A wonderful patron of the web arts (that I will keep anonymous to respect his privacy), in asking for some fixes to Timeplot that he couldn’t write himself, empties out my Amazon book wishlist and gives me a wonderful surprise by filling up my reading queue for months to come.

Two books went right on top of the queue:

1. Paul Dorish’s - Where the action is: The Foundation of Embodied Interaction
2. Edward Tufte - Beautiful Evidence

Let met start saying that both books are incredibly interesting, stimulating and open-minding but surprisingly boring, verbose and repetitive at the same time.

Granted, a lot of Beautiful Evidence (sparklines, the anti-powerpoint rant, his analysis of the map of military losses of the Napoleon’s invasion of Russia) was already available on the web or in previous books, even if not as detailed, but “I get it” emerged in my mind a lot more (well, first time ever, really) than in his previous books (and the last ’shameless plug’ chapter about his sculptures felt borderline pathetic).

Similarly, “Where the action is” could be condensed in about 20 pages without loss of precision or clarity.

But my intent here is not really to review these books and criticize their shortcomings (who am I to do that? using my blog precisely to avoid the effort of making my thoughts coherent and organic!), but to dump the fresh feelings and thoughts that these two books inspired.

One of Tufte’s focal points in his entire work (not just in this last book of his) could be summarized as: “less is bore”.

Tufte doesn’t declare himself so, but he’s a paper kinda guy: he despises low resolution, low data, shortcuts, lack of integrity, moral and scientific and does a great job to inspire all sort of criticism in those of us that aspire not only in emerging meaning from more or less chaotic collections of data, but to present it in a way that is readily understood and easy to value as integral and valid.

He never explicitly mentions interaction in any of his four information visualization books.

But he mentions repeatedly that data should be abundant and that infographic design should respect the infographic consumers (the readers) and be ready to demand a lot from them. A chart, a map, a page should capture attention more than just be easy to skim and forget.

Dorish, on the other hand, is all about interaction and his book could well be summarized as: “meaning is embodied interaction”.

This deserves a little explanation: philosophy aside, his major idea is that humans interact with systems and tools as a form of dialog, learning the meaning of their actions thru the interaction with the system. Not only that, but such interaction is ‘embodied’, in the sense that it’s subjective, phenomenological, something that relates to us using our mind and body at once, not as independent entities in search for the ultimate, meta-physical, ‘meaning’ of the system.

The book contains a lot of fascinating background on phenomenology, that branch of philosophy that, basically, rejects Plato’s idealism and treats concepts like ‘meaning’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ as emerging property of our own ‘embodied’ interaction with the world around us. It rejects the Cartesian separation between mind and body, it rejects absolutes (both individual and social ones) and sure shakes deeply the foundation of the ‘classic models’ of many disciplines, from sociology to linguistics, from politics and morality to information technology and library sciences.

If you hoped for recipes and design patterns about how to do things, both books will disappoint you deeply: both Tufte and Dorish carefully avoid telling you what to do or giving you procedural recipes to do this or that. Instead, they show and analyze examples, outlining the interesting and outstanding parts and explaining the weak ones. In Tufte’s case, he also manages to ‘redraw’ some of the infographics to show you his point and he’s really a master at radically improving an existing chart with just a few lines and text here and there.

At the same time, while no practical tools were added to your bag after reading these books, the feeling you get is somewhat rewarding in the sense of ‘coherence of thought’ that you perceive emerging from all the words that you’ve read and the examples they’ve helped you absorb.

The first of such surprising thoughts is the realization that, even without mentioning it, Tufte is too advocating interaction: not the sort of interaction that you do with keyboards and mice, but the interaction in jumping from one part of a complex chart to another, the emerging of ‘meaning’ from ‘playing’ and trying to understand the message that a chart or a map embeds.

In that sense, the ‘less is bore’ mantra is about stimulating interaction more than putting more data per square inch.

This has surprising effects: not only it makes Tufte’s message much more modern and appealing for those of us who deal with interaction design, but it gives us the ability to re-evaluate interactivity not only as in ‘change of sensorial context due to direct action’ but in more general terms. This not only helps in cases where the interaction is more ‘embodied’ (think about the tremendous appeal things like the iPhone, Nintendo Wii or Microsoft Surface have… all examples of more ‘embodied’ interaction), but also to realize that capturing somebody’s attention goes hand in hand with respecting their intelligence first and admit, as designers, that we have no clue about how people are really going to use the systems we design and that it’s empowering, for both sides, to admit so.

So, the use of a tool or a system becomes an interaction dialog between the user that feels compelled enough to continue to use the system and the designers who should balance the need to make things discoverable and easy to learn from guiding and locking users into wizards and ‘rails’ that feel refreshingly accelerating at first and unbearably patronizing when the users becomes proficient and has emerged his own meanings.

Interaction drives the emergence of meaning in the user’s mind. A meaning that, phenomenology teaches, is very much likely to be completely different than the one the system designers themselves share.

Dorish explicitly suggests the thought of considering systems as toolkits rather than series of precompiled workflows, but also acknowledges how not all types of users appreciate such a wide option space without feeling lost. I would also add thoughts on discoverabilty that he fails to mention explicitly.

At the end, the message that emerges loud and clear is the importance of interactivity as a central part of the process of emerging meaning and knowledge our own ‘embodied’ experience with the world around us (which includes, obviously, infographics and computer systems).

For some reasons I can’t really understand, we have a tendency to forget how serious ‘playing’ and the use of our body is in our daily experiences and we tend to somewhat believe that there is something purer in the use of our minds alone.

It might not yield immediate practical effects, but thinking otherwise is already starting to influence the way I produce and judge my own work and that is, alone, a great reward.