When reading Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte I came a crossed an interview that he gave about his book as well as many of the issues that he mentions in his other works. I have included one of the many parts that was relevant to Information Architecture, however the entire interview is worth reading.
TCQ: You have a new book coming out this year: Beautiful Evidence. Could you tell us about this project and its relationship to your earlier work?
Tufte: The title represents what I have been thinking about for seven or eight years now—issues of scientific evidence and issues of beauty. The leading edge in evidence presentation is in science; the leading edge in beauty is in high art. To see the future of analytical design, read Nature and Science, which routinely publish the remarkable visual work of practicing scientists (who have enormous amounts of data, who are bright and well funded, and who often have something to tell the world). Beautiful Evidence follows a growing concern in my work: assessing the quality of evidence and of finding out the truth. The other side is that sometimes displays of evidence have, as a byproduct, extraordinary beauty. I mean beautiful here in two senses: aesthetic or pretty but also amazing, wonderful, powerful, never before seen. In emphasizing evidential quality and beauty, I also want to move the practices of analytical design far away from the practices of propaganda, marketing, graphic design, and commercial art. The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly—
to develop strategies of seeing and showing. This seeing is not about “Aren’t these pictures of molecules beautiful?” Rather, the point is to recognize the tightness between seeing and thinking on an intellectual level not just a metaphorical level. That tightness is expressed in the very physiology of the eye: the retina is made from brain cells; the brain begins at the back of the eye. Seeing turns into thinking right there.
TCQ: How does this connection between seeing and thinking play itself out in Beautiful Evidence?
Tufte: Beautiful Evidence is about the theory and practice of analytical design. The purpose of analytical displays of evidence is to assist thinking. Consequently, in constructing displays of evidence, the first question is, “What are the thinking tasks that these displays are supposed to serve?” The central claim of the book is that effective analytic designs entail turning thinking principles into seeing principles. So, if the thinking task is to understand causality, the task calls for a design principle: “Show causality.” If a thinking task is to answer a question and compare it with alternatives, the design principle is: “Show
comparisons.” The point is that analytical designs are not to be decided on their convenience to the user or necessarily their readability or what psychologists or decorators think about them; rather, design
architectures should be decided on how the architecture assists analytical thinking about evidence.
In the book, I lay out eight principles of analytic design that derive from this theoretical base, and then I show how these principles lead to a set of new designs and favorite old designs that try to set standards for most all evidence displays. The book includes displays called sparklines/wordgraphs, a new way to show time series data. There is also material on an old idea now called mapped images, as well as displays on parallel mapping, causal arrow-linking lines, cladistic diagrams, and evolutionary trees. There are ideas about how time series, flow charts, and all scientific images should be redone. Another long chapter concerns rhetorical ploys in evidence presentations—ploys such as saying, “Our results are conservative” or “Our results are significant at the .000001 level”—a kind of self-congratulation by the researcher. There are probably about twenty of these rhetorical ploys.
Overall I found this interview to be very interesting. Tufte is thorough with his responses which gave a level of background information to his book. This contextual information, I found to be very helpful in understanding Beautiful Evidence. It was also interesting to learn more about his reasoning behind the topics that he chose to cover in Beautiful Evidence and why he chose to self publish the book. The interview also discusses topics that were not present in this book but were in his other works.
Zachry, M., Thralls. C. An Interview with Edward R. Tufte. Technical Communication Quarterly, 13(4), 447–462.
