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January 05, 2004
Rich Gold on PowerPoint
Christina points to UW's David Farkas' course readings in information design as a source of "fine reading". His syllabus is also worth checking out to see how he's chunked them into a semester's worth of work. Since I've lately been very interested in the "controversy" related to PowerPoint, I wanted to find out more about one of Farkas' readings for week 4: Rich Gold's "Reading PowerPoint" (available in Nancy Allen's ). Alas, it isn't online, but a bit of Googling turned up this panel transcript from a 1999 Seybold conference on web publishing. Here's a snippet from Gold: Presenting Powerpoint slides is much like playing a sax in a jazz band. The slides provide the bass, rhythm, and chord changes over which the melody is improvised. When a presenter is really cooking, he or she enters that intuitional state in which each moment follows naturally from the previous in a highly intelligent manner. In flow, the presenter locks into the audience, locks into the slides, locks into the ideas, and produces a gloss that makes whole the obscure and fragmented wall writings. Alas, Rich Gold, most recently a researcher at Xerox PARC, died early in 2003. Based on a website dedicated to him, I wish I'd come across him earlier. A quick glance through his talks yielded this gem: PowerPoint as a Toy for Thought. It's annotated, so I think it's well worth reading unless you're a committed Tufte zealot :).
Comments
I had the privelege of talking a few times with Rich when he was in residency at Berkeley, and found him both delightful and very insightful. And, well, the Tufte zealots should note HOW he used PowerPoint. There's a world of difference between your corporate-feeling blue presentation with three Times Roman bullets and Rich's hand-drawn sketches with little annotations and doodles everywhere. Rich used PowerPoint, sure--and if we all did, Tufte would have nothing to say about it. See, say,
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IDblog is Beth Mazur tilting at power law windmills. A little bit Internet, a little bit technology, a little bit society, and a lot about designing useful information products. Send your cards and letters to .
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