Tufte and Shirky on design
I had the great fortune to go hear Edward Tufte talk the other day. If you are unfamiliar, Tufte is a Yale professor who is a master at analytical design. He’s written (and self-published) four books on better information display and has even pioneered some new ideas in the field. Though there was a lot to learn in a one day course I will need to think and study much of it some more to start applying those ideas to our work here at IntraHealth. The obvious areas for Tufte’s lessons to work their way in are: interface design in our applications, reporting tools for iHRIS and other apps, our work on data-driven decision making, and the simple presentations we all have to make from time to time.
On presentations, Tufte has always had a lot to say (in the negative) about PowerPoint, and though sometimes humorous he did make it clear that often the bad design that PowerPoint forces on users is used in the dissemination (or more likely not) of very important, and life-saving information. Those are definitely not the times to not be using slow revealed bullet points!
One thing Tufte talked about that I personally want to think about more is the idea that the principle of design is the same as analytical thinking. One must show comparison and causality in design just as they would when simply thinking about the problem. A good chart is one that compares findings with a norm, or another similar scenario and then gives the cause. Yes, all in one chart. Tufte’s books are full of good examples from Galileo to a good newspaper sports page. When considering the amount of information millions of people acquire from the tables of the sports page everyday, it is not so daunting a task to show a similar amount of data to someone who needs to make a decision about the health care in their country. There is no such thing as clutter, there is only bad design.
We, at IntraHealth, are designing all the time. From software applications such as iHRIS, to paper-based public health systems, its all design. As Clay Shirky recently wrote “users are experts in their own lives” therefore “Design is humility.” Something we should always keep in mind.
