Thinking Presentations

A screen shot of one of my presentations from a few years ago. Made with Keynote

I am sitting here looking over my colleagues shoulder, he is building a site map and a bunch of content ideas for a new website. Surprisingly however he is using powerpoint to do this not some specialised app. Interestingly I have in fact used a similar tool, Apple's Keynote, to do the same sort of work in the past. So, I was a little puzzled about why this actually happens.

Various obvious reasons come to mind, one being that in our work here at KAIST we have presentations almost every day and hence use presentation tools all the time anyway. I in fact use Keynote even to prepare ideas for discussions where no presentation will actually be made.

Another factor however, is the fact that presentation tools as they exist today are a little like WYSIWYG interfaces for building idea frameworks and hence can be used in a lot of settings. I think this could be taken a few steps further.

On a related note over the past half dozen years I have thought about the possibility of a computer interface that is more like a presentation at all times. So, everything you do is sort of always ready to be seen, but also always valid and useful to communicate.

I think with presentation like tools we do, or should get the following 3 basic modes; idea collection, organisation and communication. These each have various core features that I think are important and I list bellow.

1. Idea Collection
1. Data Dropping - ability to quickly add data
2. Quick Capture - ability to create nice text or other media fast
3. Sketching - this includes typical sketching and the sketching in the more abstract sense
2. Organisation
1. Data Types - ability to take data and group it or render it or do something to it which is useful quickly. Like Smart Graphics from Powerpoint though I think they could do a lot more with that idea. 
2. Trend Visualisation - a way to see how things are flowing and to design flow
3. Communication
1. Data Pulling - ability to take data out quickly, easily, and conveniently - Keynote is exceptionally good at this. 
2. Pretty Core - things have to naturally be presentable, designing a presentation style is a whole different project, it should be made easy
3. Communicative Features - features that actually enrich the communication and storytelling value. Perhaps Scott McCloud can say more about this. I really like the idea of non slide based communications and I often emulate this in my presentations. 

I think perhaps what I really want is not actually a presentation tool but more generally a thinking/communicating tool which would be really great for designers of various sorts as well as probably many other people. I have looked at a lot of tools branded in this space and I think they get some things right but nobody makes me sing. Some I like are Compendium and PersonalBrain but these are really tailored for a slightly different process and are absolutely not as pretty as required. 

I know there is a lot more I could write about these things but perhaps I will later. Ideas, additions or suggestions?