An Interview with Edward R. Tufte

The intellectual tradition with which Tufte’s ideas are most clearly aligned is not rhetoric or even human factors theory. Rather, it is cognitive science. His principles of visual display are predicated on the idea that excellence in visual design is largely realized through the creation of graphics that correspond with the mental tasks they are meant to support. So, as he argues, “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.’”

His emphasis on identifying design principles that support cognitive tasks has led him to distance his work from other arenas that also deal in design, such as marketing, propaganda, and commercial production for mass markets. Rather than spending time thinking about howdesignworks in arenas such as these,Tufte opts to study designs that are primarily meant to help people reason about data and how the data may be used. As he said, “At their best, graphics are instruments for reasoning.” (Via Technical Communication Quarterly)

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