Edward Tufte

Edward Tufte

Biography

Edward Rolf Tufte (b. 14 March 1942) is an American statistician and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science at Yale University. Trained in statistics and political science — his early academic work was on quantitative methods in political analysis — he turned in the late 1970s to the graphical presentation of data, and self-published the resulting book after publishers declined to produce it to his specifications. Graphics Press, founded for that purpose, has published all his work since. He has run a one-day course on information design for several decades, attended by tens of thousands of people, and also works as a sculptor.

Key Ideas

• Graphical excellence. Tufte's stated goal for a statistical graphic: to give the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space. Excellence consists in showing the data, and in showing complexity without confusion.
• The data-ink ratio. The proportion of a graphic's ink devoted to displaying data rather than to decoration or structure. Tufte's prescription is to maximise it, then erase redundant data-ink — which yields his characteristic stripped-down forms: the range-frame, the dot-dash plot, gridlines removed rather than emphasised.
• Chartjunk. His term for decoration that adds no information — moiré patterns, heavy grids, three-dimensional effects on two-dimensional data, and what he called the "duck," a graphic so overwhelmed by design that the data disappears.
• The lie factor. A measurable ratio between the size of an effect shown in a graphic and the size of the effect in the data, used to demonstrate that a great deal of published graphics systematically misrepresent.
• Small multiples. Repeating a single graphical design across many panels so that comparison is made by the eye rather than by memory. Tufte regards this as the most powerful device in information design.
• Sparklines. Introduced in Beautiful Evidence (2006): "data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics" that sit inline with text, giving a series its context without a separate figure.
• Escaping flatland. The general problem he identifies: all display surfaces are two-dimensional, while nearly all interesting data is higher-dimensional, and the whole craft consists in representing the second on the first.

The PowerPoint Essay

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2003) argues that the software's default templates impose a low-resolution, hierarchical, bulleted structure that fragments evidence, breaks the relationship between claim and support, and is actively dangerous where reasoning matters. Its central case study is the NASA engineering slide presented during the Columbia shuttle crisis, in which critical uncertainty about foam damage was buried in a nested bullet hierarchy. The essay's specific claims about causation have been challenged, but its argument that presentation formats shape reasoning has been widely accepted.

Selected Works

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983; 2nd ed. 2001)
• Envisioning Information (1990)
• Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (1997)
• The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2003)
• Beautiful Evidence (2006)

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Tufte's subject is the interface between a quantity and a person, which makes his work directly continuous with interface design generally. His central principle — that every element which is not information competes with the information — is the same argument calm technology makes about attention, and the same one behind frictional interfaces: the cost of a design is paid in the viewer's cognition, and most designs do not account for it.

Related Reading

• Calm Technology
• Frictional Interface
• Designing Interactions
• Steve Krug
• Materials

External Links

• Edward Tufte's site