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October 04, 2007
Tufte 2.0
I think Tufte is great in a lot of ways. He's an example of one of those "ah-ha" moments in life where he made me really look at the world in a completely different way than ever before. I love his ideas of how understandable visualizations can yield multivariate data. But all of his forms and forms he analyzes are very static. Designing in the Photoshop or web age can utilize many of his ideas certainly, but ultimately will require a much more sophisticated paradigm. One that involves user interactions, data dynamics, and the concept of on-demand. If data is dynamic, you don't necessarily HAVE to show multivariate data in all its forms up front. Instead you can design in ways to empower users to solicit their own subsets of data. But the concept of design unafraid to provide lots of data because it is smartly designed is still an intellectual legacy of which Tufte should be proud.
Posted by Chris at October 4, 2007 05:04 PM