Edward tufte meets christopher alexander

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the relationships between Christopher Alexander's Fifteen Properties of living structures, found in The Nature of Order, and Edward Tufte's Principles of Information Design, found in Envisioning Information. In the examination of examples of Tufte's Principles, we find commonality between the Principles and Alexander's Fifteen Properties.

REFERENCES

• 1: Alexander, C. Nature of Order, Volume 1. Berleley, CA(USA): Center for Environmental Structure, 2002.
• 2: Edward Tufte, Envisioning information, Graphics Press, Cheshire, CT, 1990
• 3: John W. Stamey, Jr. , Thomas L. Honeycutt, Christopher Alexander's fifteen properties applied to the design of communication, Proceedings of the 22nd annual international conference on Design of communication: The engineering of quality documentation, October 10-13, 2004, Memphis, Tennessee, USA [doi>10.1145/1026533.1026551]
• 4: Stamey, J.W., Honeycutt, T.L., & Howington, E. Christopher Alexander's Fifteen Properties Applied to the Usability and Design of Websites. Proceedings of Southeast Decision Sciences, 2005, Raleigh, NC.
• 5: Hart-Davidson, B. Reconsidering the Basics of Technical Writing: What are the Basic Units of a Quality Writing Project? Proceedings of the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication 2004 Conference. Retrieved July 15, 2005 from http://www.msu.edu/~hartdav2/cptsc2004.pdf
• 6: Karl L. Smart, Assessing quality documents, ACM Journal of Computer Documentation (JCD), v.26 n.3, August 2002 [doi>10.1145/604228.604236]
• 7: Beverly B. Zimmermann, Applying Tufte's principles of information design to creating effective Web sites, Proceedings of the 15th annual international conference on Computer documentation, p.309-317, October 19-22, 1997, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States [doi>10.1145/263367.263406]
• 8: Gamma, E., Vlissides, J., Helm, R., & Johnson, R. Design Patterns. Addison Wesley, 1995.
• 9: Lowey, A. & Hood, P. The Power of the 2x2 Matrix. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004.
• 10: Alexander, C. The Timeless Way of Building. Oxford University Press, 1979.
• 11: Alexander, C.; Ishikawa, S.; Silverstein, M. A Pattern Language. Oxford University Press, 1977.
• 12: Albers, Josef. "One Plus One Equals Three or More: Factual Facts and Actual Facts," in Search Versus Re-Search, pp. 17--18. Hartford, CT (USA): Trinity College Press, 1969.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.1 Requirements/Specifications

General Terms:
Design, Documentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
Christopher Alexander, Edward Tufte, computer-human information, design of communication, design patterns, envisioning information, fifteen properties