05 December 2016

Week 14 - Presenting your work

1.  In the reading The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint Tufte argues primarily about how PP in terms of data collection and a way to share information that needs to be analyzed.  He explains that PP "reduces the analytical quality of serious presentations of evidence" and talks a lot about how PP "is not a contemplative analytical method".  His focus on this begins to imply that Tufte doesn't believe that PP is used for anything other than ways of sharing data and analysis.  Can you think of any other ways that PP is used that wouldn't require the exchange of information and analysis? And can PP successfully support it?

2.  Tufte seems to have a negative connotation on the use of PP.  He goes on and on about how PP causes more troubles to the presenters  and the audience.  For example he says that "PP slides are very low resolution compared to paper" and that "audiences endure a relentless sequentiality, one damn slide after another".  Do you think there are ways we can go beyond the standard PP format and use it in a new way that creates an 'experience' rather than just a fact providing presentation?

3.  Tufte talks a lot about the presentations put together by NASA for various events.  He talks about how other forms of presentations would work better than PP, but is there an unconventional way that NASA could have used PP to share the engineering reports and data?

4.  How do we as students push the boundaries of the standard programs that are supplied and use them in a new invented and unconventional way to share data?

5.  Tufte argues that the standard default PP presentations are composed of "incompetent designs for data graphics and tables, and a smirky commercialism that turns information into a sales pitch and presenters into marketeers".  But we as architects and architecture students are often pitching or selling our designs- in essence marketing our ideas.  So does that mean that PP is a successful tool to us in that regard?

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