Thinker's Bluff

For many of us, Microsoft Powerpoint is to presentations what Kleenex is to the tissue or Xerox is to the copy machine; it is synonymous.
By extension, if the most effective engaging and persuasive presentations are those which best integrate immersive story-telling, then there is actually a grain of legitimate validity to this imaginative satirical presentation by John Bohannon and a team of dancers from the Black Label Movement. John lays out his business case for his proposal around minute 5:58 in this video:

His proposition goes something along these lines:

Proposition:
Whereas – data shows that there are about 30,000,000 Powerpoint presentations created every day, and
Whereas – an estimated 25% of those presentations turn out to have been a colossal waste of time for those to whom the presentations were made, and
Whereas – an estimated 4 people at a time are subjected to 1/2hr-long bad presentations, while earning an average annual salary of $35,000,
Thus – at a conservatively estimated cost of $100,000,000,000 (that’s $100 Billion) per year, bad Powerpoint presentations are a serious threat to the world’s economy.
and Whereas – the US Government is intent upon solving the country’s economical problems, and
Whereas – one “huge” waste of time and money identified by the Government is the national endowment for the arts’ $150 Million annual budget, and
Whereas – the elimination of funding for the arts will create a surplus of competent story tellers, such as dancers,
Be it therefore resolved that:
The opportunity exists to leverage a Government’s “uninvestment” in the arts by over 66,000%, if all those unemployed artists were instead to be re-purposed as presentation visualization story-tellers, replacing the use of Powerpoint.

As tongue-in-cheek as this presentation may be, there is also a degree of “stranger than fiction” to this proposal, which invites serious consideration.

As John explains in this TED.com blog article, the organizer of the TEDxBrussells2011 event invited John because he was intrigued by the premise of John’s “Dance Your PhD” competition.

While I see that the actual contest winning videos tend to look like classical silent movies, and tend to depend upon the occasional text slide to explain the dance, I find that John’s own illustration of how to use dance to explain a complex physics experiment is quite compelling and effective (see minutes 0:48 to 04:01.)
To some extent, I see this proposed use of dance for visualization as a variant of the TheDoodleRevolution proposal, with the dancers portraying living interactive animated doodles.

While the presentation itself is, on the surface, a deliberate satire (based on Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satirical piece, “A Modest Proposal For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick”) there is also a certain elegance and appeal to this proposal. When we can effectively use imagery to communicate our most powerful ideas in the simplest of ways, using no words at all, then we can truly connect – with each other and with the essence of our ideas; then we can communicate, share, and build on each other’s ideas.

What legitimate practical idea can you take from this modest proposal, and put into action?