just in teractive : Persuasive PowerPoint

� Life Hacking Research: More Screen Space, and Beyond. | Main | Class Computer Census �

6 January, 2009

  Persuasive PowerPoint

I've been studying PowerPoint. Visual storytelling in front of groups; supporting words from your mouth with associated images. Appealing to people's instincts instead of their logic?

On Howard's recommendation, I picked up Cliff Atkinson's Beyond Bulletpoints, which applies the Three Act structure I'm learning in Advanced Script Analysis class to PowerPoint - act one, act two, act three, the audience is the protagonist, what's the narrative arc? Atkinson's book was surprising, because it was not a series of tips on replacing text and bulletpoints with pictures so much as it advocated pre-production on persuasive presentation. Writing out a script in a very specific outline format. You can see visitors to his Sociable Media Forums asking for his help revising their act I statements.

Traditional narrative framing techniques. Myself in my 20s has an inherent reaction against that, but now that I'm 30 I feel like trying to fit my ideas into other formats, to draw power from the storytelling structures embedded in our collective subconscious. Steve Jobs seems to have been thinking the same thing, in his last presentation - a very explicit use of three-act structure.

Funny thing - each time I get my PowerPoint script written out in advance, and start to make my slides, I wanna say "screw this" and fire up Final Cut Pro. Especially since I'm working on PowerPoint presentations that could be emailed to someone without my accompanying explanations. I used to send out web pages to explain ideas, but I still tend to make text-heavy web postings (like this one). Seems like the more important the person I'm working with, the less time they have to read. So can I use images and phrases to make a persuasive stand-alone presentation? Final Cut Pro is more fun to work in, because you can manage sound and visuals with explicit control of the pacing; however my voiceover talents have been roundly critiqued, so I'm being more patient with PowerPoint.

I guess you could say I'm part of the big-image-few-words school - giant photographs filling the screen, with a punchline. If you actually browse my slideshows though, you'll find I make extensive use of the Notes field - each slide may have only a photo, but the notes (hidden to the viewers; visible on the second monitor driving the performance) are prompts, sentences, or paragraphs depending on if I'm presenting or emailing the work.

From Garr Reynold's Presentation Tips
A steady progression, away from words. He labels them, left to right, roughly: mediocre, better, best.

Role Models

Lawrence Lessig appears to be the largely undisputed champion of potent PowerPoint. I remember marvelling over his slides at South by Southwest - terse, few words, distinct style, fonts. Two words at a time. Next slide, an icon. Then the icon changes. Very direct, nothing to read - only coordinated speech and graphics. It puts the people who read PowerPoint slides out loud to shame. It's a different thing really - presentation versus performance. Obligation versus engagement. I do wish more people took the time to enjoy the tool and rehearse themselves with it. David Byrne, Edward Tufte and Abraham Lincoln have already worked in this field as well.

Will Wright also gives terrific Powerpoint - from what I understand he carries around a deck of 200+ slides; depending on the venue, he'll pull out twenty or thirty. And they're great - calculous, weather patterns, life of bees, dramaturgical history, computer interface design - equations made up of graphics.

I have yet to see Neil Young from EA give a presentation, but I hear he's good too. At a recent conference about the state of the web, Web 2.0, Dick Hardt gave this Identity 2.0 talk, a rapid-fire image and phrase sequence timed to his words that is very much Lessig-derived. I've included his picture here with a link because it's probably the best example of this kind of crafted PowerPoint style you can see easily on the web.

All this I write here because I'm beginning to suspect that PowerPoint (or Keynote, what have you) is a necessary tool for presenting design concepts, for engaging learners, for supporting group visualization. It's not exactly interactive media, not the way it's framed today, but it's definitely a powerful tool for presenting ideas. And if students in the Interactive Media Division are going to be designer/producers in any medium, we have to know how to present ideas. PowerPoint and PhotoShop Mashups!

Hopefully, along with our professors, we can study PowerPointless, PresentationZen and Delicious: PowerPoint: less text to read and more images to spark our imaginations.

Posted by justin at October 23, 2005 9:56 AM

Comments

Posted by: Leonard Lin at October 23, 2005 12:09 PM

Posted by: noha at October 24, 2005 5:20 PM

Posted by: Jess at October 24, 2005 6:05 PM

Posted by: kpallist at October 25, 2005 11:43 AM

Posted by: bjorke at November 2, 2005 2:19 AM

Post a comment