art/aesthetics

Recently, I got to listen to a friend try to explain an idea to another friend. The second friend just wasn’t getting it and the first friend was getting more frustrated, more annoyed, until finally he said “What is wrong with you? Do I need to draw you a f**cking picture?!?”

Are you stupid?!?
Obviously, this is something you say to a person you think is stupid. The person doesn’t get the idea, so you have to draw them a picture, like you would a child. The person can’t understand complicated ideas, so you have to explain things in hieroglyphs, arrows and boxes, little pictures of people doing things…and…wait a moment!

Yes. We are stupid.
I read a ton of books and one thing I’ve noticed is the increasing number of them that are about communicating more intelligently by using….wait for it….pictures. I think Edward Tufte was partly responsible for this trend, starting around ’98 or ’99.

At the time, web designers were trying to figure out how to get people to understand their genius in three images or fewer. Talking with them, where I worked and with friends in the business, I remember getting overwhelmed by people talking about Tufte, about his books, about him speaking at big events and so on.

I bought a few of the books, took others out of the library, and thought “yeah, this is good stuff but it’s not really much different that what artists have been thinking about for centuries and philosophers for decades: how do we communicate using a non-verbal medium and what this means to the ideas we’re trying to express given the limitations of the medium.”

Color me jaded, I guess.

…then, more and more books like Tufte’s starting showing up. But instead of addressing the nuances of non-verbal communications, they got right to the core of all stupidity: how to make better Power Point presentations.

…and stupider.
Anyhow…then the presentation books began to appear with things like Presentation Zen showing up on the market. The sad fact is that this book (and others) dip into imagery and metaphor that make it sound like something mystical or subtle is happening when, in reality, they are simply saying “use fewer words, use more pictures.”

So, is this smart or stupid? Should we really be using more pictures? And when do we stop writing and just make videos and draw stick figures on whiteboards? What is the answer to the koan, grasshopper?

The message and the media…
There’s something to be said about how the media format that is used influences the information that can be communicated. Words allow for complex abstract information to be expressed, but images tend towards the expression of concrete concepts. Images may also equal a thousand words, but a book may have ten to twenty thousand words.

There’s also something interesting in the idea that images are a good way to communicate quickly with an audience. If you look at the TED presentation videos, nearly every slide show is a pile of images being displayed behind the speaker.

Lawrence Lessig is a writer and thinker who I deeply respect and there are elements of this kind of presentation style in his TED talk from 2007. His talk is what really matters, but as the images on the screen flash past, the images give the talk a different quality. I’m personally not sure if the “quality” is the addition or subtraction of something important.

Before starting the video, do this: start the video but minimize the window for the first 60 seconds of Lessig speaking. Then bring the window up, rewind to the start and restart. Compare the two experiences – just listening and the listening w/ the accompanying images Lessig displays. What changed? Anything?

The TED talks are hardly the only example of this. Al Gore’s entire movie about global warming followed this recipe…and the woman who made the slides for him? She’s written a book about how to create presentations like the one in the movie. In fact, her firm only does one thing: it creates presentations.

In each of these situations, the goal seems to be to reinforce what the person is saying by showing an image behind the person. However, I worry that what’s actually happening is that we are expecting more entertainment and less content when discussing difficult ideas. We don’t really need an image of the capitol building on the screen while somebody says “So he went to Washington D.C. to protest the creation of the phonograph.”

I’m not encouraging people to create slides or other materials that are packed full with text. I despise those presentations no matter how many executives say “but that way, with all those words, it’s a good reference for a person when they need to remember what was said, later.”

Guess what, those presentations chock-full-of-words are just as shoddy as the presentations that are ten images in a row that only existed to be talked over. Neither is equal to a seriously engaging conversation or an actual document that contains the materials you need to understand…but that you only absorbed. In both situations, you aren’t trading ideas, you are being entertained…just far less effectively with word-packed slides than with pretty colorful images on screen!

No, I’m going to say a meeting with no presentation is the best. Throw out a spreadsheet onto the table if you need or perhaps some charts or tables on the overhead that address the data, but keep it bare bones. Keep the crap off the screen…because, yes, we are stupid if we always need a picture.

What we really need is to talk about the ideas until both of us understand it.

And clip-art? If you use clip-art, you are encouraging the end of times you evil, evil person!!!

{ 1 comment }