Created by Jackson Fox and Lourdes Cueva for INLS 180, Spring 2004.
Edward Tufte sparked several months of debate with the publication of his article "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" in which he criticized the popular presentation program for reducing communications to contentless parades of "Phluff" (Tufte). Criticizing PowerPoint has a long and illustrious history, but Tufte's reputation in the design community sparked a considerable amount of discussion. Several other experts in media and usability added their own comments, and communications consultants took the oppurtunity to pass out a few business cards. We wanted to evaluate the claims Tufte made about the effect PowerPoint has on the information structure of presentations to see if he had valid criticisms, or if he was (as many of his detractors argued) blaming the tool for the faults of its users.
PowerPoint opponents, Tufte formost amongst them, claim that the program degrades the communication of information by forcing users into information structures which separate content and analysis, reduce concepts to meaningless bullets, and enforcing strict hierarchies that disguise important information.
Tufte's critics claim that he is confusing cause and effect. This side claims that PowerPoint is nothing more than a tool which is used poorly thanks to poor communications skills and is nothing more than a vessel for bad presentations rather than the cause of them.
We seek to understand these issues in greater depth, and in doing so to answer the following questions: