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September 19, 2007
Micro/Macro Readings - Andy
The most striking thing to me about the reading from Tufte, was the notion that information doesn't need to be pared down. The notion that information can be presented in it's entirety is definitely contrary to my preconceived notions of "Good Design" or "Simple Design", but at the same time, it makes sense. It's easy to see how people can become overwhelmed by information when the information is presented as a shotgun blast of 1's and 0's (as in websites on the internet, which most people are intimidated by), rather than a scalable structure, as in the examples from the reading.
I think the most important concept that the reading helped me realize, is that our capacity to store and hold information grows exponentially faster than our capacity to intelligently display and organize said information. I think an excellent example of this is email. Some people get 100 emails a day, and only very recently have people started to recognize that its a completely different beast than actual mail. The cost of sending email is so much lower, that it necessarily comes in torrents rather than the trickle of physical mail. Google saw this, and realized that text searching filters (rather than a person), labels (rather than folders), and Artificial Intelligence spam detection filters are the right way to do it, and a gigantic pile of intimidating data, is the wrong way to do it.
Posted by Christopher at September 19, 2007 06:42 PM