Heralding clarity in a cluttered world of information
By Alice Rawsthorn International Herald Tribune
SUNDAY, AUGUST 20, 2006
It has happened to us all. You are sitting in a PowerPoint presentation trying - and probably failing - not to yawn as slide after slide flashes across the screen.
You may blame your boredom on the speaker, but Edward Tufte has another explanation. Microsoft PowerPoint, he believes, is a badly designed medium for communicating the information people need to make informed decisions. That is why it is so dull.
Tufte blames PowerPoint for everything from tedious business presentations to declining standards of teaching. Claiming that the application "disrupts and trivializes," he even accuses it of being a contributing factor to the death of seven astronauts in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster. Tufte argues that the use of PowerPoint during technical briefings unwittingly encouraged NASA officials to underestimate the risk that pieces of foam insulation could break away and hit the shuttle - which is what happened when the shuttle re-entered the Earth's atmosphere.
Whether or not you agree with him, Tufte cannot be dismissed as a crank who has endured one too many PowerPoint presentations. He is professor emeritus at Yale University, where he taught statistical evidence, analytical design and political economy, and the author of a series of influential books on the history of information design. The latest addition to the series, "Beautiful Evidence," is the product of nine years of research and writing in which Tufte applies many of his ideas about good - and bad - information design to the presentation of evidence, which he defines as "information used to explain something accurately."
To his devotees, Tufte is a visionary, who, by encouraging us to communicate information more efficiently, has played a decisive role in raising standards in an important, but neglected, area of design. We depend on our ability to interpret information accurately in hundreds of decisions we make each day.
Tufte is an eccentric figure, who founded his own publishing house, Graphics Press, in the leafy Connecticut town of Cheshire, where he lives, rather than conform to the conventions of the publishing industry. The cover of "Beautiful Evidence" features photographs of his golden retriever, Max, diving, even though they are not discussed in the book. He has his critics; notably the digital design lobby, which has accused Tufte of being overcritical of computer-based design, although he doesn't seem to be any less scathing about shoddy design in print.
Entertaining as Tufte's tirades can be, the charm of his books is in his skill at identifying inspiring examples of good design, often in the least likely places. He is as excited by an intelligently designed railway timetable or police instruction manual as by an exquisite 16th-century Albrecht Dürer engraving. "Beautiful Evidence" is crammed with his discoveries.
Among Tufte's favorite historic exemplars of presenting evidence is "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," the illustrated novel originally published in 1499 that he describes as "lusciously visual" and commends for placing "the right words next to the right images." For the same reasons he praises "Sidereus Nuncius," the 1610 book in which Galileo revealed his discovery of new stars, moon craters and the satellites of Jupiter.
Tufte also champions unsung design heroes in "Beautiful Evidence," just as he did in his previous books. One is J. Hawkesworth for his 1823 engraving of The Vigilante slave ship for the Religious Society of Friends in London. Hawkesworth showed how cruelly the slaves were treated, crammed in the hold, shackled in pairs or squeezed together beside the captain's spacious wine locker. "Each detail makes the image more horrifying," Tufte observes.
Another favorite is Charles Joseph Minard, the 19th-century engineer who devoted his retirement to perfecting the figurative map as a means of illustrating statistics. At the age of 88, Minard published such a map showing the death toll during Napoleon's 1812-13 invasion of Russia. By depicting the French Army in the form of a stripe, the width of which corresponds to the number of soldiers, Minard demonstrated over time the deaths from each defeat and the icy Russian winter. When the army returned to France, the original wide stripe reflecting 422,000 soldiers had been reduced to a narrow slither of 10,000 survivors.
Equally inspiring is Pierre Boucher's design of a 1947 skiing manual, "How to Ski by the French Method," written by Émile Allais. By illustrating his photographs of ski experts in action with back and red line drawings, Boucher demonstrates how a skier should respond to different grades of slope.
Tufte's own contribution to evidence design is the sparkline, a combination of words and graphs that illustrates complex changes over time. In "Beautiful Evidence" he contrasts the clarity of the sparkline, and his other exemplars, with poor evidence design.
One of his targets is Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the chart he drew to illustrate the development of Cubism and Abstraction with arrows indicating the influence of one artistic movement on another, such as constructivism on the Bauhaus. Tufte suggests that by adding double-headed arrows, Barr could have presented a fuller picture that would have allowed for the interchange of ideas.
But his prime target is Microsoft PowerPoint, the subject of an entire chapter titled "Pitching Out Corrupts Within." He rails against what he calls PP Phluff, the frames and logos that tend to clutter PowerPoint slides. But rather than simply attacking PowerPoint, Tufte has analyzed its shortcomings. The crux of his argument is that a PowerPoint slide is so much lower in resolution than paper or the computer screen that too little information can be included. An average PowerPoint slide contains 40 words, whereas people typically read 300 to 1,000 words a minute. No wonder we are bored.
Tufte reckons that the bottom 10 percent of speakers probably benefit from using PowerPoint because it at least "forces them to have points," and that the top 10 percent are able to overcome its limitations. As for the remaining 80 percent, he suggests that these speakers print their thoughts on paper handouts instead.
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