[lostcolony]

Tufte is not an employee of NASA. He is an employee of Yale, and a thought leader in information design. HE was the one saying the slide design is poor, and doing so not in the interest of assigning blame, but in the interest of highlighting ways to communicate better.

To say that "the slide doesn't have any issues" is laughable on the face of it. But it's immaterial; your claim is that "NASA just ignored the engineers from Boeing" rather than "NASA didn't understand the engineers from Boeing". Communication is a two party process, and believe it or not, NASA isn't actually incentivized to take risks that lead to loss of life and damages public perception of them; it's far more likely they didn't understand the stakes, and looking at the slide from that perspective, it's very easy to see why they would not have understood the stakes even if the Boeing engineers did.

[giantg2]

I understand that he's not a NASA employee. Do you think it's fair to claim that the slide killed 7 people? I don't. Could it be worded better or have a better layout - sure. But there's no problem with that slide that would support the claim that 7 people died because of it. The information was there.

As you said, it is a 2 way street. Slides are accessories. Do you have the conversation that unfolded during this slide and presentation? Did the audience ask questions about things they didn't understand?

Is there even any evidence that NASA didn't know about the damage or had a rescue plan?

You claim they wouldn't have taken the risk, yet if I remember correctly they had no rescue plan and gave a relatively low (70%ish maybe) survival rate. Low level employees did raise concerns about severity of the damage. This seems to support the idea rather the communication between the vendor and NASA was sufficient since some NASA employees shared the same view.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2271525/It-better-d...

[bumby]

There was serious consideration to sending Atlantis as a rescue mission as Columbia was not in a position capable of rendezvousing with the ISS to use the later as a lifeboat. To your point, subsequent missions were required to have a formal rescue mission outlined.

[andi999]

Agree. Also where is the executive summary for that slide on that slide?

[logifail]

> Also where is the executive summary for that slide on that slide?

Q: Shouldn't every PowerPoint slide be an executive summary? PowerPoint can be a terrible way to [attempt to] present detail.

[ziml77]

I believe they were using that question to point out the absurdity of making a slide that long by suggesting that it is made even longer with a summary of itself.