archive.Joe Lamantia.com

I first saw Edward Tufte deliver his well-known seminar Presenting Data and Information in the heady summer days of ’99. At the time, I was working for a small interactive agency in downtown Boston. I’d heard about Tufte’s seminar from a former colleague, and was eager to learn more about Information Design, user interfaces, and whatever else was relevant to creating user experiences and information spaces. Tufte’s seminars also seemed to tap into some sort of transformational mojo; the person I was working with went in as a Web Developer, and came back a Usability Specialist. The logic of this still escapes me, since I haven’t heard the esteemed Professor mention usability, let alone lecture on it yet: I think it’s more a good lesson in how desperate Seth was to escape writing HTML.
But I’m getting away from the point.
In ’99, Tufte delivered a solid and succinct grounding in Information Design history and principles, supported by frequent references to his gorgeous self-published titles. Bravo.
He promptly followed this with a short segment on “The Web”, which was mostly irrelevant, and wholly behind the times. Professor Tufte’s chief gripes at the time included excessive use of chrome on buttons, bulleted lists, and unformatted tables. He was mired in recounting the failings of HTML 2.0. Outside, it was 1999. But in the lecture hall, it felt more like 1996… I was embarrassed to see an old master dancing poorly to new music.
Forward five years, and now clients are asking me to attend Professor Tufte’s presentation in New York, again in the summer. I expected to be severely disappointed; if Tufte was this far behind when there wasn’t much history in the first place, then it could only have gotten worse.
And so I was pleasantly surprised. The Information Design showcase was like refreshing cool rain after too much time using low-fidelity charting applications. But what really caught my ears was his ready embrace of core Information Architecture language and outlook. Dr. Tufte is hip to IA now. He even gave us some good homework: the session handout lists 11 classics of 20th century Information Architecture – on page 2, right after the day’s agenda.
Yes, his piece on the Web was still a bit behind – static navigation systems and generic corporate marketing site IA aren’t exactly cutting edge topics, and it’s hardly open-minded to say that there’s no reason for having more than a single navigation bar at the top of a page – but at least it was behind in the right direction.
And it was still nice outside.
Kudos to the old master for picking better music.
And for being canny enough to know that it’s good for business to encourage eveyrone to take notes, but not provide note paper in the regstration packet – its for sale of course at the back of the hall…

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