The Challenger: An Information Disaster

Why did the space shuttle Challenger explode? Many people assume it was because of poorly-functioning O rings on the booster rocket. However, those O rings didn’t send that ship up on a cold winter’s morn. People did, and those people drew their most critical information from two simple charts, screened by an overhead projector. The graphs displayed tiny pictures of each shuttle booster, lined up in chronological order, showing launch temperatures and any O ring damage.

They looked like so many crayons in a box, and when the engineers and managers finished looking at them, they didn’t know any more than they had before. The launch was made and seven people died.

Lets look at the information the Challenger engineers looked at but could not see, reorganized by one of the world’s foremost experts on envisioning information, Edward Tufte:

This is the same information, presented in a form that even a child could understand.

Poorly constructed overhead slides don’t normally kill people, but they do often leave people in the dark. Tufte, author of the seminal works, The Visual Design of Quantitative Information, and Envisioning Information, demonstrates time and time again how careful design of information can communicate in a single glance information that might takes hours or weeks of effort to ferret out in its raw form. Just as important as new, clean software design in the coming decade will be designs that result in equally clear information.

These charts were graciously given to me by Edward Tufte and appear in his new book, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative.