Political PowerPoint 2

Inspiration

Yep, more political PowerPoint.*

First, go watch this presentation by Hans Rosling at the TED 2006 conference. It’s long, but it’s worth it.

Now, go see Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Leaving aside the messages of these two pieces — and both are very powerful messages — what impresses me most as a designer is the careful use of information visualization in each. There’s some tricks (Mr. Gore’s "stretching" of one chart beyond the bounds of the screen) and some innovation (Hans’s moving play-by-play and live-action graph splitting), but some of the sharpest moments in each are pure old-school charting. Maybe a little more tarted up than Tufte would approve of, but beautifully done.

Good content + good speaking style + good visualizations = powerful messages.

 

*Really this is about the use of design in formal presentations — and the power of those presentations to change the world. Entertainingly, I’m pretty sure that neither Al Gore nor Hans Rosling used PowerPoint to create their presentations — Rosling helps make his own presentation software, and Mr. Gore’s pretty clearly a Keynote guy.

Quick Links #1

Quick Links
  • 15 undergraduate papers on MMOs – e.g. "From N00b to L33t: Learning strategies in Everquest II"
  • Ideo on design & business strategy – "Prototyping is simultaneously an evaluative process — it generates
    feedback and enables you to make midflight corrections — and a
    storytelling process. It’s a way of visually and viscerally describing
    your strategy."
  • Thomas Vander Wal on Technosocial Architecture – "People who understand the social interactions between people and the
    technologies they use to mediate the interactions need to understand
    the focus is on the social interactions between people and the
    relationship that technology plays. It is in a sense being a technosocial architect."

political powerpoint

Inspiration

This presentation is a wonderful example of PowerPoint being used for (satirical) political ends. (Backstory here and here.) What fascinates me even more is the use of conceptual interface designs for the same purpose. We often talk within the corporate design world about the power of concepual design to change minds — how about in the wider world as well?

I particularly like the pop-up warning in the second image below.

Mcds
Mcds2

Design Patterns Presentation

Interaction Design

To kick things off here, I’ll post the slides from my talk at the 2006 Information Architecture Summit in spectacular and cupcake-rich Vancouver, B.C.

Micah Alpern and I presented what was really two related topics squooshed together: mine was a history of our use & abuse of design patterns at eBay, and Micah’s was a deconstruction of one part of one of our more fleshed out sets of patterns.

The presentation is here: IA Summit Design Patterns Presentation (PDF)

Discussion over at Functioning Form is here: IA Summit: Design Patterns in the Real World