AlexAitken.net

Ed­ward Tufte is Yale Uni­versity Pro­fess­or Emer­it­us of Polit­ic­al Sci­ence, Stat­ist­ics, and Com­puter Sci­ence. Through his work in these do­mains and the four books he has pub­lished on the dis­play and con­sump­tion of data, Tufte has come to be best–re­cog­nized as a mas­ter of in­fograph­ic and visu­al in­ter­face design. In his per­en­ni­al one-day course on Present­ing Data and In­form­a­tion, he teaches his view on ef­fect­ive visu­al com­mu­nic­a­tion through ex­amples drawn from across eras and me­dia.

Three themes re­cur through Tufte’s present­a­tions: a be­lief in the in­tel­li­gence of the con­sumer, an in­dif­fer­ence to ‘mode of pro­duc­tion,’ and a con­vic­tion in min­im­al­ist design. While some thought schools res­ult in the dumb­ing down of data and their vehicles of com­mu­nic­a­tion, Tufte ab­hors the ap­proach for the choices and as­sump­tions it makes. In­stead, he says, our present­a­tion of data sets should con­vey as much un­filtered in­form­a­tion as pos­sible so that con­clu­sions are left to the con­sumer. His take is that, "There’s no such thing as in­form­a­tion over­load. There’s only bad design."

Tufte be­lieves the fun­da­ment­al ques­tion be­hind any data pub­lish­ing ex­er­cise to be ‘how can we dis­play and con­vey this in­form­a­tion?’. Where we might be temp­ted to ask, ‘How can we use graph­ics to dis­play fin­an­cial in­form­a­tion?’ Tufte urges that we ask simply ‘How can we dis­play fin­an­cial in­form­a­tion?’ without the pre-spe­cific­a­tion of mode. In the con­text of com­puters and ap­plic­a­tions, Tufte em­phas­izes the im­port­ance of an ‘app-ag­nost­ic’ ap­proach that pri­or­it­izes the con­tent to be de­livered over the tech­no­lo­gic­al means of de­liv­ery.

And just as tech­no­lo­gies and ap­plic­a­tions are in­vis­ible in a per­fect Tuftean world, so is the design be­hind the visu­al. Tufte pos­its that UI design of­ten goes the way of a noisy cock­tail party, "where par­ti­cipants talk louder and louder so that they can be heard above the oth­ers." As an al­tern­at­ive to this ca­co­phony of ele­ments, he pro­poses the prin­ciple of the "smal­lest ef­fect­ive dif­fer­ence." Ad­her­ing to this, we sidestep an eye candy arms race by con­stantly ask­ing of our UI com­pon­ents, ‘what is the smal­lest mar­gin­al (de-)em­phas­is this ele­ment can em­ploy in or­der to ful­fill its re­quire­ments.’

conferences, minimalism, Tufte