Thursday, September 21, 2006

More on Edward Tufte - Icon of Information Design

Advances in industry and innovation require leaders thinking in new and different ways.

Edward Tufte is one who has spent a lifetime thinking deeply about new ways to communicate through new forms of visualization. Tufte goes beyond the visual presentation of concepts, demanding that content drive the visual intent. Wikipedia offers a good overview of Tuft's work here.

Tufte's work is important in such fields as information design and visual literacy, which deal with the visual communication of information. He coined the term "chartjunk" to refer to useless, non-informative, or information-obscuring elements of information displays such as Power Point presentations. Tufte says these reduce thinking to bullet points of information and attributes the Challenger disaster to information miscommunicated through such a presentation. See the WIRED article here and Tufte's detailed essay on the disaster here.

The City of Boston's has asked Tufte to take a new look at visualizing the mapping of the Boston Airport to lower incursions. Visit the link here.

Tufte has written extensively on various subjects relating to information, visualization and design. Check out his book page here.

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