Peterme on Tufte’s latest

I confess I haven’t yet read Tufte’s latest information design tome, Beautiful Evidence, but have been following along peterme’s review posts. In the most recent writeup, peterme take’s issue with Tufte’s desire for unambiguous diagrams. I think I can put a finer point on it.
This consulting deliverable, is a an illustrated artifact of a research project that Adaptive Path did with a client. Adaptive Path and the client lived through the research together, and the illustration complements the story they put together about the experience people have when comparing financial products online. The illustration doesn’t stand alone. If peterme didn’t tell the story in a few paragraphs of text below the picture, it wouldn’t mean much to someone who wasn’t there. And the illustration didn’t need to standalone. The client was paying Adaptive Path to talk to them. So there was no need to make an artifact that would speak for itself.
By contrast, the seemingly plain yet elegant graphic of SARS transmission is more self-contained. The textual narrative adds content, but the picture tells more of the story by itself. The medical article needs to be self-explanatory, since, unlike Adaptive Path consulting deliverables, the journal article does not come with a set of medical researchers explaining it to the reader, and the readers were not already part of the research team with the writers.
There is no single standard for explicitness in an information diagram, because the need for explicitness depends on the context in which the illustration is used.

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