I have wanted for a long time to write down this short history. It is a work in progress as it needs some patient tracking to verify some claims and it needs to be completed for there are some more important pieces missing !!

I have ranked them in historical order :

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), England, natural philosopher, theologist, political theorist, and educator. He designed a timeline chart (1765), with bars to indicate longevity of famous people. More info on Wikipedia.

William Playfair (1759-1823), engineer and economist, is credited with inventing data draphics (time series 1786, pie chart 1801, and bar charts). More info on Wikipedia 

Charles-Joseph Minard (1781-1870), inspecteur général des Ponts et Chaussées, who is probably E. Tufte's favorite, is credited with inventing the flowchart to depict Napoleon's retreat from Russia (1861). More details on Wikipedia.

John Snow (1813-1858), physician specialist in epidemiology, used simple mapping to display statistical evidence from cholera outbreaks to point out the role of water sources (1854). More information on Wikipedia.

Unknown (Touring Club de France). The first documented apparition of a traffic sign was 1894 on the RN7 by Cannes. First designed for people riding bicycle, it quickly proved necessary to organize automobile's birth. It was quickly made mandatory in Paris (1904) and became an international standard staring 1909 (successive iterations and new signs). More info here, here, here, here and here.

Otto Neurath (1882-1945), philosopher, sociologue and economist, created a system of practical signs (stick figures) to convey quantitative information and formalized his thinking in the Isotype (1930). More information on Wikipedia.

Otto Aicher (1922-1991), graphical designer. He designed the pictograms used for the 1972 Munich Olympics. First attempts had been made at the Tokyo Olympics before but it was Aicher's pictograms which stayed as a normalized system to describe sports. More information on Wikipedia.

Carl Sagan (1934-1996), astronomer and astrobiologist. He designed with Frank Drake (1930-xx) the so-called Pioneer Plaque. A graphical representation of key current human scientific knowledge was printed on a metal plaque that was sent on the Pioneer spatial probe in search for an extraterrestrial intelligence. More info on Wikipedia.

Susan Kare (1954,xx), graphic designer. She designed the first icons for Apple Computer's new Macintosh operating system between 1983 and 1986. Those 'pixelart' icons together with the graphical interface surely paved the way for the widespread adoption of personal computing. More info on her website and on Wikipedia.

And finally Edward Tufte (1942-xx), statistician and political economist. His contribution to information design can not be yet valuated but judging from the number of the books he wrote and how he is referenced throughout the InfoViz community … More info on Wikipedia.

 For more on the history, I have found quite a few papers on the web, starting with this one and this one from the same authors.

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I am a fan of simple instructions, most of them relying on images / graphics only, such as Ikea's or Lego's. Pat Hanrahan and Barbara Tversky from Stanford University have done a lot of good research on that subject. See also the very good book from graphic designer Paul Mijksenaar Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design . Graphic instructions are knowledge design at their best !!

Last June I was traveling by TGV and there was an exhibition in the train by the well known international NGO "Medecins sans Frontieres" (with French origins : the so-called French doctors). They were explaining who they were and the type of missions they were doing and had brought with them some paraphernalia.

I was especially interested in a few of them like this "pill bag" that display very useful instructions in a unequivocal way.

Doctors need their medicine to be taken the right way, no matter what language the patient speaks, or if he is able to read or not. By using this little plastic bag, they can deliver the right number of pills and indicate how many and when a pill needs to be taken. Such a bag is cheap to produce and can be used in the millions worldwide.

Other examples of simple and standardized instructions are the apparel / clothing care instructions  I had to battle with as a marketer trying to design one that would be accepted in all European countries in addition to the US. Just because all countries need some translation of the graphic signs, most apparel manufacturers' labels are in some benign way illegal (just imagine peeling 3 or four labels in your neck …, because that's what would be required to comply with French, Greek, Portuguese, etc … language and labeling laws). The label below does for example not comply with regulations that require the information of the manufacturer's name and address, has not been translated in any local language … Technically this product could be seized by any authority in Europe (except perhaps in the UK ;-)), but end up being sold anyway.

I will come back with more on such design standards in a future post. They are in essence a universal language. See my previous post on this.

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Everything you always wanted to know about colour, its history, why use one vs another, … A must for all graphic designers also exists in a French version :

John T. Drew & Sarah A. Meyer, « La gestion de la couleur : guide exhaustif à l’usage des graphistes », 2005, Editions Pyramid

 See also the user guide on InfoVis : http://www.infovis.net/printMag.php?num=183&lang=2

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Un excellent livre qui fait le point sur l'état de l'art des techniques informatiques de visualisation d'information.

"Information Visualization : Beyond The Horizon", second edition, 2006, Springer Verlag 

je valide l’inscription de ce blog au service Paperblog sous le pseudo adebuche

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