Russell Davies

coffee corps

A trip got cancelled so I was thinking we could do a coffee morning tomorrow. Anyone fancy it? 11am. The Breakfast Club. D'Arblay Street.

powerpoint as a toy for thought

Gareth introduced me to a brilliant little book called The Plenitude and I started devouring it last night. Excellent stuff, nice discussion of the problems and delights of creating 'stuff'. This little thought popped up in the intro: PowerPoint is a Toy for Thought. And it crystalised all sorts of stuff for me.

I love PowerPoint, have done for years, it's my weapon of choice. And I'm starting to really like Keynote too (mostly because it can do great things with video, though I wish it didn't make everything look so Californian).

I tend to write a presentation by gathering a bunch of images that represent stories, like this:

Then I chuck them, more or less randomly, into that multi-slide view (as below) and shuffle them about until they divide up into sensible chapters or streams of thought:

That seems a reasonable way to do things. And PowerPoint and Keynote do that well. But I've been frustrated for ages that no-one seems to be innovating in presentation software, Apple and Microsoft seem to have given up and I can't find any eager new start-up that's trying to challenge them, even if I couldn't imagine what that innovation would be like.

But then 'Toy For Thought' made me realise what I'd love to see happen. I'd love someone to do to PowerPoint what the Wii did to Xbox and the Playstation. What might this mean?

1. They'd think about the performance aspect of presenting more. The embedded assumptions within powerpoint and keynote seem to be that the presenter is going to stand right in front of (or very near to) the laptop. And that they're not going to move about much, or be very physical, that they're going to be  relatively sober and business-like. That doesn't seem to be that true. Look at Steve Balmer - he uses PowerPoint - imagine a presentation tool that drew on this energy and movement.

Or imagine a presentation suite that used something like this as the controller. That'd liven things up a bit. Or what could PowerPoint learn from GuitarHero?

2. They'd allow for a bit more abstraction. PowerPoint tends to be incredibly literal. (Or maybe that's the presentations people tend to make.) I've always hated U2, but I've always like the presentations they do. Because that's how I think of their gigs. You've got Bono presenting down the front and all the visual stuff is the PowerPoint - and they're very good at creating stuff that illustrates the point but doesn't just repeat it. Abstract, visual, moving stuff. Imagine if UVA collaborated with someone on presentation software, how good would that be?

3. They'd allow for less linearity. I saw Usman Haque present once, and he used what seemed to be a home-made flash presenting tool which allowed him to crawl around a web of charts, laid out a bit like a mindmap. It meant he could follow trains of thought which made sense at the time, and it meant the connections between charts were revealed to the audience, which helped us understand. And I bet he found it was easier for him to remember the contents of his presentation, because they were laid out in metaphorical space that made more sense. It would also allow for the thing I've always wanted - the ability to construct a single giant presentation, containing all your ideas, thoughts, images, videos, that you could dart through in different ways, depending on your audience, whim, timing, etc. This would make a better presenting tool, but also a better thinking tool, because you could pile new ideas on top of old ones and let them knock up against each other, creating new juxtapositions and new ideas. In fact, thinking about it, the ideal would be not to keep importing stuff into a presentation suite, but to just tag things and allow the presentation stuff to explore them. Or something.

Which brings us nicely back to the Wii, because Matt used a Wiimote at dConstruct to interact with his tilting slide interface and it had me hypnotised, because it felt like the first step down a really interesting route. Brian Eno used to talk about how he wished computers had more Africa in them:

“What’s pissing me off is that it uses so little of my body. You’re just sitting there, and it’s quite boring. You’ve got this stupid little mouse that requires one hand, and your eyes. That’s it. What about the rest of you? No African would stand for a computer like that. It’s imprisoning." (quote found here)

I guess my tiny version of that would be wishing that presentation stuff had more performer in them. Imagine a presentation driven by a dance pad, or even a tenori-on. Imagine if it was physically difficult to move to the next image. Or if the presentation would pour on like a river unless you intervened to stop it. Or. Or. Well, you know. That'd all be more fun for everyone.

tom at interesting (different tom)

Here's Tom Armitage's splendid 20 minutes from Interesting; A Series Of Tubes. This is one of those excellent bits from the day that I couldn't imagine hearing anywhere else. Really good stuff. Here's his charts on slideshare and there's a pdf here.

(picture above by Roo)

tom at interesting

Here's the very erudite Tom Lewis-Reynier giving his by now legendary History Of Knots. Sorry about the spotty sound on this, we will try and fix it for the final, archived version, but it's well worth persisting with. Only three minutes long. And here are the notes that Lloyd took for the slowbloggingsysteme. I think he captured the essence.

the anaesethetic of the familiar

(Above; the Harvard psych-cognoscenti eagerly await the commencement of Mr Pinker's address)

I went (with Gareth who's written about it too) to hear Steven Pinker speak about/from his new book yesterday. He's no fool, knows what an audience might enjoy and decided to focus on the chapter about swearing. Very popular. He used a great phrase while talking about the uses of swearing - describing it as a way of overcome 'the anaesthetic of the familiar' to shock people into noticing something. And that struck me as a really useful idea in a lot of circumstances. So much of our lives (especially our business/work lives) is trammeled by convention and habit that we're suffocated by the anaesthetic of the familiar a lot.

And he introduced a word I'd never heard of but really liked too - dysphemism. It seems that a dysphemism is essentially the opposite of a euphemism. So while a euphemism allows you to talk about a topic without confronting the nasty reality of that topic (say 'poo') a dysphemism is an intentionally hard word intending to confront you with that reality and make you examine if (say 'shit'). Again this would seem to have a lot of applications in business life, which is festooned with euphemisms, concealing reality and causing bad decisions. The interesting challenge might be to find the dysphemistic words that will usefully confront people, rather than just saying 'your business is shit'.

adventure thrills action

I bought these books today, 40p each. Very pleased. They may not be 'good design' (there again they might be, I always seem to get that wrong) but they're damn interesting and enticing, partly, I think, because they're so energetic. You don't really see books like this any more. Shame. (Or do you?)

And who could resist the strange saga of 'liver-eating johnson'?

They look good on the shelf too.

matt at interesting

Matt was last on at Interesting2007 (which is why he's a bit longer than the average, Bobbie forgot to stop him) and it was the perfect end to the day. His omnivorous interests meant he touched on all sorts of things that came up throughout in a nice rounding-everything-up and spinning-if-off-in-an-interesting-direction kind of way. And he cited all sorts of books that made people want to go and read them, which is an excellent thing. You feel like you should pay attention to the stuff he cares about, it's going to be interesting. And you've just got to admire this kind of semi-grumpy enthusiasm, it makes things happen.

(picture above, of Matt's final chart, by Roo. And thanks to Curtis for helping fix the audio on this)

chris at interesting

Chris here was probably the inspiration for the whole interesting thing. I'd not met him before thinking of the conference but I'd read his blog, which was always interesting, knew he was used to presenting (had done it at lots of tech conferences) and knew he was interested in food. And it occurred to me that it would be fantastic to  hear him talk about food. That was exactly the idea of the thing - get interesting people to talk about their passions. And it had the additional benefit that I got to meet him, over a large fry-up. His talk about a 21st century ebcb was fantastic, just the right thing. Apologies to him and to you for the slightly troubling video camera which interfered with his demos a bit.

(picture above by roo)

matthew at interesting

Matthew was one of the unexpected delights of Interesting. He got in touch, out of the blue, before the conference, I think because he liked the sound of it all, and asked if he could talk. I said yes because I didn't really know what to expect. What would you expect from the editor of The Spectator? Not a masterful Al Pacino impression and an actual incisive point. Life is full of surprises. (And if you'd like to compare and contrast - here's the original.)

(picture above by tim)

the triumph of klona

My copy of Churnmore just arrived from Amazon, ordered on Ben's recommendation. And ten minutes later I've read it and loved it. It's the perfect encapsulation of how reasonable people can do stupid things. Again and again and again.