The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

I don't see how this has anything to do with PowerPoint. There wasn't clear communication; the medium was completely incidental to that. They could have been writing on a chalkboard and had a communication failure, does that mean that chalkboards should be blamed in that case?

Because the medium is not conducive to dense amount of technical information that readers are expected to use to make or understand decisions. Other similar mediums like a chalkboard were not singled out because the problem was identified with PowerPoint specifically. And it wasn't a choice of mediums all with similar problems, but slides vs papers. From the article,

> “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”

But the problem, if anything, was that too much dense information was conveyed at all. Based on the analysis in the post, of the engineers had replaced that slide with one that said "Don't go forward with reentry", that might have saved lives better than any change in medium. To be clear, I'm in favor of abolishing PowerPoint for any non-ephemeral use, but the problem here was focus and framing of the info.

I agree completely. My deck would have been:

Slide 1: 48-point font

  Don't go forward with reentry

Slide 2: 24-point font

  * Our foam collision dataset from experimentation only included pieces below X cu in.

  * Evidence points to this piece being at least Y cu in - 200 times more massive

  * Catastrophic damage to the wing cannot be ruled out

This would have been a great PowerPoint, and I'm not convinced handing them only an academic paper with dozens of pages of facts and figures would have had the effect that my above deck would have had.