Powerpoint engineering and the downfall of quality

Wasn't that the ship that was built asymmetric and they found rulers with different scales?
 
Vasa was more a case of experienced ship-wrights being asked to "expand the envelope" into unknown territory. Consider that a few centuries earlier, experienced stone-masons were "expanding the envelope" large buildings of taller and lighter Gothic cathedrals - with more and more windows - without fully understanding the limits of stone construction. They had to watch a few freshly-completed Gothic cathedrals crumble before they understood the strength limitations of limestone construction. Limestone may be pretty and easy to carve, but it is not the strongest of stones.
 
The problem with PowerPoint (and same with Excel) is that the default settings are absolutely horrible for engineering presentations. Engineers that don't know any better and use the defaults are condemned to fail.

I'm going to claim that it's actually worth spending time cleaning up PowerPoint slides. PPT is here to stay, so you have to make the best of it.
Tufte's principles, explained in previous posts, go a long way towards making slides more understandable. The way i see it, the goal is to maximize the amount of easily interpretable data per unit time that you can transfer to the reader. You do that (among other things) by picking the right chart type and simplifying the constituent elements as much as possible, so that the data can be interpreted as efficiently as possible.
This can make a TREMENDOUS impact over the course of a design review with the customer that might span two days and several hundred slides. The last thing you want is to make the audience work hard to understand your analysis by using poor slide design.
 
Every company I know, has their own Power Point settings for cooperate identity, none is using the default settings of PP directly.

You can make Power Point look like Word or Word look like Power Point, so the type of program you are using is not defining the style of your presentation. However, it does make little sense to read loudly from a text document on the screen in a meeting.
 
Nicknick said:
Every company I know, has their own Power Point settings for cooperate identity, none is using the default settings of PP directly.

You can make Power Point look like Word or Word look like Power Point, so the type of program you are using is not defining the style of your presentation. However, it does make little sense to read loudly from a text document on the screen in a meeting.
Click to expand...
I dare you to try to make Word look like Powerpoint. ;)
 
You can choose a horizontal format in Word and you can find all the drawing tools from Power Point as well in Words. You can also add text fields, charts, diagrams etc. just as in PP (depite it takes more effort to keep them in place...).
 
Nicknick said:
You can choose a horizontal format in Word and you can find all the drawing tools from Power Point as well in Words. You can also add text fields, charts, diagrams etc. just as in PP (depite it takes more effort to keep them in place...).
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When using any kind of graphic element in Word, your first action should be to insert a drawing canvas: basically a container for drawing elements. Drawing without a drawing canvas is the 'fuck me over now' option in Word.
 
Nicknick said:
You can choose a horizontal format in Word and you can find all the drawing tools from Power Point as well in Words. You can also add text fields, charts, diagrams etc. just as in PP (depite it takes more effort to keep them in place...).
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The tools don't always work the same between Word and Powerpoint. I'd sacrifice my first born before I tried to do a graphic intensive presentation in Word. I'm sure there are people who can push them out all day long but I'm not one of them.
 
Hobbes said:
Nicknick said:
You can choose a horizontal format in Word and you can find all the drawing tools from Power Point as well in Words. You can also add text fields, charts, diagrams etc. just as in PP (depite it takes more effort to keep them in place...).
Click to expand...
When using any kind of graphic element in Word, your first action should be to insert a drawing canvas: basically a container for drawing elements. Drawing without a drawing canvas is the 'fuck me over now' option in Word.
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I use text fields for that pupose, it seams to be a common work around, since Word was always recommending not to do this whenever I used text fields...

I do agree, that it is not a usefull approach to use word for presentations, but it works in theory...
 
sferrin said:
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sferrin said:
Nicknick said:
Every company I know, has their own Power Point settings for cooperate identity, none is using the default settings of PP directly.

You can make Power Point look like Word or Word look like Power Point, so the type of program you are using is not defining the style of your presentation. However, it does make little sense to read loudly from a text document on the screen in a meeting.
Click to expand...
I dare you to try to make Word look like Powerpoint. ;)
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I actually had a student give their presentation using Word. It kinda worked, but didn’t look like PowerPoint (Which may be a plus!)
 
starviking said:
sferrin said:
Nicknick said:
Every company I know, has their own Power Point settings for cooperate identity, none is using the default settings of PP directly.

You can make Power Point look like Word or Word look like Power Point, so the type of program you are using is not defining the style of your presentation. However, it does make little sense to read loudly from a text document on the screen in a meeting.
Click to expand...
I dare you to try to make Word look like Powerpoint. ;)
Click to expand...
I actually had a student give their presentation using Word. It kinda worked, but didn’t look like PowerPoint (Which may be a plus!)
Click to expand...
One team I worked for liked to produce reports in Excel, then paste them as images into Powerpoint to be distributed as written reports. There was never any intention to use them as presentations.

Even worse, I once saw someone produce a general arrangement drawing in Excel. They had access to AutoCAD and two 3D CAD programs. They knew how to use AutoCAD at least, even if not the others. Why they thought Excel was the most appropriate tool, I still don't understand.
 
When I was a trainee pathologist and had moved to a new lab as part of the need to work in at least two, the bosses asked me to give a PowerPoint presentation every week on a topic they gave me. After a few weeks of this, they asked me for my opinion of how it was going and I said "I'm sure I'm learning something, but I spend more time and effort assembling the PowerPoint than I do learning the stuff I'm supposed to present you." They agreed, and the presentations stopped.

Insofar as boiling down complex ideas into a simple form that the technically uninitiated can understand is concerned, I'd say doctors (in the medical practitioner sense) are streets ahead of the rest - mostly because we have to do it every day, with little or no notice, for people who have absolutely no technical background AT ALL and who for very good reasons are under a lot of stress. Finding ways to simplify the complex becomes a mindset and a way of life. And there is no PowerPoint.

(Yes, I'm biased because it's my own profession, but I hope you'll indulge me on this idea.)

I am also reminded of what Reginald J Mitchell told test pilot Jeffrey Quill one day (recounted in Quill's Spitfire: A Test Pilot's Story): "Jeffrey, if someone tries to tell you something about an airplane that's so complex you can't understand it, you can take it from me it's all balls." Quill admitted this was probably an oversimplification, but I think Mitchell was underlining the need for experts to present their data in a form that the people they're talking to can comprehend.

On the flipside, John Terraine's position on Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig was that for all his intelligence, he was inarticulate and interacted particularly poorly when face to face with eloquent politicians. If that's not a tragedy waiting to happen, I don't know what is. I know how he must have felt - I've got into all sorts of arguments that I've lost, and only afterwards thought of the things I could have said in order to win.
 
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A couple of thoughts on this topic.

Drafting is really necessary for early concept development, as a correctly scaled image quickly shows whether a design is good or rather silly. Without it, the idea remains as crude as the team has CAD time available, which in many cases is very limited. PowerPoint engineering just does not replace it - not at all.

PowerPoint is terrible for storing information. A PowerPoint presentation contains the slides and the presenters speech accompanying the slide deck. Only the slide deck remains, so at least half the information is lost, if not more. A written report attempts to put all information on paper, so it at least encourages the author to be comprehensive.

The PowerPoint format does encourages thinking in bullet points and single-slide "comprehensive operating pictures." As PowerPoint infests an organization, thinking slowly adopts to match the PowerPoint medium, so complex thoughts get replaced by bullet points and hopelessly optimistic pictures.

Lastly, the shift from Scientist/Engineer to Engineering Software User really has deleterious effects. First, studies get limited to either the simplest of "hand-calculations" or a full FEM/CFD analysis. The latter can take at least a month to set up, run, and evaluate, and the former is just too simplistic. Any serious iteration takes even more time. That leaves results being either rather crude or a detailed analysis of /one/ design. The second issue with "Software User" is that the software becomes the arbiter of truth and the model of what is possible. Analysis conforms to the toolset available and physical modeling of the software becomes the model of accuracy. Fine when working within existing toolset capabilities, very much not-fine when expanding to new areas.
 
I would never do drafting with Power Point that’s not what it is made for. I guess, I do it, as most designers do it, first in the mind, than with a pencil and from a very early stage I use CAD. I never heard about any company were CAD time is limited and 3d graphics/clips can visualize your idea better than everything else. A power Point presentation is the right tool to explain the design process and not for a final documentation. In a design process, it can be very useful to share your CAD model life during the (online) meeting and discuss it, but I would always recommend to prepare a presentation about what you are going to show in advance.

Replacing a meeting with power point presentations of an ongoing design process by sending written reports around would be disastrous. Many wouldn’t read to full text and those who would wouldn’t often understand the 3d mechanism. People would hesitate to ask about details which they didn’t understand in the text and no interactive communication would happen.

I doubt that it would be useful to send text documentations for marketing to convince potential customers, they need to get all the information as simple as possible.

I remember, twenty years ago I was working in a company were it really took weeks to get the FEM results for your design. Already back then, I didn’t like the idea to have the designers separated from FEM department, and in the meantime I heard they changed it. The organisations have changed and FEM calculations became much quicker with the introduction of automatized mashing and powerful computers. Usually you use a combined CAD/FEM software, so that many FEM calculations can be done by the designer himself without needing a specialist in FEM calculation
 

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