Ofamind Informer: A New Information Design for Briefings and Presentations

PowerPoint has emerged as the de facto tool in military, business and academic briefings and presentations. Still, organizations have increasingly called into question PowerPoint’s limitations even as its usage has become widespread. The technology has been criticized for being overused, for simplifying complex ideas, and even for contributing to Space Shuttle failures. Overcoming these limitations requires radically rethinking the way that briefings and presentations are authored, disseminated and reused. We have developed a new model for authoring presentations and briefings called Ofamind Informer that has the potential to improve the speed and quality of those presentations by enhancing the authoring process and preserving the information context that informed the author. The methods we plan to use build on deep research in cognitive psychology, human-computer interaction and information design, and will result in early proof-of-concept designs and prototypes that demonstrate key functions of the proposed system.