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The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

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Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#41

Post by like_any_other »

klaff wrote: post #17
socalgal2 wrote: post #15

This was an interesting article but it doesn't really provide solutions. I watched a few tech talks teaching a new API. Most slides were split, left side bullet poitns, right side either code or an image. As I was watching I was thinking "isn't this supposed to be almost the worst style"? but I was also thinking "I can't think of any way to do this better". It's an API. It requires examples. And it requires something…

Tufte did make specific recommendations that one should prepare a real document that your audience can and should read, and that they would have in front of them during the meeting. I'm not sure how best to translate that to your API example.

What would make the most important point of that slide stand out any more in a "real document" than in a slideshow? If anything, I would expect it to be buried even more - a slide and limited-time presentation forces you to be concise, while in a document there tend to be few limits on length.

I would say the disaster occurred despite PowerPoint, not because of it. It's not clear to me at all why the slide author thought all that text was needed, when it seems to communicate almost nothing. If anything I would blame it on the culture around "real documents", where having more information is treated as better (probably because they serve multiple functions - to educate, but also as a record of activities), even if it makes it bloated and hard to read.

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#42

Post by GarnetFloride »

cntainer wrote: post #19
gjejcjekdnfnwja wrote: post #10

As an engineer, that slide looks completely reasonable to me. Its purpose was to communicate technical info, which it did adequately. Keep in mind that the subject matter is highly technical, given that we're literally talking about the Space Shuttle, and more than a high school level of reading comprehension is heavily implied. If the NASA personnel weren't competent enough to review technical data without a pithy s…

I can't remember the last time I saw a slide as mangled as the one in the article. It hurts my brain just reading it. But you are right, most engineers would consider that reasonable, while complaining about the "muggles" that just don't get it. As a Software Architect, one of my main responsibilities has been to take information presented like above and turn it into something that non-technical people can digest. Be…

If you want a slide to really hurt your brain search for “Iraq war PowerPoint slide”

The principles of that slide apply to a lot of other circumstances.

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#43

Post by hinkley »

wat10000 wrote: post #23
gjejcjekdnfnwja wrote: post #10

As an engineer, that slide looks completely reasonable to me. Its purpose was to communicate technical info, which it did adequately. Keep in mind that the subject matter is highly technical, given that we're literally talking about the Space Shuttle, and more than a high school level of reading comprehension is heavily implied. If the NASA personnel weren't competent enough to review technical data without a pithy s…

"That's on them" is not acceptable for an engineer when lives are on the line. Part of your job is making people understand what they need to understand. If their lack of understanding means people die, then you need to do your job and figure out how to communicate effectively to the audience you have, not the audience you want.

There’s a famous speech someone related from their civil engineering professor, where the professor basically said, if I pass you in this class I am effectively giving you a license to kill. So some of you will not be passing.

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#44

Post by bigstrat2003 »

I don't see how this has anything to do with PowerPoint. There wasn't clear communication; the medium was completely incidental to that. They could have been writing on a chalkboard and had a communication failure, does that mean that chalkboards should be blamed in that case?

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#45

Post by hinkley »

kg wrote: post #2

I've been slowly refining a pitch deck over the past couple years and the feedback from reviews and test pitches has strongly reinforced for me just how important it is for slides to be short and laid out precisely. You want the most important information in the right places, communicated with as few words as possible, using the most accurate words possible. You want the key takeaways to be the things that people are…

One of the dynamics is that if there is too much text they’ll read instead of listening to you. Another is that if the conclusion is on the deck, they’ll get bored waiting for you to get to the punchline they’ve already read, and that can lose your audience as well.

So you’re better off either opening with the conclusion or putting it on the next slide, but accidentally jumping two slides forward can still ruin your audience’s attention span. So sometimes it’s better for it not to be in the deck at all.

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#46

Post by like_any_other »

gjejcjekdnfnwja wrote: post #10

As an engineer, that slide looks completely reasonable to me. Its purpose was to communicate technical info, which it did adequately. Keep in mind that the subject matter is highly technical, given that we're literally talking about the Space Shuttle, and more than a high school level of reading comprehension is heavily implied. If the NASA personnel weren't competent enough to review technical data without a pithy s…

There's a near infinite quantity of technical information to choose from. The purpose is to emphasize what is important, and de-emphasize the unimportant. When I look at that slide, I see 95% utterly irrelevant information, and a teeny tiny note saying, in vague and indirect language, that the impact was 600x worse than any test.

So on the remote chance you're not just trolling: If you're doing anything safety critical, please quit your job before you kill someone. You vastly overestimate human's (including yours) ability to process information. I am being 100% sincere.

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#47

Post by bryanlarsen »

like_any_other wrote: post #41
klaff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tufte did make specific recommendations that one should prepare a real document that your audience can and should read, and that they would have in front of them during the meeting. I'm not sure how best to translate that to your API example.

What would make the most important point of that slide stand out any more in a "real document" than in a slideshow? If anything, I would expect it to be buried even more - a slide and limited-time presentation forces you to be concise, while in a document there tend to be few limits on length. I would say the disaster occurred despite PowerPoint, not because of it. It's not clear to me at all why the slide author tho…

A document generally has an abstract at the front and/or a conclusion at the back where the important information goes.

A presentation accompanied by a document can be more easily done with punchy slides because the detail is in the document.

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#49

Post by stinkbeetle »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #44

I don't see how this has anything to do with PowerPoint. There wasn't clear communication; the medium was completely incidental to that. They could have been writing on a chalkboard and had a communication failure, does that mean that chalkboards should be blamed in that case?

Because the medium is not conducive to dense amount of technical information that readers are expected to use to make or understand decisions. Other similar mediums like a chalkboard were not singled out because the problem was identified with PowerPoint specifically. And it wasn't a choice of mediums all with similar problems, but slides vs papers. From the article,

> “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#50

Post by wat10000 »

hinkley wrote: post #43
wat10000 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That's on them" is not acceptable for an engineer when lives are on the line. Part of your job is making people understand what they need to understand. If their lack of understanding means people die, then you need to do your job and figure out how to communicate effectively to the audience you have, not the audience you want.

There’s a famous speech someone related from their civil engineering professor, where the professor basically said, if I pass you in this class I am effectively giving you a license to kill. So some of you will not be passing.

My CS undergrad was in the engineering college and so I had a mandatory engineering seminar that was basically "don't get people killed with your work." We covered Challenger, Hyatt Regency, and some other classic failures. I've mostly avoided working on life-critical software so it's not an immediate concern, but that sense of responsibility still stuck with me.
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