Yuri Engelhardt

information visualization

graphics and diagrams

sustainability

My academic career started with studying organic agriculture for developing countries, but I switched to medical school, and later to cognitive science.

I hold an MA degree in medicine, a Ph.D. in computer science, and I am Assistant Professor of media and culture.

A short biography is here (for a training I gave for the Istituto Europeo di Design).

Currently I work at the University of Amsterdam (see my staff page). Mail me at:  engelhardt (at) uva (dot) nl

Presentations: In addition to lecturing at universities, art academies and other institutions in the Netherlands, I’ve enjoyed traveling to give presentations in, for example, Barcelona (on The language of graphics), Berlin (Epson), Cambridge, Coventry, Edinburgh, Hamburg, Hannover, London (on Theories in information design and on Explanatory and instructional graphics, see also here), Paris, Pittsburgh, Recife (Brazil), Schwarzenberg (Austria), Stockholm (one-day course in Information visualization), and Stanford (e.g.: Building blocks of graphics come in syntactic categories).

Publications

Note: The Language of Graphics is out of print, but all pages have been scanned and can be downloaded via this download page. The introductory chapter (download pdf, 600 kb) deals with graphic representation, visual language, and the grammar of graphics. (See a brief review.)

Contributions to books:

Network nations (with Ben Schouten). See here and here. In: Else/Where: Mapping New cartographies of networks and territories (2006).

Objects and spaces: The visual language of graphics. See here. In: Diagrammatic representation and inference (2006).

A meta-taxonomy for diagram research (with Alan Blackwell). See here. In: Diagrammatic representation and reasoning (2002).

Grundprinzipien grafischer Darstellungen. In: Navigation durch Text, Bild und Raum (2001).

Meaningful space. In: If/Then: Design implications of new media (1999).

A recent paper of mine is Syntactic Structures in Graphics (pdf, 350 kB) (2007, in: Computational Visualistics and Picture Morphology, also here).

Here are some titles of papers I have (co-)authored (see some of my writings at Google Scholar for references):

Meaningful space: How graphics use space to convey information (1998).

A taxonomy of diagram taxonomies (1998).

Structure-preserving visualization: Towards... (1997).

Formal specification of a graphic design theory (1997).

Towards a design theory for visualization (1996).

The visual grammar of information graphics (1996).

My critical review of Edward Tufte’s ‘Beautiful Evidence’.

Other work-related activities

Member of the Editorial Board of the Information Design Journal (and of the Advisory Committee of the Brazilian Journal of Information Design).

Founder and moderator (1995-1999) of InfoDesign, the first international electronic forum on information design (see here and here).

Assistant curator of and contributor to InfoArcadia.

Recent/current memberships of program committees: 3rd Information Design International Conference and Diagrams 2008.

Some texts that others wrote about my work

Very brief review of The Language of Graphics (2007).

The InfoVis Diagram (2007).

Illustrated explanation of my notion of graphic syntax (2004).

Student report of a lecture I gave in Barcelona (2003).

Article about my grammar of graphics (2002).

A critical review of The language of graphics (2002).

Dutch media about my work:

Duidelijke taal van een plaatje (de Volkskrant, 1996),

Yuri Engelhardt en de taal van het visuele (Tekstblad, 2007).

My stuff on the web

Some books that mention my work.

Some work-related images.

Teaching

At the University of Amsterdam I have (co-)developed and taught a large number of courses at BA and MA levels - here is a selection:

Online interactive graphics,

Structure & rhetoric of multimodal representations,

Information visualization (also here),

Pictorial languages, graphics and visual information.

Core courses about new media (description in Dutch):

Interaction design, New media objects, New media analysis I, Digital culture.

Also, for many years now, I have been teaching Philosophy of Science, using collaborative visualization assignments and concept mapping.

At the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design, I am involved in teaching:

Information graphics in the MA program Editorial Design (also see here and here).

Many years ago, I co-taught: Automatic visualization and Formal perspectives on visual representation.

I have (co-)developed online courses on Information visualization for the Istituto Europeo di Design (see here) and for the Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona.

My life

My educational path has included elementary school in Australia, high school in Germany, college in California, and university in the Netherlands. I am a (close-to-)native speaker of English, German, and Dutch. I speak French fluently, and I am enthusiastically working on my Spanish.

My main interest in life is in people.

Early non-academic work experience:

Among other jobs, I’ve been a teaching assistant in a school for physically handicapped children, as a medical student I have worked in health care in various medical centers and hospitals (general practice, psychology, orthopedics, surgery), and I’ve been an infographics-developer for popular science journals.

I have always been active for sustainable development and for international social responsibility (e.g. during the 2006 flooding in Surinam, I happened to be in Paramaribo, so I helped to coordinate international aid). 

I am now contributing to the curriculum development of Future Planet Studies (descriptions in Dutch here and here): a new BA program that combines natural sciences and social sciences to study possibilities for sustainable development.

For some nice examples of visualizations that help to raise public awareness about such topics see Visualizing Information for Advocacy, Gapminder, Google Earth Outreach, and The Story of Stuff.