Thoughts On Presenting & Design

As I mentioned in a previous article, I attended the Open Government conference in DC.  If you followed my tweets that day, you might remember this one:

If you have to tell the audience in the back that it’ll be hard to read your chart, you’ve got a poorly designed chart. #ogi#ppt

Well, here is the slide in question.  It was presented by Aneesh Chopra, the new federal Chief Technology Officer.  Though well intentioned, the chart was impossible to read or absorb as a member of the audience.

Your challenge:

Redesign the slide to the right so that the information is more readable and, of course, more effectively reinforces the speaker’s message.  To participate:

• Redesign the chart slide to the right as one or more slides in PowerPoint, Keynote, or Impress (OpenOffice)
• Post your submission on SlideShare. Please add the keyword of “cc09″ and submit it to the Chart Make-Over Challenge 2009 group.
• If you also blog about it, feel free to comment below with a link or email me the link at webmaster@mike-pulsifer.org and I’ll post a brief summary here.

The deadline is Noon EST on Sunday, August 16. I’ll link to each submission here shortly after the deadline.

Of course, no chart is any good without the context in which it is presented.  You can watch the recorded presentation at this link (discussion of this chart starts at about 1:50).  For your convenience, a transcript of the relevant portion is below:

Let me be begin with just a phenomenal story about our personal lives.  This is a difficult to see graphic for those in the back, but it conveys a very powerful message.  This time in our life, we are seeing a tremendous increase in the adoption rate of new technologies.  The graphic before you shows how long it took the average American household to adopt an innovation. And you can see over the 30s and 40s as we adopted refrigerators and washing machines and so forth.  It took some time.  The slope of the S-curve, as they say is growing but not as steep as in the current era.  In fact, we’re seeing the adoption of cellphones as an example exceeding those of homes with dishwashers.  In fact, if you think about the context, there will be newer and newer services and products that emerge the year post this evaluation, you’ll see the same rapidity.  At the same time, we’ll acknowledge we’re at the infancy of this digital era.

Aneesh Chopra – Federal CTO