst.)   Tufte practices a kind of restrained, dignified but visually interesting graphic design that is in stark contract to both PowerPoint and the steroidal, caffeinated look of most magazines and many newspapers today.

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