|
Sifting through my mail one day, mixed in with junk and bills was a rather unpretentious envelope, inviting only because it was so simple. I opened it unimpressed and stared at the letter a bit baffled and disoriented. The letter appeared audaciously typed. There was accurate logistics and a non-superfluous map to the hotel where Edward Tufte, the man the New York Times heralds "the da Vinci of data" was going to have his one-day legendary "Presenting Data and Information" seminar. Couldn't they spare a sexier invite? I've gotten more provocative invites to my department meetings. I brushed it aside; ignorantly unaware that perhaps this was an introduction to the goal of Tufte's work, "Simple design, intense content" and his venerable fight for clarity and truth. In retrospect, what other information, than the logistics and map, did I need and use from this invite to an intelligent talk?
The high linear density of attendees to the workshop astounded me. Rows and rows of chairs, much too close for comfort, filled with a diverse motley crew ranging from a gangly Yale-bound high school senior, squirrelly computer science wonks and professors, to at-surface enviously put-together corporate execs. These were his followers leafing through the three books provided to us and anticipating his arrival. A queue formed at the front of the ballroom and as a man, donned in clothing comparatively less pretentious than the invite to this event, sauntered in, one could almost hear chanting as if the Dalai Lama had arrived. The line now hugged two walls of this incredibly large ballroom as more zombied into queue-formation after realizing this was an autograph session. I was certain this was a cultish experience.
Three books and a poster of the French engineer Charles Joseph Minard's 1861 encapsulation of Napoleon's Russian campaign in hand, I joined the endless queue thinking I had nothing to lose and everything to gain from this visionary experience.
Cullen Murphy, managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly writes that Tufte did not explicitly spell out his ultimate intentions in that first volume of his trilogy, but it has turned out that the whole series has been produced according to a precise schema-as he now indicates in the introduction to Visual Explanations (1997), which was just published by his company, Graphics Press. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983) had been devoted to pictures of numbers, he explains-"how to depict data and enforce statistical honesty" whether the subject is traffic deaths or the distribution of galaxies. The second book in the series, Envisioning Information (1990), was about pictures of nouns-that is, about representational rather than numerical reality: the depiction of cartographic information, diagrams, and signage. (What's the best way to show sunspot activity, for example, or the working of a subway system?) The third book, Visual Explanations, is about pictures of verbs-that is, about displays that illustrate dynamic processes and can therefore function as explanatory narratives.
Edward Tufte rose from his signing chair, and with very little introduction and a blatant lack of a PowerPoint presentation, in a nanosecond, with a charming yet slightly brutally arresting manner, he had the audience captured, entrenched in a dissertation of and sermon-like counseling on the fundamental strategies of information design; jargon kept at a minimum. His guidance spanned from attributing authorship, forcing visual comparisons, and using the millions of color hues rationally. The main entrée was his continuing discussion of the Nine Grand Principles of Design. The appetizing teasers throughout this delicious impeccable presentation were rare books carried about by Tufte's surgeon-gloved assistant-including a coveted copy of Euclid's pop-up book Geometry (1570).
He capped the day revering the power of design with a review of how the Challenger disaster could have been avoided with truth and clarity in the presentation of the technical data. The man and his subject were so moving, infinitely spiritual; the day passed like this singular paragraph describing this visionary moment, without notice and far too quickly.
Reignited about the potential of truthful information design, I walked away still mesmerized from this visionary moment with a mantra that I solemnly pledge to as I'm inspired to revisit my work in mathematics visualization: at the very least "do no harm," - a message Tufte embedded throughout his delightfully thought-provoking presentation.
Visit his site http://www.edwardtufte.com/ to partake in a titillating flavor of Edward Tufte's vision.
 Madeleine Chowdhury, Mesa Community College
| 
