Thoughts on Edward Tufte & Jonathan Harris
Posted on 5 November, 2009 at 11:14am with no comments
In response to our assignment here:
http://itp.nyu.edu/VisualizingData/2009/10/30/homework-pimp-my-data/
1. Edward Tufte
I agree with Tufte’s view that clutter and overload are not an attribute, they are failures of design but I feel as though he ignores one major piece of information in his analysis, the target user. The target user of an iPhone is going to be someone in motion. In this case, brighter “keynote style” colors would seem more beneficial for the user to locate specific data much quicker. In addition, the use of padding and whitespace will help isolate data and thus draw it to focus quicker. However, these points would not be valid in a web browser like situation. In that case he is correct, the browser is still littered with what he labels “administrative debris”.
Tufte strongly attributes good visualizations to be fundamentally driven by content, so a strong knowledge of the data is essential. This tends to be people with a good quantitative or scientific basis. Throughout history he credits the best visualizations to a combination of a deep understanding of the content, a dense amount of data and space constraints. I enjoy the simplicity and romanticism of this notion. It alludes to an idea that good design will grow once the designer reaches a deeper level of understanding with the data. Maybe I am biased towards this idea because I do not consider myself a designer yet I do understand that I am capable of good design once I truly understand the data.
In a response to a question regarding information overload, he briefly mentions that a potential future trend could be “anti-social networks”. I am a bit unclear of what he is implying here because at a semantic level the concepts of being anti-social and networking is contradictory. With that in mind I assume what he is implying is a tighter size and data limit to our networks, as a trend. If these “micro-networks” are what he is implying then I do agree and I think we are already seeing traces of this trend to start to sprout. Services like google wave and buddy-press both grant the ability for a user to create their own social network and to control the size and level at which data is passed around.
On a side note, his response on how to deal with information overload “if you think there’s overload go spend time in New York and everything will be all right” could not resonate with me more.
2. Jonathan Harris
After reading Jonathan Harris’ bio and viewing his works I felt inspired and moved which was completely in contrary to Karsten Schmidt and Aaron Koblin’s works. Not to say that Schmidt and Koblin’s works were bad, I just felt that they they lacked a certain level of depth and warmth. Harris obtains this depth and warmth by rooting his works in an emotional response and using technology to connect people through that common emotion. While using “We Feel Fine”, I see the words “I feel scared because… “ and I immediately recall what that feels like. Suddenly my experience becomes much more personal and I feel connected with a person I have never meet. I then observe thousands of other dots like it and I my thoughts are bouncing between this micro and macro level of connectivity. He also uses a simplicity to his design. Even if the information presented was taken away I would enjoy the user experience just from the combination of soft colors with playful animations. All in all, amazing work!
