Reading Response on Tufte’s Visual Confections: Juxtapositions from the Ocean of the Streams of Story

Summary

Tufte defines a story as a progression of noun-verb incidents. Confections are visual explanations which use a particular combination of visual elements to “illustrate an argument, present and enforce visual comparisons, combine the real and the imagined and tell us yet another story (121).” Confections should be used for the design of information (139). There are two types of confections: compartments and imagined scenes. The compartments group visual elements together in a distinguishable way – such as with a border or call out button. The imagined scenes are not real places/events, but are used to further develop the story or argument (127). Confections are made by cutting and pasting, constructing and managing “miniature theatres of information” (138). In this way, confections are “a cognitive art that serves to illustrate an argument, make a point, explain a task, show how something works, list possibilities, narrate a story” (138).

Tufte’s theory of design is that memory and recall is easiest when “mnemonic emblematic reductions” are used such as allegories, puns, and bizarre associations. These reductions compress detailed materials down into elaborate confections or groupings of visual elements (125). Confections are all about deeply illuminating ideas and the relations among ideas; clear thinking will result in an excellent display of information via confection (141). In short, confections should make reading, seeing, and thinking identical (151). When used correctly, confections can help to express an order in space and time (131). Since they are a particular kind of design, confections have the ability to bring new meaning to familiar objects based on how the visual elements are arranged (133). Confections work to show how image and thought are linked (141) and how form and content are intertwined (138). For example, the illustration of the process of graphic thinking and creation on page 141 is effective at displaying the relationship and intersection between the hand, mind, and eye. The downsides of confections are that they suffer from “thinness of content, flimsy logic, poverty of annotating text, and heavy-handed arrangement of structure” (141). Speech is not enough by itself because it is low resolution and not as effective as illustration – showing rather than telling is what works. Tufte uses an example of teachers who rely solely on lectures are not as effective as teachers who also use illustration (145).

When organizing information, the structures used should be “transparent, straightforward, obvious, natural, ordinary, [and] conventional” (125). An example used is that of a welcome screen at a museum which helps patrons to locate themselves in the facility by providing visual cues and a printout with directions on how to get to the next exhibit (146). Tufte also cautions that the guides, keys, and codes used to assist in understanding information be limited in administrative tasks which can impede understanding (125). The information should become the interface and the information should be described in space, rather than in time (146). In the museum design, 90% of the image is substance. The confection should not resemble the institution hierarchy (information about the founder, message from the president, etc.) because this is not of interest to the user nor does it help the user in achieving their task.

Finally, Tufte ends with the bad design principles that one should avoid. Television disease is commonly found in interface designs; it is noticeable because of its thin substance, contempt for the audience and content, short attention spans, and over-the-top styling (148). Other bad design analogies include organizing information similar to television scripts, organizational structure, software decision-trees, and page turning in a book (149). The screen counted should be measured according to 1) % of screen devoted to content/substance, 2) density comparisons between printed item and computer interface, and 3) the number of computer commands immediately available – the more the better (150).

Author Information

Edward Tufte is an expert on presenting informational graphics (such as charts and diagrams) and currently teaches statistics, information/interface design, and political economy at Yale University. He is probably most well known for his criticism of Microsoft PowerPoint and its frequent misuse. This is often dubbed as the “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb” phenomena.

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Relationship to Prior Readings

The power of confections can be related to our class discussion about good design being invisible. Specifically, Tufte uses to different confections representing mind/eye/hand to show effective use of confections and what can happen when a confection lacks thought as it occurs in the design process. Also, the integration of form and content and space time could be seen as being similar to Stroupe’s argument in Visualizing English about the non-exclusive nature of text and image in illuminations from last week. Similarly, Smith’s piece on “Aristotle’s Classical Enthymeme and the Visual” argues that text and image should be in conversation with one another.

If we look back at Week 1 of the course, I believe that confections make direct use of William’s four design principles – contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity – which is what makes them so successful. While all of the design principles can be seen within confections, I would argue that alignment and proximity are most noticeable just based on the definition of a confection – the grouping of visual elements used in the design of information.

Relevance to Own Research

Beyond simply teaching the concept of confections to students, I believe that the idea would be most useful to designers in a workplace setting. The beauty about confections is that it refers to groups of visual elements which can include text or image, so it can be equally used by technical writers, graphic designers, or web page designers and its usefulness as a way to design information would still hold true. At this point, I know the concept is useful and I will one day put it to use in the classroom setting, but I cannot say at this time when it would be most applicable.

Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte

Williams: Design Principles from Non-Designers Design Book

Stroupe: Visualizing English

Smith: Aristotle’s Classical Enthymeme and the Visual

Tufte: Visual Confections from Visual Explanations

January 26th, 2009 in Visual Rhetoric/Doc Design

Cynthia PengillyOnline teaching, dissertation work, and other academic stuff

Reading Response on Tufte’s Visual Confections: Juxtapositions from the Ocean of the Streams of Story

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