De Bono and ‘Serious Creativity’: Corante

“Design” is too small a word for De Bono because he considers “design” as more than just putting together visual elements. He uses the word “design” to describe the process of deliberately putting together new ideas in order to deliver value.

I’d rather see designers of this ilk reclaim the word ‘design’ and spread the meme somehow, but it may never happen. (Thanks to the cultural hijacking of the word for things like fragrances and wallpaper.)

Interesting point, though … kind of wish I’d seen this talk.

Sometimes, it feels like there is simply no way to work through design concepts with stakeholders. There has to be a better way — and we keep thinking we’ve hit the right balance between showing literal “finished” designs prematurely and showing vague skeletal concepts that can so easily be misconstrued.

But sometimes it’s like you’ve shown how a chair works to someone a lot, and each time they leave the room acting like they got it, then when you bring it out again just to refer to what they’d seen in the past before you go on to discuss the desk, the cabinet and the other pieces to the solution, the conversation goes like this:

Them: “Ok, so you’re telling me that I’m gonna, what was the word… sit? … on that surface there… and that my head is going to dangle from the ceiling?”

Us: “No… um… just like we explained with the diagram last time, no dangling is involved.”

Them: “But there’s all that wasted space between your head and the ceiling… I really think something should go there.”

Us: *stunned countenances*

Them: “Can you be sure to usability test it with that option?”

Introducing the Information Architecture Institute

To achieve wider recognition for information architecture, the Institute’s leadership embarked on a process to create a new identity. While the AIfIA name has been well-received and well-known in the user experience community, the name has little equity in the world beyond. Difficulty with spelling and pronouncing AIfIA led us to look for a simpler, clearer alternative.

When we were trying to decide on a name, in that brightly lit room on the Asilomar grounds, we figured it would be, well, arrogant to just call it “the institute” for IA, since that would seem to imply that we claimed some kind of ownership over all of Information Architecture, whatever that was (and is).

But since in the last two years, nobody *else* has made an institute for it, I applaud the decision to just cut to the chase, as it were.

The people who stuck with this organization and continued to do the hard work of molding and nurturing it certainly deserve to make the claim — we’re the institute for IA.

Huzzah :-)

The title to this entry is oversimplified, but it addresses the issue of whether or not “User Experience” as an umbrella discipline of sorts contains IA and all the other things that are related to the new kinds of design we’re all doing for the internet and elsewhere.

In my company, somebody ran across this article by Peter Boersma (at peterboersma.com), and asked what we thought.

I dashed off a reply that sort of fell out of my head, so it’s not entirely refined, but it’s just the same thing I’ve been obsessing about and digging away at for a long while now. I wonder if I’m insane, or if this make sense to anyone else?? Here’s what I wrote.

I still think that the internet has added a new paradigm to design that isn’t covered by traditional disciplines. Until the last decade, nobody had to think about massively populated environments where everything is made of language, and documents are places and vice versa. It’s the shaping of *that* kind of space that necessitates a new kind of architecture, one that isn’t so much concerned with how the thing looks or what statement it makes artistically, but with more emphasis on function.

What we need is a discipline that combines urban planning, civil engineering and “architecture” all within networked electronic environments. If there is another discipline that does this, then I’ll start calling myself after that discipline. But for now I use “information architecture.”

My issue with bundling all of this within “user experience” is that “user experience” puts emphasis on the singular “user” as well as the idea of a received/perceived “experience” — this lends itself to being more about interfaces for individual users involved in specific, solitary tasks.

But the internet has made necessary an approach to design that looks beyond these specific user experiences to the collective experience, which is truly a whole greater than the sum of its parts. This is why Metcalfe’s Law is so important: the usefulness, or utility, of a network equals the square of its users. Why not just the sum of its users? Because with each additional user, the potential for synthesis increases exponentially.

The internet changes what we mean when we say “space” and “time” and “community” — I just don’t see how serially adding together all the various disciplines that have become involved in internet-related design covers this sea change.

One thing my point does, however, is draw a boundary around information architecture that defines it as internet-related (or massive networked electronic environment related — our intranet is technically not ‘on the internet’ but it’s definitely the same order of being). A lot of IA people don’t like that, and want to say that IA is about everything. That’s where it gets watered down, though. If you’re talking about all the old orders of reality, then yeah — there are many lovely disciplines and traditions that have been designing for those orders of reality for generations. The necessity for IA is internet-specific.

I went back to this recently, to get my head back in the right groove when working out how to model complex relationship structures. It still makes me gasp.

RUDI: Bookshelf: Classics: Christopher Alexander: A city is not a tree part 1

Here’s how it ends:

For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces.

At Vanguard, we’re trying to figure out the best ways to visually model the incredibly complex webs of relationships between financial institutions, people, and the various ways the money is organized. I wish we could do something along these lines (see below) but I doubt anything like this is mature enough for us to use at this point… Currently all the CRM applications available model this synaptic, organic chaos of connections in a flat hierarchy, like the folding drop-down lists in Windows Explorer (not the file browser in Windows). It’s barely adequate, and possibly even detrimental, because it can trick you into thinking you’re seeing everything important when something essential might be two or three levels down and you might miss it.

Vizster: Visualizing Online Social Networks

Vizster is an interactive visualization tool for online social networks, allowing exploration of the community structure of social networking services such as friendster.com [4], tribe.net [12], and orkut [10]. Such services provide means by which users can publicly articulate their mutual “friendship” in the form of friendship links, forming an undirected graph in which users are the nodes and friendship links are the edges.

I spotted an article in the latest Metropolis Magazine touting a new, “innovative” approach to “make research a fundamental factor in all phases of product development.” (The article isn’t on the site, though.)

I’m glad the approach is getting press, but I was a little surprised to see it called “innovative” since I thought more people knew about this?

IIT’s website luckily has a PDF of the article that you’d normally have to buy the magazine to see.

Institute of Design : In The News

Here’s a quick link to the PDF download. (Not large at all.)

LiveJournal is an amazing, genre-bending web entity. There are imitators (mostly using LJ’s code) and admittedly there are some clunky things about LJ’s execution, but I really would like to dig in and write about just what in terms of architecture makes LJ work and be such a magnet for its users. One small change or different decision in how journals are linked, browsed, or whatever, could completely change the way it all works, and then change how the individuals relate entirely.

I’m still mulling.

But this is a cool link to a mind-map (that works kind of like the infamous “brain” interface) with spatial proximity, size and color being used to map prominence and/or relevance of certain ‘friend’ names on the site. In fact it’s part of a community on LJ called “weblog sociology” which I may have to keep up with more closely. This post in particular and the resulting comments bring up points that I think are central to IA in general. To me, the ‘net isn’t about information, but about connecting people to people (often via their information and knowledge)… but this is another topic upon which I must further mull.

In the meantime:

weblogsociology: MindMap = Friendship Patterns

I finally finished dragging my rear enough to finish a review of Mike Kuniavsky’s Boxes and Arrows: Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research, and it’s posted at that link on the Boxes and Arrows website now.

I’m sitting in the Taxonomy pre-conference thingie here at the IA Summit. For four years I’ve been wanting to take this one, and even though I have some basics I figured I’d do the whole course. It’s just Friday, the rest of the conference is just…well…regular conference stuff.

Austin is flat. And they have a new building downtown that looks like it came from the set of a Batman movie.

That’s all for now.

Mappa.Mundi Magazine – Memory Palaces

This article summarizes some very important stuff that keeps haunting me as I obsess over how to conceptualize information environments.

I read Frances Yates’ book on The Art of Memory as an undergraduate, and used it as part of a paper I wrote on Vico’s science of the imagination. Since then I keep thinking of this powerful, ancient idea of the “memory palace” and how we still use spatial representations of place in our heads, even when we’re not navigating actual “space.” (An example: when you compare the nutritional information of two snacks, you usually would hold them side by side, looking at the tables printed on their packaging. But if you weren’t able to hold them side by side in real time, you’d unconsciously list the info from product A in your head and compare it in that imagined list’s ‘space’ against product B… )

Anyway, we make these little rooms still, even if we don’t do it on purpose. We especially use them to get around websites and environments that aren’t even physical… making something physical out of them in our imaginations.

I’m about to start trying to visually model one of the largest financial services web properties in the world… and maybe I’m reaching back to this idea like an old friend, or “comfort food” — something to reassure me that what I’m doing isn’t that scary?

Anyway, I really dig the muted post horn reference toward the bottom of this article. Pynchon lives!

Just updated my resume. (pdf download)

And no, I didn’t take the time to figure out the accent HTML code to make “resume” look right. I’m too busy trying to find a job!