4th

The lecture started off by an introduction of Edward Tufte, a popular inofrmationdesigner especially in U.S.A. He is a professor emeritus at Yale university and has written seven books and has eventually recieved 30 awards for them. Some of his best known clients include companies such as IBM, HP, Bose, Lotus, CBS, NBC and the list goes on and on... The books he has authored are all designed, written and even published by himself.
Envisioning Information, probably his most notorious book asks a relevant question "How to explain complex material by visual means?". In order to open up this kind of theme he explains it through interesting and thought provoking concepts such as "escaping flat land" and "micro/macro readings". Micro and macro in this kind of field of study is measured by the distance of human/user to the source of information. Examples of such successful examples can be found in for example detailed axonometric maps.
Layering and separation is a way to use macro and micro level effectively. We were shown a rather self explanatory example of hiragana wiriting guide, where the guide lines were there own layer by using different coloring than the actual text. Explanations of the kanjis can also be pinpointed by giving them their own color coding and thus own layer.
Small multiples is another one of the ways to explain the effect of micro and macro layers. This means that some bigger entity is constructed of smaller parts that differ from each other by only a small margin. The effect is intense as the macro value becomes really important when reading the message of a visual message.

Some of the most effective examples showed to us were normal geographical maps where colors and symbols are in fact built in layers and thus give us easy to understand information as well as the infamous graph/map of Napoleon's march to Moscow.

IBM was also used as an example. When Tufte was engaged in developing new kind of windows in the Windows OS for IBM, he wanted to make them more natural for a human's eyes and mind to perceive. He thought that natural colors those of a forest would be the easiest to understand, where the closest objects have the most intense colors and the background objects tend to look more shady and pale.

The key idea of the lecture was to remind us that both humans and objects have in their respective ways physical and mental sides. Where humans physical attributes are understood as bones, organs, veins, skin and other physical parts of us those of the objects are often understood to be hard drives, screens, motherboards and other mechanical parts.
The mental side of humans consists of basically of 3 layers, that also Donald A. Norman stated in his block buster book Emotional Design. Those being the visceral, behavioral and reflective levels of thought processing. Therefore its not a surprise that the mental side of objects is often thought of consisting of styling, colors, weight, basically the aesthetics of the products, since these are the attributes that affect the human beings' emotional side.

This mental or emotional side of human beings is tried to be affected by manufacturers mostly by the means of design. And in the process of styling the targets or aims are set by creating keynotes for the main target groups. When the keynotes are set numerous design concepts are created based on each word and in the end they are attempted to be combined thus creating the optimal products. In many situations however these attempts fall in the category of styling.

These kind of controversies between the mental and physical side of products may very well derive from the generally accepted way of teaching design. As explained in the lecture in the education of architecture students are taught both the structural theory of buildings as well as the external (read styling) of the said buildings. What makes the curriculum of design (especially product design) so much different is the fact that the structural side of objects is neglected as it is expected to be mastered by engineers. This kind of flawed methods of education may very well lead to useless and excessive use of natural resources and unhappy end users.
Maybe it is time to change the way of thinking...