Edward Tufte Seminar
“Does this guy have some kind of cult?”
We’d just seated ourselves in the packed auditorium, and my colleague was eyeing the dozens of glazed-eyed autograph-seekers lined up for their moment with Edward Tufte. His seminar “Presenting Data and Information” had sold out well in advance, and the place was quietly buzzing with conversation and — my colleague had it right — a kind of excitedly cultish devotion.
I’d never seen the man in person, and didn’t even know how to pronounce his name: Tuft? Tuff-ta? Tuff-tee? Whatever — the main draw for me was the little cardboard suitcase containing all four of Tufte’s info-design works. All four!
Tufte is an avuncular, earnestly likable fellow with bushy white eyebrows appropriate for guru or academic. Academic he is, having taught at both Princeton and Yale, and guru as well — from the publication of his brilliant first book “Envisioning Information” back in 1990, his exalted master status was almost assured.
Master of what? Well … it’s really all there in the title of that first book. Tufte is all about techniques for portraying piles of complex data in visual form. Charts, diagrams, maps, tables, guides, directories … the “flatland” world of cognitive art.
The first half of the day-long seminar was much the more practically useful to me, and I’ll save you the 4-figure price tag by summarizing Tufte’s approach in a single line, slightly paraphrased. Ready?
To clarify or simplify, add detail. Pare away that which does not communicate, but do whatever it takes to visually communicate what you need to explain.
People interact with complex data all the time — the stock pages, the sports section — and the misguided notion that simplifying data by reducing it, removing important bits which might be confusing — simply reduces the amount of information available. The thing that makes this most appealing to me personally — apart from the fact that it works — is that it assumes that people aren’t idiots. Our eye-brain interface in incredibly powerful, capable of apprehending and processing hundreds of gigabytes of visual information in a single glance. There is no confusing information, my friends. only poorly designed graphics.
A plethora of video and physical props supported his conclusions — the most noteworthy of which was an original 14th century edition of Euclid’s “Elements of Geometrie”, walked reverently around the hall by a white gloved underling. Who knew it was a pop-up book? Heavyweight names sprinkled throughout the presentation included Galileo, Dr. Richard Feynman, and T.S Eliot.
Although substantially less useful, the second half was alternately entertaining (a two hour rant about the Evils of PowerPoint, in which Bill Gates’ clunky slideware was implicated in nothing less than the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle), and dull (focused on techniques for giving corporate presentations, something that — thank the heavens — lies outside my bailiwick).
And in conclusion, apropos of nothing, really — a slideshow of Tufte’s garden of elegantly awkward metal sculptures, accompanied by chamber music.
I walked out of the seminar a bit dazed from the onslaught of information, but unconvinced that I’d learned anything I didn’t already know. But last night I was pondering the concept of “adding detail” to simplify or clarify, and realized that one of my current projects would benefit tremendously from this idea! A rack card for Roshambo Winery was suffering from a poorly drawn, confusing map inherited from a previous designer, and though the project was already scheduled to go to press, I realized I had to act. I split it up into multiple smaller maps, each associated with specific driving directions. The result? More detail, more complexity, but much more clarity.
I never did learn how to pronounce his last name.
