Edward Tufte's essay arguing that PowerPoint's design forces the fragmentation and dumbing-down of information — and contributed to the organizational failures that led to the Columbia shuttle disaster.
The PowerPoint indictment: Tufte argues that PowerPoint's bullet-point structure forces hierarchical fragmentation of information, creates the appearance of analytical thought without the substance, and makes it impossible to show data with the density and context needed for serious decisions. His Columbia analysis: the NASA engineer's report on foam strike damage was presented in PowerPoint slides that buried the key numbers — the foam's mass — in sub-bullets where it couldn't be properly evaluated. A bullet point cannot convey the weight of a safety-critical number the way a table or narrative can.
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