The minimum we should hope for with any display technology is that it should do no harm.
Category Archive: Edward Tufte
There are many true statements about complex topics that are too long to fit on a PowerPoint slide.
I was writing a chapter of Beautiful Evidence on the subject of the sculptural pedestal, which led to my thinking about what’s up on the pedestal – the great leader.
I do believe that there are some universal cognitive tasks that are deep and profound – indeed, so deep and profound that it is worthwhile to understand them in order to design our displays in accord with those tasks.
The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly – to develop strategies of seeing and showing.
My father worked for governments all his life as an engineer and public works director.
I hope that I am generous and tolerant, but certainly on the intellectual side I think that there are discoverable truths, and some things that are closer approximations to the truth than others.
That is to say, nature’s laws are causal; they reveal themselves by comparison and difference, and they operate at every multivariate space/time point.
A curious consequence is that I have become a minor celebrity.
The speculative part of my work is that these particular cognitive tasks – ways of thinking analytically – are tied to nature’s laws.