The Functional Art: An Introduction To Information Graphics And Visualization / quote 4 of 18
Turning thinking principles into seeing principles
Effective analytic designs entail turning thinking principles into seeing principles. So, if the thinking task is to understand causality, the task calls for a design principle: “Show causality.” If a thinking task is to answer a question and compare it with alternatives, the design principle is: “Show comparisons.” The point is that analytical designs are not to be decided on their convenience to the user or necessarily their readability or what psycholo-gists or decorators think about them; rather, design architectures should be decided on how the architecture assists analytical thinking about evidence. [Quoting Mark Zachary and Charlotte Thralls, “An Interview with Edward Tufte,” Technical Communica- tion Quarterly, 2004, 13(4), 447-462. Accessed Feb. 11, 2012 at http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ s15427625tcq1304_5.pdf.]