For Yale Professor Edward Tufte, good design means a lot more than a clever illustration or a readable font.
Arguing his case to a capacity audience at the Graduate School's Tercentennial lecture series "In the Company of Scholars" on Nov. 15, Tufte said that good design must be "driven by a deep and intense knowledge, and a deep and intense caring about the content."
Trained in statistics and political science (earning his Ph.D. in the latter field at Yale), Tufte joined the faculty in 1977. His early research and publications focus on data analysis, economics and political policy.
Then, 20-some years ago, Tufte began to devote his energies to the visual display of information. At his retirement last year, he was senior critic in graphic design at the School of Art as well as professor of political science, statistics and computer science.
Tufte has written, designed and self-published three pioneering books on design. The first, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information," explores how to present complex data involving numbers. The second, "Envisioning Information," deals with the challenge of showing three-dimensional, tangible objects on a sheet of paper or a computer screen. The third, "Visual Explanations," considers the display of dynamic, changing information. Tufte says the first book is about numbers; the second, pictures; and the third, verbs. He is working on a fourth book, this one on cognitive art.
In his Tercentennial talk, held in the Law School's Levinson Auditorium, Tufte said that good information design was "clear thinking, made visible," while bad design was "stupidity in action."
"This is a content-driven business," he said. "Most of what happens in any information display depends on the quality and the relevance and the integrity of the content. ... All my work can be seen as an endless defense of content against all those who would screw her over. Against computer programmers, designers, the data manipulators -- all those who would mess up the content. ... My work is secretly about the quality of evidence. Design can never rescue bad content. If your numbers are boring, calling in a 'chartoonist' won't help you. If your words are lying, the finest typography won't help."
The whole point of displaying information in charts, graphs, maps and illustrations, he said, "is to assist thinking, to help people think more clearly. Not surprisingly, every visual display should be designed in accord with the thinking task: making comparisons, showing causality, understanding the multi-variant world."
Using an oversized, two-sided, four-color handout (complete with pop-up) prepared for the occasion, Tufte illustrated instances of good and bad design and outlined the problems inherent in creating effective visual explanations.
One challenge facing the designer, he noted, is that, "Nearly everything interesting that we want to reason about and communicate to others requires the expression of three or more variables. ... We have rich, complex and luscious multi-variant information and 'flatland' display surfaces," like paper and computer screens.
Another challenge to good design deals with "information resolution, data density," said the Yale professor. He pointed, as illustration, to Minard's famous depiction of Napolean's ill-fated march on Moscow. In the display, which combines elements of a chart and a map, Minard conveys such information as the passage of time, the distances traversed, the dimunition of Napoleon's army, the temperature each day of the campaign and more.
"This is 'War and Peace,' as told by a visual Tolstoy," Tufte said, pointing out how the master designer incorporated six variables on a chart "without a lot of mumbo-jumbo. I'm afraid that if some of my colleagues in computer science or sociology were to attempt something like this, there would be a lot of technical jargon."
Tufte then noted that, "The third deep principle of information design is to get your analysis out of 'flatland.' The world we seek to understand is multi-variant, complex, high-dimensional, and therefore our displays should be that way."
Perhaps the biggest challenge, according to Tufte, is to achieve a "complete integration of word, number and image," so that every part is useful and necessary, uncluttered by what the critic calls "display debris."
He sharply criticized many web designs for their inefficiency. "If you take a hard look at your screen, routinely less than half the computer screen is devoted to content," Tufte said. "That's very precious space. It is especially so, because the screen is a low-resolution display device compared to paper, to film, to the glories of the human eye-brain system. We can't afford to waste a pixel on it.
"The measurements are astonishing," he continued. "A great many screens show only 20% content. The other 80% is devoted to operating system imperialism, computer administrative debris, stupid icons, dumb metaphors or just to nothing much at all. As a consequence, ... not much happens on any one screen, and the information is stacked in time. That's known as one-damned-thing-after-another," he joked, adding, "It's hard to make comparisons unless you can reason about things within the eye-span."
For Tufte, the principles of good design are "rooted in the fundamental task of learning from visual experience." And for that reason, they are universal, he contends. "They are indifferent to language or culture or century or gender or the particular mode of information display."
--- By Gila Reinstein
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