In the closing talk for this year’s IA Summit, I had a slide that explains the various layers that make up what we use the term “Information Architect” (or “Information Architecture”) to denote. I think it’s important to be self-aware about it, because it helps us avoid a lot of wasted breath and miscommunication.
But […]

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In the “Linkosophy” talk I gave on Monday, I suggested that a helpful distinction between the practices of IxD & IA might be that IxD’s central concern is within a given context (a screen, device, room, etc) while IA’s central concern is how to connect contexts, and even which contexts are necessary to begin with […]

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I finally uploaded Linkosophy on SlideShare.
Or you can download the 6 MB PDF version.
(Thanks to David Fiorito for compressing it down from its formerly gigantic size!)
Giving this talk at the IA Summit was a blast; I’m so grateful for the positive response, and the patience with these still-forming ideas.
If you’re after […]

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The IA Summit is going fine so far. Miami is delightful.
I set up a channel on Freenode so that if anybody wants to get their chat on during sessions, we can do it there.
For those of you who just want to chat without much muss or fuss, go here: http://java.freenode.net//index.php?channel=iasummit2008 … and BE […]

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Some very nice and well-meaning people have asked me to speak as the closing plenary at the IASummit conference this year, in Miami.
This is, as anyone who has been asked to do such a thing will tell you, a mixed blessing.
But I’m slogging through my insanely huge bucket of random thoughts from the […]

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There are some insightful comments on how moderation architectures affect the emergent character of social platforms in Chris Wilson’s article on Slate:
Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy.
He explains how the rules structures of Wikipedia and Digg have resulted (ironically) in highly centralized power structures and territorialism. A quote:
While both sites effectively […]

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So, my article is up… thanks to all the excellent editors who pushed me to finish the dang thing over the last seven months. Procrastination is a fine art, my friends.
Personas and the Role of Design Documentation - Boxes and Arrows
Here’s a nugget:
A persona document can be very useful for design—and for some […]

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Note: This is something I had embedded in a few very long presentations from last year, and I’m realizing it would probably be useful (to me if nobody else) to elaborate on it as its own topic. Here’s the first part.

There’s a lot of writing and thinking happening around the best approaches to designing […]

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There’s been a lot of talk over the last couple of years about a collective Eureka moment where we’ve all come to realize that the Internet, the Web, and designing User Experiences for those platforms, is “really about People … not products and information.”
I think it’s great that more folks are coming to this […]

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Kevin Kelly’s article Bottom Up is Not Enough is making the rounds, and rightly so. Here’s a snippet:
Here’s how I sum it up: The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further than even seems possible. It keeps surprising us in this regard. Given enough time, dumb things can be smarter than […]

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I haven’t written here in many weeks, but it’s not because I’m not writing.
Lately, though, my thoughts have been too fractured to coalesce into anything that felt like a real blog post. I’m now realizing, however, that they never will unless I unclog the cognitive drain, as it were.
So, this post, in a […]

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I’m sick of Facebook. The noise and annoyance, the confusing permissions, the beta-intrusions into privacy and the rest are bad enough.
But what really chafes me about it is the Facebook Apps framework. I’m in full agreement with this post about Facebook, except that I’m not going to blame the developers that much.
The developers […]

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