Edward Tufte course review: “One visionary day” WIRED

August 10, 2016  |  staff
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Edward Tufte course review, WIRED

ONE VISIONARY DAY by Peter Myers

His insights lead to new levels of understanding both for creators and viewers of visual display.

Source: WIRED

Many are fluent in the language of technology. Few, however, speak as eloquently as Edward Tufte, whose theories of information design not only illuminate, they inspire. In a full-day seminar, Tufte, author of the classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, uses maps, graphs, charts, and tables to communicate what prose alone cannot. He is to information designers what The New Yorker once was to writers: a model of clarity and craftsmanship. His counsel ranges from the importance of attributing authorship to the responsible use of the 16 million colors at our disposal. “Above all,” he pleads, “do no harm.”

Tufte course Presenting Data and Information (now as an online video course Analyzing/Presenting   Data/Information)

I left the seminar with useful advice (“Force visual comparisons,” “Integrate all data”). Tufte bundles his critiques with proposed solutions that serve as models for our own designing. The real benefit of Tufte in person is witnessing his passion for ethics. To listen to him review how the Challenger disaster could have been averted, had well-intentioned engineers done a better job of presenting their case, is to hear a man who believes in the power of design.

Given that the heart of his enterprise is statistics (of which he’s a professor at Yale), one might worry about “lognormal distributions” and “trimetric projections.” This would be a mistake. Tufte keeps jargon to a minimum. His insights lead to new levels of understanding both for creators and viewers of visual display.

What makes Tufte most persuasive are his works themselves: His books and his seminar embody his belief that “good design is clear thinking made visible.”

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  • Graphics Press staff says:

    “The Information Sage: Meet Edward Tufte, the graphics guru to the power elite who is revolutionizing how we see data.” THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY

    http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/mayjune-2011/the-information-sage/

    Edward Tufte’s many goverment data presentations in Washington, DC, including his presidential appointment to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel and work on recovery.gov. https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses

    “One day in the spring of 2009, Edward Tufte, the statistician and graphic design theorist, took the train from his home in Cheshire, Connecticut, to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with a few members of the Obama administration. A few weeks earlier, he had received a phone call from Earl Devaney, a former inspector general in the Department of the Interior, who is best known for leading that agencys investigation of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Devaney had recently been appointed head of the Recovery Act Accountability and Transparency Board, the body created by the Obama administration to keep track of the $780 billion in federal stimulus money that has spread out across the country.

    Whereas Devaney once led a team of professional investigators responsible for sniffing out waste, fraud, and abuse, he was now faced with a rather different, but related, task: designing a Web site. In the stimulus bill, Congress had called for the creation of user-friendly visual presentations of data that would allow the American public to watch over the disbursement of the giant funding package. This wasnt exactly familiar territory for Devaney, a career lawman. Perhaps Tufte could offer some advice?

    And so, that April, in an office building blocks from the White House, Tufte spent a few hours with Devaney looking at sketches of some of the displays the board was preparing. Devaney showed Tufte a prototype of Recovery.gov, the site that catalogs all the projects funded with federal stimulus money around the country. Thinking about it now, Devaney remembers that the proposed pages were full of classic Web site gobbledygook, with lots of simple pie charts and bar graphs. Tufte took one look at the Web site mockups that the boards designer had prepared and pronounced them intellectually impoverished.

    It was a classic Tufte moment: a spontaneous and undiplomatic assessment that immediately struck everyone in the room, even the designer himself, as undeniably true. The site would get a wholesale redesign. The model, as Tufte explained it, should be the Web site of a major newspaper, with Devaney and his staff as reporters and editors. I told them that it isn’t an annual report, Tufte told me later. It shouldnt look stylish or slick. Its about facts. As Tufte and Devaney talked, a number of staffers gathered in the hall, waiting for the meeting to finish. The guys from the IT department had lined up outside my door to shake his hand and say they met the guy, Devaney remembers.”

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