In this week’s readings, I’lll be focusing my discussion on Chapter 2 of Edward Tufte’s “Envisioning Information,” which delves into how effective micro and macro designs help to enforce both local/global comparisons. One particularly powerful example I resonated with was the Vietnam Veterans Memorial – having visited it in the past with my family, Tufte effectively put into the words the underlying feelings and sentiments that I had when seeing it for the first time. For example, the memorial is a powerful reflection of leveraging both effective and macro design. From afar, the black granite yields a physical manifestation of what 58,000 soldier deaths equate to, whereas close up, the broad sweeping granite resolves into individual names – with each soldier having a contributing and individual mark. The intentionality of having the downward gradient also aids in the metaphorical meaning, with the names of the dead rising “higher and higher.” Another interesting point Tufte discussed was the notion of how “clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.” In a previous reading, one of the questions I asked was whether there was a limit to the number of dimensions that could be effectively mapped. Based on these readings, Tufte would likely argue that no dimension is too hard to map, and that a desire to display multi-faceted complexities is deeply embedded into the social fabric of human connectivity. This can also be seen in Shinkansen graphical time-table, as despite looking extremely convoluted at first, the creators were able to convey the highly complex structure of the railroad system as an aggregate of systemic patterns (as seen upon a close micro viewing).