Slashdot Mirror
Edward Tufte Talks information Design
BoredStiff writes "The Weekend Edition of NPR ran a story on Edward Tufte — the outspoken critic of PowerPoint presentations — he has been described by The New York Times as "The Leonardo da Vinci of Data." Since 1993, thousands have attended his day-long seminars on Information Design. Tufte's most recent book is filled with hundreds of illustrations that demonstrate one concept: good design is timeless, while bad design can be a matter of life and death."
Tufte is absolutely one of the world experts on presentation of design. We have absolutely strived to adopt his principles of data design and presentation in almost all of our work and its paid off in terms of data interpretability. My dissertation work was presented for two years in a row at our big vision meeting getting no attention until I used some of Tufte's principles in presentation of data and the third year I had several hundred of the worlds scientists in vision research gasping, oooohing and aaaahing. It was awesome. Of course Keynote and a cool animation of a degenerating retina helped, but still......
His books are required reading in our lab and I encourage everyone who is involved in presentation of data of any kind to spend some time with his books.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Edward Tufte's site.
Gettysburg address in powerpoint: http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/
- Don't have anything to say and or
- Whose words aren't truthful
For these people in either or both the above categories, PowerPoint can be a huge g-dsend, allowing them to execute a praise-generating (or, sales-generating) presentation that, had the person followed Tufte's advice, would have (rightfully) bombed.PowerPoint: stretching Truth and Content since 1997.
People ready software, indeed. Lots of people have nothing to say or lie when they say it.
Example: the Vista project manager giving a status report on features implemented, bugs solved and milestones met (this needs "filler") and projections for hitting delivery dates (this needs "less than truthful"). PowerPoint to the rescue!
Seriously, though. In Tufte's world, those without something truthful to say simply would say nothing. I like that world. But, I live in the Internet Age and know that world, perfect as it is, does not exist.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Reading his thoughts on borders (scroll down) reminds one of a flaw of Wikipedia's HTML/CSS design. "Strong frames ... produce content-diminishing effects," says Tufte. I seldom see borders around tables or equations in textbooks, and it does look very clean. On the other hand, Wikipedia's CSS styles place borders and underlines superfluously about everything, from blocks of code, images and underneath headings. It seems the Wikipedia web designers try too much to make "pretty pages" when, to an academic eye they look ugly and cluttered.
Every page element should signify some meaning; a heading should be underlined to distinguish it, but only if it is not otherwise distinguished by font size, vertical whitespace or some other typesetting. One element variation should suffice, as long as it's a bold change. A table should have borders only if the data are unclear otherwise. It's sad that as useful as Wikipedia can be, it still suffers from so many flaws. Wikipedians could learn much from Tufte, or from any study of technical communication.
I imagine that many people will get on and post all sorts of breathless praise about Tufte. This is well deserved. His design sense is first-rate, but what's really impressive to me about him is his emphasis on intellectual honesty and detail.
...) that lives up to Tufte's ideas about maximizing data ink and minimizing junk. While I really admire the effects that Tufte and some of his acolytes achieve, quite frequently it seems that they achieve these effects by painstaking work in drawing or desktop publishing packages. More than once, I wince at some bit of graphics or interface that I've designed, thinking, "Damn, that's an embarrassing bit of work for someone who has read Tufte, but I just don't have the time or skills to fix it..."
:-) ), papers and books.
What I really would like to see is a new widget set (with lots of data presentation support - obviously most of the widgets should be quantitative displays) and a style written in some already well-supported widget set (Qt, Swing,
This makes it a lot harder for schlubs like me who don't really have skills in this area, and don't have time to develop them. Further, it makes it more or less impossible to achieve these sort of fine effects programmatically - I'd like to see interactive displays that are informed by his sort of design sense, not just nice presentations (using hand-outs, of course
If anyone is interested in this - or knows of systems that go any decent way in this direction - please post or e-mail me at:
geoff AT cs DOT usyd DOOOOT edu DoT au
(sorry about the stylized "dot" silliness, but something tells me that the traditional foo AT bar DOT com is probably already being mined by spammers - or will be soon).
I think the standard Tufte line on this, is that if a 'few words' are all you're going to get up there, then why not just say the words and leave the screen blank?
... or some low-information drivel like that.
As a side bonus, you'll get eye contact from your audience rather than the disconcerting experience of looking out at a sea of faces who are all looking slightly to one side, peering at:
- Standard Tufte line
* high-data essential
- Good to have eye contact
But on the whole I agree that PowerPoint isn't inherently evil if used as a way of doing a nice slide-show of reasonably detailed elements (graphs, pictures, movies). The only problem is that the resolution of projectors is still pretty wretched compared to printed graphs.
And I am the Jackson Pollack of data! They don't let me near the spreadsheets much anymore though....
1) No matter what my company says, they get a white background presentation with a small logo in the bottom left corner of each slide. I refuse to use background templates of "company colors" 2) No crap on the borders. I can't stand the waste of space that borders use up. I would rather make my table 20% bigger than have a pretty pattern of lines off-setting the slide 3) Text titles no bigger than 36 font, text subject matter no smaller than 24 font 4) Preferably 1, if I must then 2 plots to a slide 5) No test describing the plots on the slide, I should be doing that 6) No bar charts! I hate bar charts 7) Bold primary colors, none of this 'earth shades' 8) Plots imported from a graphing package. I use Sigmaplot of Origin. Excel is the armpit of graphing.
Bottomline is that if you have to use sounds and animations to capture the audiences attention, you're not doing a good job as a presenter, or the audience is just plain not interested in your subject (which happens).
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning 'fast' or 'quick', so it does at least partly describe the function of the software. You might complain that not everyone is familiar with Hawaaian words, but then not everyone is familiar with baseball terminology from which you derived "BullPen". Open source software tends to have a very cross-cultural, cross-language audience. Do you suggest that projects rename themselves for each language they target? Projects are named for marketing purposes, to be memorable and appealing. It sounds very much like you just hate the idea of marketing, so I will rename you CrankyBastard, which I think we can all agree is memorable, appealing and accurately describes you!
"It's Dot Com!"
Tufte's reputation is usually boiled down here to "the world's foremost critic of PowerPoint" but that's hardly what he's about. He's a wizard at explaining how to present data more effectively, not just an unusually articulate "M$ teh sux!!!" nitwit.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Here's a link to a long interview with Tufte._ 5.pdf
:-)
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/s15427625tcq1304
The interviewer asked him about why he self-published:
"After moving to Yale University, I finished the manuscript in
1982. A publisher was interested but planned to print only 2,000
copies and to charge a very high price, contrary to my hopes for
a wide readership. I also sought to design the book so as to make
it self-exemplifying--that is, the physical object itself would
reflect the intellectual principles advanced in the book. Publishers
seemed appalled at the prospect that an author might
govern design."
So, here's a guy writing a book on how to present information and the publisher thinks he knows better. LOL. Naturally, Tufte chose to keep control of the process. In other words, we are to do as he does. (as opposed to do as he says.) This approach reminds me of a lecture our principal used to give. The lecture was on how to lecture. He gave seven different techniques. He delivered each technique by using that technique. This is what Tufte refers to as self-exemplifying. Our library doesn't know it yet but they are buying copies of his books.
Yes, I *am* saying that I used a presentation software package, yet in using that package, I kept the "chartjunk" to a minimum, used graphics effectively where appropriate and used simple data and clear presentation to deliver the message.
This can be done with Powerpoint, Keynote and a variety of other packages. However, the problem with them is that people often use things like 3D graphs where inappropriate, fill up screens with lots of little text whereupon they say "don't read this, I just wanted to show......". Also the distracting use of transitions that flip and pop and such and cute little sounds that do nothing for the message except cloud it are common things that folks like Tufte and interestingly enough David Byrne have also commented on.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Bad design is giving a program an insufferablely cute name that does absolutely nothing to describe its function.
Actually, Tuffte talkes about this very phenomina using terms familiar to anyone in design: affordances. Affordances are learned aspects of a particular domain. Affordances, as Tufte has touched upon in his design for information clairty are to be used, not avoided. Everyone had to learn what MP3 meant. Everyone had to learn how to read a chart (or, if they weren't a jock on a fast road to CEO at Daddy's firm, fail High School geometry.)
For example, I am a big fan of functional naming. Instead of a variable named $CORNED_BEEF I would use $HASH_PIVOT. However, if you are an ESL like 95% of the world, it won't matter what you call your variables becuase the non-native aspect will always stand in the way. You will have to learn what those identifiers mean and then remember that.
The same holds for software. The 'lingua franca' of Computer Science, hence much programming and software marketing, is English. The language of musical notation is Italian. From study I know what agitato and determinato are. But it does not help me that they are Italian for agitated and determined, respectfully, because I had to learn their definitions in English. If I spoke Italian I could have pulled the names for those musical styles out of thin air just listening to music. However, they are just words attached to those concepts for me, abstract labels and nothing more. However, I do not see any difference between this hundreds of year old phenomina and sotware naming.
But TWike like OggVorbis, is a ridiculous name that actually hurts the program by alienating people from exploring what it does after they see or hear the Program name referred to in some random context.
I don't think we'd get a lot of benefit if TWiki had been called VersionGroupwareType003.
People hunting online for MP3s might dissagree. After all, MP3 just says 'music file' doesn't it? MP3 is a Motion-Picture Experts Group layer 3 file. Yes, I looked that up. I might think that has something to do with the movies, but music? Wiki means HTML TEXTAREA editor with special markup for you web browser. (Really the groupware aspect of Wikis is kinda of a dominating secondary effect.) Ogg Vorbis stands for Vorbis encoded audio inside an Ogg format container.
This is far from the point thougt. Tufte's expertise is to spot on eliminate distracting garbage in a design. Powerpoint is very good at packing in garbage, hence his critisim of it. Simple, silly names are appripirate when differentiating. When they are clutter, like bullets points that take up 40% of the slide, names won't serve this purpose. For evern search.com there is a competitor not wanting to lose mindshare (or trademark infringement lawsuits) by having a very similar name. But pardon me, I have more google'ing to do before I can flesh out that point.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."