Escaping Flatland - Tufte

I really enjoyed this reading and the diversity in the different examples of information design. Two of the examples that stuck out to me were the 3D scatter plots and periodic table. I have previously never considered the periodic table as an example of design. It is so rooted in our curriculum and upbringing but presents a dense amount of information effectively. I found it fascinating because a lot of the design choices that led to this table (organizing different elements into groups based on properties, etc.) were made by scientists and probably not someone who was looking to optimize the visual appearance of the periodic table. Upon looking at the 3D Scatterplots for data and the oft-plotted data where the data was mapped onto six of the twelve surfaces of a pentagonal dodacahedron, I started to wonder how much of information design is rooted in past constructs + how willing are people to learn how to read something less intuitive but that could be potentially more structured. It also made me wonder about what the right balance between mimicking 3D/reality and our perception vs playing upon what we are used to that is based in that is rooted in some culturally taught phenonmenon (i.e. do I only think that periodic table is easy to read because I have been taught in science classes how to use it/its accepted culturally?).

Another piece that I really liked was The Art of Dancing which had a perspective map that coded gestures in dance notation of body motion. Visually, I thought the piece was very apealing even though I don’t know how to read it/what kind of dance is being conveyed. From this section, I was also really intrigued by the sentence “The redundancy of bilateral symmetry construmes space better devoted to fresh information”, because I never realized how inefficient symmetry can be when trying to display large quantities of data, especially because it can be attractive and pleasing to the eye. Even though the design is assymetric, it still felt very balanced and was designed in a way that I didn’t relaize it wasn’t symmetric upon a first glance. One last closing thought is I was really struck by the fact that humans have been using similar strategies of compressing information and displaying it on flat surfaces for centuries (i.e. mapping sunspots). We may develop technologies but the core principle hasn’t changed in the sense that we’re still here trying to better understand the world around us and communicate that to other people.