TCQ: The idea of universal principles is central to your work on visual displays. Would you elaborate on the universality that you suggest is seminal to the human experience?

Tufte: I do believe that there are some universal cognitive tasks that are deep and profound—indeed, so deep and profound that it is worthwhile to understand them in order to design our displays in accord with those tasks. These tasks are understanding causality, multivariateness, and comparison. The speculative part of my work is that these particular cognitive tasks—ways of thinking analytically—are tied to nature’s laws. That is to say, nature’s laws are causal; they reveal themselves by comparison and difference, and they operate at every multivariate space/time point.

My idea here is that, inasmuch as certain cognitive tasks and principles are tied to nature’s laws, these tasks and principles are indifferent to language, culture, gender, or the particular mode of information that is provided. There is an analogy here with Chomsky’s theory of language: that certain rules of language—or in my case, cognitive tasks—come built in.

…

TCQ: What about the Internet?

Tufte: Probably the only generalization about the Internet is that there is none, which is to say that users can have nearly any experience they 

desire. Internet users are not prisoners—they are responsible for 

their experience since they can generate nearly any experience they 

wish (other than an in-depth historical analysis).

TCQ: Do you yourself have some guidelines that you employ when you 

are making decisions about whether to use paper or a computer 

display? You have spoken passionately about paper.

Tufte: I like paper for its permanence, its high resolution, its portability, 

and its physicality. I find the computer screen rather limited when I 

put some of my book material on it. My books are written to the double-page spread. On a computer screen, it is hard for most people to 

even see a complete single page. The more I work on the computer, 

the more I appreciate the amazing qualities of the book, particularly 

the way books support high-speed and also high-resolution 

scanning.

Ultimately, I guess my guideline would be to use everything you 

can to get the word out, remembering that often various display 

methods can be used in parallel.