A Clear Presentation Danger

Will Pecha Kucha Rescue Us?

By Art Kalinski, GISP

Over the past year I’ve attended over a dozen GIS related conferences and sat through over a hundred presentations, most of them PowerPoint.  Just like the Dilbert cartoon below I’ve reached my limit of poor PowerPoint presentations and I feel compelled to get on my soap box.

It’s been years since PowerPoint made its entrance but over the past year I still found myself suffering through absolutely horrible presentations. Several years ago there was a Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert was explaining his side number 397. An audience member, who was actually paying attention, could take it no more and with a scream passed out.  Wally, who had been sleeping, examined him and declared “PowerPoint Poisoning!”  This may be funny but it strikes too close to reality.

Over the past year, I’ve attended more than a dozen GIS-related conferences and watched at least a hundred presentations, most of which were conducted in Microsoft PowerPoint. It’s been years since this now-ubiquitous software made its entrance, yet I still find myself suffering through absolutely horrible presentations. PowerPoint has made slide creation so easy that neurotic presenters with no skills, no taste, and no judgment are free to make us squirm in our seats. I’ve finally reached my limit, and I feel compelled to get on my soapbox.

First, a little history from an old guy who did presentations in the early eighties the hard way: with a grease pencil on overhead projector glass. In the late eighties I was lucky enough to be at a command where the graphics department could create professional-looking transparencies or 35-millimeter slides. The slides looked good, but because of the cost and hassle involved, presenters thought through their points carefully and used the slides sparingly.

In the early nineties, Harvard Graphics and PowerPoint hit the streets along with LCD projectors, and what should have been a wonderful tool quickly became a curse to many. Edward Tufte, the well-known author and Yale professor of information design, railed against PowerPoint. He used the famous 1869 graphic by Charles Joseph Minard of Napoleon’s march to Moscow as a superb example of the right way to communicate data graphically. This graph is still considered the single best example of elegant simplicity in using a map to display spatial and temporal data.

Charles Joseph Minard created this “figurative map” of Napoleon’s march to Moscow. The image shows the route of the army’s march, the temperature, and personnel attrition over time. The brown band represents the men who enter into Russia, and the black band represents those who leave it.

That’s how it was done in olden times: slow, deliberate, and thoroughly thought out. PowerPoint has facilitated the exact opposite behavior, with legions of presenters using the high-tech tool as a toy. I remember sitting thorough a presentation given by a senior executive of a major power company in Georgia. It was about a year after Microsoft added sound effects and the bullet fly-in feature to PowerPoint, and this presenter had each bullet fly in with a unique animation and sound effect. After a few minutes, no one was paying attention to the content; the audience chuckled and murmured, trying to predict which effect would come next. The only thing that presenter was missing was a big red nose and floppy shoes.

Worth a Thousand Words

In the GIS community, we are especially lucky, because most of our content is a graphic representation of spatial data. I think that’s what attracted me to GIS — its graphic visual nature. In GIS classes I’ve taught, I frequently pointed to a universal human characteristic: our learning, memory, and perception are very much graphically oriented. As an example, I cited the work of scientists who determined that the average person has almost 200,000 discrete human faces in their mental database. That’s pretty amazing, considering the relatively minor differences between faces; we have such discerning powers of observation that even Hollywood impersonators can’t fool most viewers. Of the thousands of Elvis impersonators, many come close to the real thing, but I have yet to see one that’s spot-on.

So I encourage people to take advantage of that human trait and use graphs, maps, imagery, and photos — not text — as visuals in their communication. Most PowerPoint trainers recommend using very little text, and limiting a presentation to no more than 35 slides and no more that 25 words on any given slide. They also caution to never, ever read the slides aloud. The slides are supposed to enhance the presenter’s presentation, not replace the presenter. My feeling about any presenter that reads his slides aloud is: Save yourself the trip! Stay home and just e-mail me your PowerPoint.

Good Tools, Bad Results

One problem with computers is that anyone can produce content that is technically perfect, such as documents, maps, or slides. But technically nice lines and fonts don’t guarantee a good-looking or effective end result. I learned that when I was the GIS Manager for the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC). In the mid-nineties we started publishing our GIS data on CD so our ARC users could create their own maps. The results were some of the worst maps I’ve ever seen. We quickly learned that when wielded by someone with no cartographic or artistic skills, even sophisticated GIS tools could result in horrid presentations.

The same held true for Internet projects. In the early years of the Web, the new technology was difficult to master quickly, so we hired a computer firm specializing in Web site creation. I remember asking the company owner about the challenge of finding good HTML programmers. He surprised me with his answer: it was relatively easy to find programmers, but he couldn’t teach them how to be artists and create content that looked good. He said it was easier to start by hiring good artists, and then teach them the programming skills needed to create Web sites.

And that’s the problem with PowerPoint: Learning the software doesn’t guarantee good presentations. In addition to knowledge of the software, good presentations require artistic talent, a command of the material, and exceptionally good judgment as to how to communicate with your audience.

I think that many people who overdo PowerPoint do it out of insecurity; they want to show everyone how complicated their job is, and how much stuff they handle. While I was at ARC, I tried countless times to convince our planners that more is less. Frequently they would conduct slide shows containing 80 to 90 slides, with many slides containing more than 100 words each. When these “planning shows” were scheduled, you could see the look of dread on the faces of our board members. The old “I just got a silent-ring cell phone call and I have to leave the room” trick was used frequently.

Trimming the Fat

Thankfully, some of these problems have been partially addressed. Good-looking, interactive GIS maps can now be created using ESRI’s MapPublisher, TerraGo’s GeoPDF, or some of the Adobe PDF map formats. All permit the preservation of color schemes, fonts, line widths, symbology, and other cartographic elements in the interactive environments.

Many companies and conference organizers try to improve the artistic aspect of PowerPoint presentations by requiring presenters to use a standard conference template. But that only standardizes the look, without affecting the content or the way it’s delivered. Now, there’s finally hope that tediously long presentations may get reined in as well.

There is a relatively new trend you’ve probably heard of called Pecha Kucha (Japanese for “chitchat”). Many pronounce it the way it looks, although the proper pronunciation is “peh chach ka.” This patented presentation method was started by architects Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein. While working in Japan, they would hold shows for young designers. Since they wanted to give many designers the opportunity to show their work, they developed a fast-paced format that limited each presenter to 20 slides and only 20 seconds per slide. The end result was a short presentation: just six minutes and forty seconds.

Think about the ramifications of this. Just like a “thirty-second elevator pitch,” presenters had to really think through their presentations and distill their material down to only the key points. Currently, most conferences give presenters twenty minutes, plus another five to ten minutes for questions. With a seven-minute limit per session, there can be more time for questions, or for more presentations. The trend is spreading like wildfire: Autodesk is hosting Pecha Kucha nights during conferences, and Bentley and some universities are doing the same. ESRI has tested the format at some local conferences, and the 2009 Annual URISA Conference will have a Pecha Kucha night that I’m looking forward to participating in. My current PowerPoints have fewer than thirty-five slides, and fewer than forty words total, but I’m working to whittle that number down to twenty.

If you want to learn more, check Google or YouTube, which have many examples to choose from. I promised myself that every time I’m subjected to a poor PowerPoint presentation, I’m going to give the presenter a copy of this article. Maybe you could do the same, and we can collectively raise the bar and see fewer bad presentations in the coming year.

Well, it’s time to get off the soapbox. So, if you aren’t neurotic, and you’re confident with your knowledge and position, try giving your audience more by giving them less — adopt Pecha Kucha and help cure PowerPoint Poisoning.