VISUAL EXPLANATIONS

IMAGES AND QUANTITIES, EVIDENCE AND NARRATIVE

146 VISUAL EXPLANATIONS

By sorting through immense stockpiles of text and images, computerscan quickly assemble and display one-time confections designed to serveimmediate, local, unique purposes. For example, below is my interfacefor guiding museum-goers to exhibits and facilities. Right from thestart, this opening panel shows the scope of information made available.Only a small part of the screen is devoted to computer administration(this is a touch screen, these are the language options). Free of icons,decorative logotypes, and navigation apparatus, about 90% of the imageis substance, a contextual overview describing the reservoir ofdata. In anarchitecture of content, the information becomes the inteiface. Rather thansequentially stacking up little bits of data to be unveiled gradually, thisflat inteiface surfaces 45 options at once, distributing the information inspace rather than in time. Museum-goers then touch the item that theywish to learn about (here, the location of Flemish paintings) and thenext confection appears. Shown are a three-dimensional guide-map,

SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS, NOVEMBER 2004

Henri Matisse:Lesperiennes, 1919

Susan Rothenberg:Recent Paintings

Information Designs ofCharles Joseph Minard

Henri Rousseau: FrenchWinged Confections

Architectural Designs ofHumphry Repton

The Great Age ofTedious British Water­colors: 1750 to 1880

INFORMATION FACILITIES PERMANENT WORKS

art information cascade espresso bar American Painting

bookstores checkroom British Painting

calendar concourse buffet Dutch Painting

copyrights elevators European Sculptureand Decorative Arts,

film programs facility for disabled 14th-19th century

gallery talks first aid Flemish Painting

guides garden cafe French Painting andSculpture

hours lost and foundGerman Painting

photography restroomsInformation Design

security stairwaysItalian Painting and

slide lectures telephones Sculpture

special programs terrace cafe Netherlandish Painting

Sunday concerts Spanish Painting

tours Twentieth-centuryPainting and Sculpture

wheelchairslstrollers

, Travel to the farthest opposite end of the concourse past

• the concourse buffet and the bookstore.

, Locate yourself within the gallery picture on the left.

• Cross the lobby and descend one Right of stairs to theconcourse level.

VISUAL CONFECTIONS 147

Concept and design by Edward Tufte;design and production by BonnieScranton, with Drnitry Krasny andWeilin Wu.

, Ascend two Roors on the elevator or escalator to the main

• Roor of the West Building. Turn right.

-. Continue to the opposite end of the West Building.

• Turn left to begin the Netherlandish/Flemish exhibit.

written directions, and a live video image of museum-goers standing atthe computer. Users will surely half turn and wave at the camera behindthem. Again content dominates, with only two computer commandsvisible: (1) Return to the original table of contents, or (2) Touch themiddle button to generate a sheet ofpaper reproducing what is on thescreen: a map, written directions, and a video snapshot of the museum­goer at the computer kiosk! Emerging from a high-resolution printer,this paper serves as a portable and permanent memory, helping visitorsnavigate through a complex ofbuildings (shown here is the NationalGallery in Washington). Indicating a route down the stairs, the redpointer on the video-image (linked to red line and footprint on themap) resembles the three-dimensional gesture made by someone givingdirections, "Go around and down that way." Only a printed guide willlead people gracefully along a complicated route to Flemish paintings.The personal and entertaining photograph, combined with the map,

148 VISUAL EXPLANATIONS

helps museum-goers orient themselves-in fact see themselves-withinthe three-space they are navigating. Each technology does what it isgood at: the computer selects, organizes, customizes data; paper makesvisible the high-resolution information in portable permanent form.

Information-sensitive designs are exacting and laborious, requiringa deep appreciation of the particular content at hand. More genericapproaches to interface design are widespread.

For example, a news broadcast method: as users approach the kiosk,the computer plays a 30-second video of the Director of the Museumwelcoming the visitor, then a series of 20-second videos of curators ofvarious galleries introducing their territory, and then the Vice Presidentfor Facilities Management pointing at the telephones and rest rooms.Besides resembling bad public television, such an approach commits acommon error: the information architecture mimics the hierarchicalstructure of the bureaucracy producing the design. This also occurs inthe design ofmagazines, as strongly colored frames delineate each sub­editor's turf Those accented borders and running heads, sometimes thestrongest visual statement on the page, are not there to help the readerbut rather to replicate the organizational form.

Another way to design an interface such as the museum kiosk is toreason that people use computers all the time and so the design willsimply follow standard computer practice. Thus the interface offers asequence ofbinary choices, perhaps beginning as follows:

CHOOSE ONE (1) FROM THE LIST BELOW:

o YOU LIKE ART?

o OR NOT?

And so a museum-goer sequentially marches through a tedious decisiontree in tiny irritating steps, as the logic of software is exposed to thosewho simply want to see some paintings or find a telephone. Contextand overview are lost in this dopey approach. These poor designs aresometimes defended on the grounds that they conform to computerindustry standards (for example, in a typical arranging-the-deckchairs­on-the-Titanic dictum: "Drop shadows on binary-choice boxes shallhave the [pretend] light coming from upper left."). Ding-a-ling designis thus sanctified and institutionalized.

Another weak approach is to make the interface itself a conspicuousvisual statement, with a great deal ofcreative effort going into stylinga billboard that masks a data dump. Believed to be boring and in needof decorative spice, the content becomes trivialized and incidental.Too many interfaces for information compilations have suffered fromtelevision-disease: thin substance, contempt for the audience and thecontent, short attention span, and over-produced styling.25

25 Printed publications and their readershave long been similar design victims.Joseph Giovannini writes: "The effectofgraphic design in many publications,then-even when it is handsome design­is the fragmentation or subordination ofthe text. The result affects no less thanhow we think: the broken page deliversimpressions and even sensations, but itdoes not lead a reader into the depththat carefully elaborated ideas, craftedwriting, and layered passages can createin quiet sequence.... The capitulationof text to layout can also be seen inbooks about the visual arts, in whichtexts are often treated as visual blocksthat are subservient to piCtures. In themost graphically 'painted' books eachpage is a design that mayor may nothave words, and texts are relegated tointroductions that playa minor sup­porting role. Books about graphicdesign itselfare notorious for havinglittle or no text-they are simplycompendia of full-page designs."Joseph Giovannini, "A Zero Degreeof Graphics," in Mildred Friedman,ed., Graphic Design in America: AVisual Language History (Minneapolis,1989), 2 °4.

In addition to organizing information by means of analogies totelevision scripts, bureaucratic structures, software decision-trees, andmusic television, interface designers have used a metaphor of the book,with viewers flipping through electronic pages. On the screen below,however, the metaphor has become the interface. Only 18% of thespace depicts substantive information (photographers and their work);an astonishing 82% of the screen is devoted to computer administrativedebris or to nothing at all. In a contrast symbolizing the priorityof apparatus over information, compare the elaborately crafted systemicons (why won't just the words do?) with the distinctly clunkytypography for the content, the names of the photographers. Thisspread from the book-parody shows only 53 typographic characters(last names and dates); real books display between 1,000 and 50,000

characters on a double-page spread.26

These quantitative measurements of the interface indicate how muchthe design itself has systematically reduced the already inherently lowresolution of the 1990S computer screen (a resolution approximately

VISUAL CONFECTIONS 149

26 The book metaphor used for this in­terface attracts unfortunate attention tothe distorted and inconsistently renderedletterforms on the computer screen, sounlike the typography ofwell-designedbooks. Down the left part of the image,we have stamped-embossed sans serif,

then stamped-embossed serif,

and, finally, a quirky system font-withan oversized x-height (presumably to im­prove legibility on the screen) resultingin cramped ascenders and descenders aswell as a grotesque Y:

Yearbook page from From Silver toSilica, Interactive Media Group, TheMinneapolis Institute of the Arts, 1991.

150 VISUAL EXPLANATIONS

An eternal confection

THE first confection to leave the solar system was engraved on a 15 by23 cm (6 by 9 in) gold-anodized aluminum plaque aboard the Pioneer10 and 11 spacecraft launched in 1972 and 1973. After observing planetsfor 20 years, both Pioneer spacecraft have now left our solar system andhave headed for the stars beyond, each carrying the plaque:

5% to 10% ofa printed map). Direct measurement ofcontent andnon-content provides a quantitative assessment of an interface; thesemeasures of the informational performance of a screen include:

• the proportion of space on the screen devoted to content,• to computer administration, and to nothing at all;

• character counts and measures of typographic density (making• comparisons with printed material as well as computer interfaces);

• the number of computer commands immediately available• (more are better, if clearly but minimally displayed).

Applied thoughtfully, these measures may help to restrain the spatialimperialism of operating systems and of interface metaphors-andthereby enhance the richness ofcontent displayed. Also such appraisalswould make explicit a decision to devote only 18% of a computerscreen to information, as we saw for the photographers' yearbook.

Binary equivalent of decimal8, between tick marks indi­cating human heights. Thehydrogen wavelength (21.11cm) multiplied by 8 yieldsthe woman's height (169 emor 66 in).

Planets of solar system (noteSaturn's rings), binary relativedistances, and path indicatingorigin of Pioneer (whichpoints back toward Earth).

.........o 0o

Outline drawings ofhumans (with prominent four fingersand opposing thumb), drawn in proportion to the Pioneerspacecraft in the background. Note the visual convention ofthe opacity ofoutline drawing as well as the lack of shadows.

'-\. ~

.;~o

Map of 14 pulsars locatingthe sun relative to pulsars andcenter ofour galaxy. On thelines, binary digits denotepulse-times (deducible fromtheir 10-decimal precision, anunlikely accuracy for stellardistances). With the hydrogentime-unit, an extraterrestrialanalyst should realize that thetimes are about 0.1 second,a typical pulsar period. Sincethese periods decrease atknown rates, pulsars serve asgalactic clocks. Thus anadvanced civilization couldreview its galactic databaseand identify the origin andtime oflaunch, even ifPio­neer is not discovered untilseveral billion years from now.

Hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen,a basic unit of time and distance throughoutthe physical universe.

This intensely quantified assembly brings together maps of pulsars andplanets, scales for measuring time and distance through many ordersofmagnitude from atoms to galaxies, and outline drawings of humansand the spacecraft itself.27 In one to ten billion years from now, perhapslong after our solar system has returned to dust, the Pioneer and itsconfection "may pass through the planetary system of a remote stellarneighbor, one ofwhose planets may have evolved intelligent life.If the spacecraft is detected and then inspected, Pioneer's message willreach across the eons"28 and light-years of time and space, an eternalconfection, a surviving memory of our Ocean of the StreanlS of Story.

THE development of perspective by Florentine ~lrchitects during the15th-century Italian Renaissance was a special gift to the world ofvisual thinking, for now people could see diverse objects located in ageometrically correct context. Confectionary designs are a similar giftto understanding. Like perspective, confecti(:):ns give the mind an eye.Confections place selected, diverse images into the narrative contextof a coherent argument. And, by virtue of the architecture of theirarguments, confections make reading and seeing and thinking identicaL

VISUAL CONFECTIONS 151

27 The annotation here of the Pioneerplaque is based on Richard O. Fimrne1,James Van Allen, and Eric Burgess,Pioneer: First to Jupiter, Saturn, and Beyond(Washington, DC, 1980), 248-250; andRoy R. Behrens, Illustration as an Art(Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1986), 110.

28 David Morrison and Jane Samz, Voyageto Jupiter (Washington, DC, 1980), 20.