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In 1613, Galileo published
Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari,
his remarkable observations of the sun. On a fall day,
393 years later, Edward Tufte stands in front of a packed
hotel ballroom, holding up a first edition of that book.
The room could be in New York, San Francisco, Cleveland
or any of the dozens of other cities where Tufte, ’63,
MS ’64, teaches his daylong course Presenting
Data and Information. Today he’s at the New Haven
Omni, just blocks from the Yale campus where he taught
for 22 years. Nearly 400 people have come, at $360 a
head (half-price for students, and a set of his books
is included), to hear the man who has been called the
Leonardo da Vinci of data, the Strunk and White of graphic
design, the George Orwell of the digital age.
If the course title sounds like a snooze, you might
be surprised that an academic who lectures about data
could attain such godhead status. But in four books
on design, from 1983’s The Visual Display
of Quantitative Information to the recent Beautiful
Evidence, Tufte has offered the country’s
foremost critique of the way information is depicted
in graphs, tables, illustrations and (lately and relentlessly)
PowerPoint slides. Graphics, as Tufte makes clear, are
not mere sideshows to spruce up text, entertain readers
or keep art majors employed. Graphics shape, and too
often distort, our understanding of everything.
Tufte has demonstrated how confusing medical charts
can lead to mistakes in treatment and how corporate
reports that highlight years of rising revenue without
adjusting for inflation can mislead investors. He has
shown how a lawyer used a simple spreadsheet to defend
mobster John Gotti and how 19th-century physician John
Snow used detailed maps of London to pinpoint the cause
of a cholera outbreak. Tufte is credited with turning
chart-making into a discipline with intellectual credibility
and moral weight. His course attracts not only visual
professionals but also scientists, engineers, journalists,
doctors, attorneys and financial analysts—pretty
much anyone who analyzes and presents data.
In his lectures and books, Tufte invokes a variety
of thinkers who have been models of precision, withering
analysis and clarity. But his hero, “the master,’’
is Galileo, the mathematician and astronomer who challenged
fiercely held misconceptions about the world by the
simple, unprecedented act of looking at the sky through
a telescope and drawing what he saw.
Beautiful Evidence opens with the words of
a Galileo friend and patron, who wrote that those drawings
“delight by the wonder of the spectacle and the
accuracy of expression.’’ Tufte returns
to the images again and again: sunspots, Jupiter’s
moons, meticulously annotated diagrams of planets and
stars. He says Galileo’s first published observations
of Saturn’s rings, with word-sized sketches inserted
mid-sentence (see below), “may be the best piece
of analytic design ever done.’’
A white-gloved young man carries the book up and down
the long rows of conference tables so all can get a
close-up glimpse at this historical treasure, where
Galileo stated the heretical idea that the Earth moves.
And sure enough, every visual attribute Tufte promotes
is on those old, mesmerizing pages: the integration
of drawings and words; the efficient, elegant design;
the straightforward image, almost as elemental as a
child’s, capturing the soul-stirring richness
of the universe.
But what inspires Tufte is more than aesthetics. Galileo’s
observations, recorded in nearly 12,000 pages, marked
an intellectual revolution. No longer was knowledge
the dictate of church authorities, kings or the acolytes
of Aristotle. Theories could be tested—doctrine
could be upended—by what the eye can see. As Tufte
sees it, what makes evidence beautiful isn’t artistry.
“It’s all about discovering and telling
the truth,’’ he says.
After an encounter with Tufte’s ideas, people
can never again look at a chart, a map, a scientific
table or a PowerPoint presentation quite the same way.
In his romps through statistics, art, history, science,
policy and anything else that grabs his interest, Tufte
tackles a fundamental problem: how to accurately render
complex, interrelated information on a two-dimensional
paper surface or computer screen—how to, as he
puts it, “escape flatland.’’ Tufte
explains how to do it well and demonstrates the many,
many ways it’s done badly.
Bad graphics mangle the truth or lie outright, Tufte
says, by a myriad of design flaws. Lousy graphics omit
context, bury critical information, cherry-pick data
to advance a cause and heap on “chartjunk’’—a
Tufteism (and there are many) for the smiley faces,
irrelevant numbers and other doodads that distract us
from grasping evidence, thinking about it and drawing
smart conclusions. This can have catastrophic consequences.
Tufte asserts, for example, that poorly designed charts
played a decisive role in both space shuttle disasters (see sidebar).
By his count, 1.4 million copies of his books are in
print, and 160,000 people have taken his one-day course.
He is cited copiously in scholarly articles, design
textbooks and general-interest books with Dilbert-worthy
titles like Why Business People Speak Like Idiots.
He has consulted with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, NASA, the Federal Energy Administration,
IBM, Bose, Sun Microsystems, TV networks, leading newspapers,
law firms, brokerage houses and hospitals. Devotees
use his name, like Google’s, as a verb; to “Tufteize”
your presentations is to scrap content-lite graphics,
such as pie charts and decorative dingbats, and to create
visuals that brim with data and state precisely what
you know—nothing more and nothing less.
“We adore him,’’ says Nicolas Bissantz,
managing director of Bissantz & Company, a software
firm in Nuremberg, Germany. Bissantz stumbled onto Tufte’s
books (in English—they’ve not been published
in translation), and got so excited he developed software
that makes Tufteizing a chart almost as easy as, well,
creating a PowerPoint show. The software uses a Tufte
idea for compressing huge amounts of data—say,
the fluctuations of the exchange rate over several years—into
a word-sized graphic called a sparkline.
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Tufte posted sparklines on the Ask E.T. Forum of his
website, free for the taking. He puts many ideas there and, although
he prefers that people write open-source code, he doesn’t
stop anyone from turning an idea into a commercial product.
Tufte also posts draft chapters, photos of his art,
graphics he loves or hates, and questions that intrigue
him: Are bad PowerPoint displays the fault of presenters
or the technology itself? What makes for a brilliant
performer-audience relationship? Is concert music always
too loud? What are the grand truths about human behavior?
Tufte calls the forum “open office hours’’
and the adherents who weigh in “Kindly Contributors.’’
Here he seeks comment on problems he’s working
on. Last spring, after an airline security official
asked him to analyze whether better airport runway maps
would reduce runway incursions, Tufte posed the problem
on his website; the discussion was still going in November.
Tufte dispenses advice and criticism unsparingly. “Sometimes
the contributors are disappointed,’’ Bissantz
says. “They’ll post an idea and he has three
or four points of criticism, and they’re devastated.
They want to defend their concept, but it’s ridiculous—he
just demolishes the idea. It’s worthwhile to just
sit back and say, ‘Thank you, Master.’ ’’
At 65, Tufte is not only a guru and a verb but also
a cottage industry. He publishes, distributes and markets
his books through his firm Graphics Press, run from
a converted garage. (For more than 20 years, the press
stubbornly had a single author: Edward Rolf Tufte. Last
year, he added his mother, Virginia, publishing her
book Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style.) Tufte
also makes sculpture—huge abstract pieces, often
made from steel, installed on 23 acres in Cheshire,
Conn., where he lives, and a 122-acre spread, Hogpen
Hill, that he recently bought in nearby Woodbury.
He was a professor of political science, statistics
and computer science at Yale and senior critic in the
School of Art when he retired in 1999, weary of what
he calls the “bureaucratic bloat” of academia.
He also stopped consulting, frustrated because managers
forced to listen to his suggestions rarely followed
them. (He once told an interviewer that products under
development “are in one of two states—either
too early to tell or too late to change.’’)
He works on the occasional industry problem, like runway
maps, pro bono. Running his own enterprise, Tufte says,
allows him to work “elegantly, intensely, gracefully
and incredibly efficiently.”
He was born in Kansas City in 1942, and graduated high
school in Beverly Hills, Calif. “Until I got there
I thought I was one of the smartest people around,’’
he recalls. “Then we moved and suddenly 20 people
around me were smarter than I was.’’ His
father was an engineer and public works director; his
mother, a reporter, went to graduate school when Edward
left for Stanford and later became an English professor
at USC. “We had numbers and words in the same
house,’’ Tufte says, as if that explains
how he got to where he is.
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| WELL-GROUNDED: Tufte’s
sculpture makes an appearance in his book Beautiful
Evidence, in a discussion on the meaning of pedestals.
His works, clockwise from top, Dear Leader, two
pieces from the Millstone series, and pieces from
the Escaping Flatland series, rest solidly on
his Connecticut acreage.
Courtesy Edward Tufte |
Maybe it does. His career is built on the way he joined
words and numbers under one intellectual roof, marrying
quantitative reasoning with communication as nobody
else. In an interview in the mid-’90s with the
Computer Literacy Bookshops in San Jose, Tufte explained
that to do statistical design, one has to be able to
see and to count. He claimed he didn’t see as
well as many graphic artists and didn’t count
as well as the best statisticians, but he did the combo
better than just about anyone. His great insight was
to think about graphics not as art or statistical constructs
but as stories. He challenged chart-makers to ask the
question: what is the story we’re trying to tell?
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| Courtesy Edward Tufte |
Tufte majored in statistics at Stanford. He didn’t
much like the “frat-boy rowdiness” of the
campus. But three professors influenced him deeply—the
late statistician Lincoln Moses and political scientists
Richard Brody and Raymond Wolfinger, now at Berkeley—and
he stayed in close touch with them.
Tufte “was always trying to devise user-friendly
approaches to statistics that nonspecialists like me
could use,’’ Brody recalls. Ray and Barbara
Wolfinger remember that young Tufte was like a grad
student in his seriousness, curiosity and enthusiasm
for faculty dinners. “Most undergraduates had
no interest in us at all,’’ Barbara Wolfinger
says. “Most were only interested in mating. Ed
was different. There are very few truly unusual people
one meets in life. Ed was certainly one of them.’’
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| Courtesy Edward Tufte |
Tufte says his mentors showed him “how successful
scholars lived,’’ and he loved it. “I
wanted to get done with school as quickly as possible
and become a professor. I realized the academic world
is a more humane and ethical place with better values
than most of the world. . . . It’s also much more
tolerant of idiosyncrasy and independence. I’ve
always been contemptuous of authority. There aren’t
better places than the university to do that and get
away with it.’’
He finished his bachelor’s and master’s
degrees in four years and got his PhD in political science
from Yale four years later. He started painting the
day he completed his dissertation—balloons rising
to the sky, “unintentional but heavy symbolism,’’
he says. He spent the next 10 years on the public affairs
faculty at Princeton. He wrote two well-received books
on democracy and political control and co-authored another,
on politics, with his Yale adviser, political scientist
Robert Dahl.
In the mid-1970s, Tufte was asked to teach a statistics
course to visiting journalists. He found the literature
in the field thin, “grimly devoted to explaining
the use of the ruling pen,’’ with nothing
to say about quantitative reasoning. He started doing
research, and the noted Princeton statistician John
Tukey suggested they give a series of joint seminars.
Terrified about performing in front of Tukey, Tufte
threw himself into preparing for each class. Soon, he
began weaving his notes into a manuscript.
He finished the book in 1982, after moving to Yale.
No publisher would print it to his exacting standards.
Tufte wanted the book to exemplify the design principles
he articulated. It had to have lavish, abundant, high-resolution
images and footnotes alongside the text so a reader
wouldn’t have to flip pages to find a reference.
The book had to be printed on thick, creamy paper and
sell for a reasonable price, about $30. “Publishers
seemed appalled at the prospect that an author might
govern design,’’ he later wrote. So he took
out a second mortgage at nearly 18 percent interest
and produced the book himself.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
was instantly hailed as a classic. Orders poured in.
He repaid the loan within six months. Envisioning
Information followed in 1990 and Visual Explanations
in 1997. Tufte likes to point out that Galileo, too,
helped finance the publication of his own books.
I don’t want to sound too majestic, but my books
are forever knowledge,’’ Tufte says. “People
will be reading them a long time from now.”
On a late spring morning, Tufte sits on a couch in
his Cheshire home, in a room cluttered with books, papers,
magazines, art. One of his sculptures dangles from the
ceiling, a large bird made from corrugated aluminum
folded like origami. He wears shorts and a T-shirt,
slumps into the cushions and flips through Beautiful
Evidence, page by page. Nine years in the making,
the book arrived from the bindery the day before.
Like the earlier books, Beautiful Evidence
isn’t an instruction guide but a statement of
Tufte’s design principles: Show comparisons. Show
causality. Show data in their full complexity. Document
and display your sources. Above all, respect the intelligence
of your audience and tell the truth. “Serious
presentations,’’ Tufte often says, “rise
and fall on the quality, relevance and integrity of
the content.’’
By “forever knowledge” Tufte means his
principles “are indifferent’’ to culture,
gender, nationality or history. They apply to a 6,000-year-old
cave etching, to the latest web design, to every map,
chart and graph in between. The images in Beautiful
Evidence “come from 14 centuries, 15 countries
. . . three planets and the innumerable stars’’
to underscore the point that his principles are universal,
apparently as immutable as the laws of nature.
Some critics—and even some fans—don’t
buy it. “Tufte, you’re a smart guy, with
good points to make,’’ one blogger moans.
“Why puff it up with this foolishness about universality?”
Questions of timelessness aside, the power and the pleasure
of his books lie in their unabashed reach. Each offers
a stunning array of images, from the brilliant to the
ludicrous to the heartbreaking. A favorite image—one
now almost synonymous with Tufte’s name—is
a once-obscure 1869 statistical map of Napoleon’s
march on Russia, by the French engineer Charles Joseph
Minard. Tracing the number of soldiers across the land,
through months and dropping temperatures, the map shows
the French army was devastated not by the enemy but,
in retreat, by the cold. “This is War and
Peace, as told by a visual Tolstoy,’’
Tufte says.
But it’s not a single image that makes Tufte’s
work memorable; it’s the mix and multitude. “Escaping
Flatland,’’ the opening chapter of Envisioning
Information, has 40 graphics in almost as many
pages—a fairly typical count. The images skip
seamlessly from Galileo’s sunspots to a 1937 timetable
for a Java railroad to air pollution charts to notations
of dance movements. One spreadsheet shows the crimes
committed by government informants who testified against
accused Mafia boss John Gotti; the ledger of murder,
drug sales and pistol-whipping helped persuade a jury
to dismiss the testimony as that of sleazy stool pigeons
and acquit Gotti. Is there any stronger proof that graphics
isn’t just for designers? And that presenting
data isn’t necessarily dull?
Tufte says he was drawn to the field precisely because
it is so wide-ranging. Still, it’s hard to imagine
another scholar approaching charts and illustrations
with such mirth, passion and oddball appetites. Tufte
once attended a Russian satellite auction and bought
a visual diary made by cosmonauts during their three-month
space voyage. When he worked on redesigning medical
records, he donned a white coat and hung out in a hospital.
In Visual Explanations, he co-authored a chapter
on magic with a professional magician, Jamy Ian Swiss.
It is vintage Tufte—an exuberant illustrated analysis
of card tricks, vanishing coins, flying water glasses
unmasked. “To create illusions is to engage in
disinformation design, to corrupt optical information,
to deceive the audience,’’ the authors write.
“Thus the strategies of magic suggest what
not to do if our goal is truth-telling rather than
illusion-making.’’
Nine years ago, around the time he began work on Beautiful
Evidence, Tufte set aside painting and started
sculpting. Large abstract pieces now rise from the landscape
in Cheshire and Hogpen Hill. Spring Arcs, a
series of solid stainless steel arcs that seem to squash
and stretch depending on your vantage point, span 12
by 67 feet. The Millstone pieces are curved
rust-colored giants, 11,000 pounds of scrap from the
nuclear power plant from which they take their name.
Dear Leader, installed in the winter but deemed
finished only in May when grass was planted around it,
is two giant porcelain and steel cylindrical shapes,
Tufte’s vision of missiles fired from North Korea
that plonk down in a Connecticut field. Here and there
graceful aluminum birds seem to lift to the sky, like
the balloons he painted so many years ago.
Tufte has exhibited his sculpture at shows in Los Angeles
and New York and discovered two things. “I learned
that the art needs to be outdoors, and that I don’t
like hearing what people say about it.’’
Still, the man who has made a career of visual display
cannot resist displaying the visuals closest to his
heart. Beautiful Evidence closes with the sculptor’s
photo album: seven two-page spreads showing Tufte’s
work, photographed in various seasons.
Some longtime Tufte fans have responded with impatience.
“Beautiful—but not on topic without stretching
the imagination,’’ Stephen Few, a consultant
who specializes in data visualization, writes on the
online Business Intelligence Network. Zach Gemignani,
a founder of Juice Analytics, a data-consulting firm,
says, “I wish that Tufte would focus more on the
current state of information visualization in business
today and encourage vendors to make better tools.’’
But making better tools has never been Tufte’s
mission. His passion is fundamentals—the accuracy
of expression and the wonder of the spectacle. And these
sculptures, sitting on the grass or floating free in
space, are wonderful spectacles. Changing with the shadows
and the seasons, they grab a blade of grass, a buttercup,
a mound of snow and reflect it back, transforming the
familiar into an image to behold. Escapes from flatland,
every one. |
