The HG2S Training Blog

THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, March 5, 2010:

“President Obama Announces More Key Administration Posts

Edward Tufte, Appointee for Member, Recovery Independent Advisory Panel
Edward Tufte is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science at Yale University. He wrote, designed, and self-published The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, and Beautiful Evidence, which have received 40 awards for content and design. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Society for Technical Communication, and the American Statistical Association. He received his PhD in political Science from Yale University and BS and MS in statistics from Stanford University.”

From ET:

“I will be serving on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. This Panel advises The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds:

‘The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board was created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 with two goals:To provide transparency in relation to the use of Recovery-related funds.
To prevent and detect fraud, waste, and mismanagement.
Earl E. Devaney was appointed by President Obama to serve as chairman of the Recovery Board. Twelve Inspectors General from various federal agencies serve with Chairman Devaney. The Board issues quarterly and annual reports to the President and Congress and, if necessary, “flash reports” on matters that require immediate attention. In addition, the Board maintains the Recovery.gov website so the American people can see how Recovery money is being distributed by federal agencies and how the funds are being used by the recipients.

Mission statement: To promote accountability by coordinating and conducting oversight of Recovery funds to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse and to foster transparency on Recovery spending by providing the public with accurate, user-friendly information.’

I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I’ll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary.”

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003e0&topic_id=1#

George Siemens at elearnspace mentioned a remarkable site called Indexed in a recent blog post. Indexed author Jessica Hagy uses mathematical metaphors in sketches of relationships that span topics from consumption and arrogance to expectations, communications and perception. Hagy claims in her About page that Indexed “… is a little project that allows me to make fun of some things and sense of others without resorting to doing actual math.” To be fair to all the mathphobes out there, the mathematics is rather mild and, more to the point, Hagy’s adept skill at using Venn diagrams and xy-graphs reminds me of what must be one of the primary objectives we all face when creating technical graphics:  transform complex observations and relationships into simple and appealing visual designs. A good graphic after all is a data compression scheme. It’s no wonder then that it’s often easier for many people to remember the graphic than the explanatory text.

I wonder if the relationship between confusion and information is really parabolic? Hmm….

Death by PowerPoint

Garr Reynolds over at Presentation Zen has pulled an old skeleton from the presenter’s closet: The Technical Presentation: “Who says technical presentations can’t be engaging?” Scientific and technical presentations are often put in a separate class because they tend to be highly specialized, dense, and often a bad match for the limited bandwidth of PowerPoint. This, in combination with a variety of other issues (poor preparation, bad graphics, lack of clear purpose, no regard for the medium) often results in what is commonly known as the “Data Dump.” Too often we fall prey to this abuse, even when we are paying for the privilege of the presentation. Reynolds cites an essay by geologist J. Lehr (1985) who reminds us of our primary burden as presenters:

“Failure to spend the [presentation] time wisely and well, failure to educate, entertain, elucidate, enlighten, and most important of all, failure to maintain attention and interest should be punishable by stoning. There is no excuse for tedium.”

Avoiding the Data Dump requires work. Far too often presenters are pushed to deliver reams of data and complicated charts and graphs without the assistance of (or time for) a design(er). It’s almost unheard of (and perhaps ironic) that technical people have any background or knowledge of information design to help them prepare media. What’s worse, this blind spot is just as common in technical writers and instructional designers who fashion presentations for others to give. This is certainly one instance where good design can pay off.

With that said, what can we do to avoid inflicting a lethal PowerPoint presentation on a trusting audience?

1. Prepare in advance
2. “Own” the material
3. Simplify the look and content
4. Don’t read the slides
   
5. Avoid gratuitous anything (this may be a comment on 3. above)
   
6. Connect with the audience
   
7. Adapt the presentation to the audience
8. Tell a story
9. Rehearse the talk (this may be a comment on 1. above)

Garr Reynolds is in the throes of a new book titled “presentation zen DESIGN” due out at the end of the year. It follows on a previous title “presentation zen” and drills down deeper into material specifically related to visual communication. From his blog post:

“For many of us, there is a hole in our education when it comes to communicating visually, and knowledge of even the basics of graphic design is missing for most people. This book intends to do its small part to help fix this problem by focusing on concrete graphic design principles and techniques in the context of presentation design, though the concepts and knowledge can be applied to other areas of one’s professional life. This book is a deeper exploration of the Design section of PZ (chapters 5-7). The underlying guiding principles are the same — restraint, simplicity, and naturalness — but this time applied strictly to visual communication in general and graphic design in particular. My aim is to help the non-designer become a bit more savvy of a visual thinker and to give him or her the tools and understanding to apply this knowledge in concrete, practical ways immediately in presentations (and beyond).”

Reynold’s work should be required reading for anyone who teaches or gives talks with PowerPoint and the like. His emphasis on clarity, simplicity and naturalness is a balm to the tired soul deluged by dreary stacks of slides that drone on in endless succession.

The author also requests suggestions, stories and examples from his readers. Please write to Garr Reynolds at this address with suggestions for “presentation zen DESIGN.”

One of my pet rants is that good design matter, even for training materials. Well designed tools don’t just delight the eye they function better, adding efficiency to their purpose. The problem, however, is that design is often taken as extraneous and unnecessary by development managers, instructional designers and other business people who see it as “eye candy.”

Psychologist and author Donald Norman has a post on this issue and attempts to remedy the situation at Northwestern University:

Terry Winograd of Stanford’s computer science department and d.school wrote a very nice description of our new Design + Operations MMM program at the Kellogg School of Business and Northwestern Engineering. That article is available in Interactions, the magazine for Human Computer Interaction professionals.

In Winograd’s words:

The essence of successful interactive products is not just the interaction an end user has with the product, but with the whole range of operations that make that interaction work.

Norman goes on to say that  Jimmy Guterman at O’Reilly Radar Group reviews the program in a post titled “Teaching Design to Business People.” A copy of the Winograd article in PDF format can be gotten here:  p44-winograd.