individual information graphics are also technologies, means to fulfill purposes, devices whose aim is to help an audience complete certain tasks. This apparent no-brainer will have consequences later on. If you accept that a visualization is, above all, a tool, you are implicitly accepting that the discipline it belongs to is not just art, but functional art, something that achieves beauty not through the subjective, freely wandering self-expression of the painter or sculptor, but through the careful and restrained tinkering of the engineer.