Edward R Tufte – the ‘Information Man’: a profile of America's leading proponent of effective strategies for seeing and showing

Abstract

When Rene Descartes asserted as a general rule of his Discourse on the Method (1637) that ‘the things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true’ he was proclaiming one of the articles of the rational faith. Not only that, he was boosting sight as a metonym for thinking itself. Galileo’s The Starry Messenger (1610), a book that revealed for the first time details of craters on the moon, four of Jupiter’s satellites, and many new stars, was also a clarion-call: in the future speculative theories about the universe would have to be tested against the evidence of the eyes — by empirical observation. Almost one-third of Galileo’s book comprises images and diagrams integrated within the text. The modern era was going to be a flat one: of maps and grids and networks. But its workings would be clear. Clarity also determined the three principles of pragmatism, as outlined by the American polymath Charles S Peirce in his famous Popular Science Monthly paper, How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878).1 Peirce was even more forthright than Descartes: > ‘A clear idea is defined as one which is so apprehended that it will be recognized wherever it is met with, and so that no other will be mistaken for it. If it fails of this clearness, it is said to be obscure.’ Between the wars, there was great interest in the issue of clarity, not least because it was felt that a lack of perspicacity about motives had led the European countries into the disaster of 1914–1918. The famous Bauhaus institute in Weimar was set up to clean the Augean stables of pre-war ornamentalism. Sans serif typefaces, including Helvetica and Arial, were championed by the modernists because of their clear, unfussy lines. Ludwig Wittgenstein felt a major source of …