"It didn't explode, the crew didn't die instantly, and it wasn't inevitable." Are your twenty-year-old memories accurate?
One of the best articles on the subject was written by Edward Tufte, author and designer of several beautiful and elegant texts on the visual display of quantitative information. The same material appears in this book.
His story: Engineers indeed tried to convince managers not to launch the shuttle on such a cold day. But they attempted to make their points with some very poorly-designed charts and graphs. Had they used better ones (Tufte provides an example of what might have been), the decision to launch not only would have seemed ill-advised, but would have been shown to be foolhardy. (To my knowledge the article is not available online, but a sample of the most damning material --- the graphs the engineers made to show to the decision-makers, together with Tufte's reorganization of the exact same information --- appears in a book review here.)
Communication is important. Very important. Often we think of communication as a text-based endeavor. We can evaluate text: this is bad writing, that is good writing, this one is concise and clear, that one is windy and obscure. The same accusations can be leveled at quantitative information --- charts, graphs, diagrams, maps. And yes, lives depend on them, sometimes.
Your blog is great! Just stopped by and wanted to let you know that!
Posted by: Holly | 28 January 2006 at 01:45 AM