Tufte on application segregation

28 July 2008

Edward Tufte’s sparklines are impressive on their own as a graphic idea. In short, they are miniature scatterplots intended to be embedded in running text or aggregated for comparison. They are excellent examples of the type of information design that stresses information density and typographic precision, attributes for which Tufte’s research is known.

In Beautiful Evidence, Tufte uses sparklines to draw a surprising analogy to software, suggesting that content types should not be arbitrarily divided in a piece of design.

By segregating evidence by mode (word, number, image, graph), the current-day computer approach contradicts the spirit of sparklines, a spirit that makes no distinction among words, numbers, graphics, images. It is all evidence, after all. A good system for evidence display should be centered on evidence, not on a collection of application programs each devoted to a single mode of information. Rather than wandering around a bureaucracy of operating systems and applications, analysts should work entirely with evidence-documents. Long ago such was the case: in the original graphical user interface (developed in the 1970’s at Xerox Parc), users saw only documents—and never saw an operating system or a free-standing application. Text, graphics, tables, and mathematical formulas were all edited inside of documents, not inside of separate application programs. Why go to a special place to construct a data graphic? To lay out a report? Segregating information by its mode of production, convenient and profitable for software houses, too often becomes a corrupting metaphor for evidence presentations. Why should the intellectual architecture of our reports and our evidence reflect the chaos of software bureaucracies producing those reports?

An application-agnostic system was the goal of Apple’s OpenDoc initiative in the early 90s, but it failed quickly. Lately both Apple and Adobe seem to be moving in the opposite direction, designing interfaces that consume the entire screen and isolate themselves from the rest of the operating system. Consider the latest iterations of Apple’s Aperture and Final Cut Pro, or Adobe’s Lightroom or plans for Photoshop CS4.