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Beyond Findability Seminar at IA Summit 2009

January 14, 2009 by Andrew | No comments

In case you were wondering which of the fabulous IA Summit 2009 pre-conference seminars to spend your hard-earned (or hard-begged) money on, look no further than “Beyond Findability: Reframing IA Practice & Strategy for Turbulent Times”

It’s being presented by the IA Institute, and includes some very smart, experienced people in the UX/IA world: Livia Labate, Joe Lamantia and Matthew Milan. In addition, it includes little old me.

Hit that link to learn more about the workshop. I’m excited about it — we’ll be digging into some meaty subjects, and stretching our brains about IA. Yet we’ll manage to have lots of practical take-aways and fascinating conversations too.

Flickr and Market Governance

September 30, 2008 by Andrew | Permalink

Erin Malone points to an article on the challenges of managing the Flickr community in the SF Chronicle:

"People bring their human relationships to Flickr, and we end up having to police them," Champ says. …

Lest your inner libertarian objects to such interventions, Champ is quick to correct the idea that the community would ultimately find its own balance.

"The amount of time it would take for the community to self-regulate — I don't think it could sustain itself in the meantime," she says. "Anyway, I can't think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own."

This struck me as uncannily relevant to what’s going on right now in the US economy.

Once social platforms like Flickr reach a certain size, they really do become a weird amalgam of City & Economy, and they require governance. Heather Champ (Flickr’s estimable community manager) points out that, even if you truly believe a collective crowd like this will self-regulate, much damage will be done on the way to finding that balance.

Isn’t that precisely the perennial tension we have in terms of free-market economics?

It seems to me that User Experience design is increasingly needing to learn from Economics and Political Science — and it may even have a thing or two to teach them, as well.

I have lots of thoughts on this, but too many to get down here … just wanted to bring it up because I think it’s so damned fascinating.

The Cultivation Equation Part 2: Motivation

September 22, 2008 by Andrew | Permalink

Motivation

Months ago, I posted the first part of something I’d been presenting on for over a year: a simple way of thinking about social design choices. I called it the “Cultivation Equation for Social Design.” I should’ve known better, but I said at the end of that post that I’d be posting the rest soon … then proceeded to put it off for a very long time. At any rate, here’s the second part, about Motivation. The third part (about Moderation) will be forthcoming, eventually, but I make no promises on timing.
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Denis Wood: A Narrative Atlas of Boylan Heights « Making Maps: DIY Cartography

September 20, 2008 by Andrew | Permalink

Detail from Halloween Pumpkins Map of Wood's Neighborhood

In my talk for IDEA Conference, I’ll be referencing the work of Denis Wood.

I’m so utterly intrigued by a particular long-term project he did back in the 80s, which ended up in an episode of This American Life.

In a blog post at the “Making Maps” blog, Wood goes into some detail about this project and how it managed to go from being a bunch of stuff in a box under his desk to one of the most popular episodes of TAL: Denis Wood: A Narrative Atlas of Boylan Heights « Making Maps: DIY Cartography

There was a lot we wanted to do. Certainly we wanted to use the mapping to help us figure out what a neighborhood was, but we also wanted to use the mapping as a kind of organizational tool, as a way of bringing the neighborhood together and helping it to see itself. This meant we wanted to be able to get copies of the atlas into the hands of the residents and so we planned a black and white atlas that could be cheaply reproduced on a copy machine. At the same time we wanted to make something beautiful, almost a livre d’artiste. I in particular was impatient with distinctions between art and science – it was an important part of my teaching that these distinctions were arbitrary and obfuscatory – and I wanted the atlas to read almost like a novel.

One thing I love about this story is how it breaks assumptions about what maps are, and what they’re for. How a map of a neighborhood shapes the identity if the neighborhood. Wood uses the term “mask” for what a map can do — it creates a mask that the place wears on its own face, for anyone who looks at the map. It constructs & reveals at the same time, a neighborhood’s crime patterns, underground tunnels & cisterns, or the spirit of its residents through where the jack-o-lanterns are on Halloween.

The map is a narrative. So what does that mean, when we create virtual places that are their own maps? It means our assumptions of what the map shows actually shape the neighborhood itself. Not just in the “social construction” sense of printed maps and physical neighborhoods, but quite literally in the sense of architecture.

What does it mean to be a resident of a neighborhood mapped as X vs one mapped as Y? What if, with the flip of a switch, the neighborhood could change between X and Y? Isn’t that what we’re making with our virtual spaces?

Changes in how we perceive place & time

September 15, 2008 by Andrew | Permalink

From Adam Greenfield:

If, as so many have pointed out, the ongoing process of digital ephemeralization has taken previously place-bound functions like communication, banking and commerce, and exploded them – “smearing them across urban space,” in Bill Mitchell’s words – it’s without question also doing interesting and significant things to how we perceive the nexus of place and time.

Adam says he’s going to focus on these changes in his new book — I’m looking forward to it.

Running for the Board & the future of the IAI

September 5, 2008 by Andrew | No comments

In the midst of all the other things keeping me busy and away from blogging, some very nice people nominated me to serve on the Board of Advisors for the IA Institute. I’m flattered and honored, and a bit intimidated. But if elected, I’ll give it my best shot.

They asked for a bio and position statement. Here’s the position bit I sent them:

This [Information Architecture] community has excelled at creating a “shared history of learning” over the last 10 years. We’ve seen it bring essential elements to the emergence of User Experience Design, in the form of methods, tools, knowledge, and especially people. I think the IAI has been essential to how the community has developed, thanks to the hard work of its volunteers and staff creating excellent initiatives for mentorship, careers and other important needs.

The next big challenge is for the IAI to become more than a sum of its parts. How can it become a more influential, vital presence in the UX community? How can it serve as an amplifier for the amazing knowledge and insight we have among our members and colleagues? How can it evolve understanding of IA among business and design peers? And how can we better coexist and collaborate with those peers and practices?

From the beginning, IA has grappled with one of the most important challenges designers now face: how to define and link contexts usefully, usably and ethically in a digital hyper-linked world. I don’t see that challenge becoming any easier in the years ahead. In fact, the digital world is only becoming more pervasive, strange and exciting.

As a board member, my focus will be to help the IA Institute grow as a valued, authoritative resource for that future.

UPDATE:

Already, I feel the urge to further explain.

Read the rest of this entry »

You don’t want to miss IDEA Conference 2008!

August 13, 2008 by Andrew | No comments

IDEA 2008 is shaping up to be quite a conference, in spite of my involvement. In terms of speakers, it’s looking great: David Armano writes the influential Logic + Emotion blog — one of the few voices online that understands the complexity of merging Marketing & Advertising with User Experience Design; Bill DeRouchey is one of the smartest people writing and thinking about the future of Interaction Design; visual-thinking sensei Dave Gray is the founder of XPLANE, a company whose blog I started reading religiously back in 1999, when my career as a Web Design person was really taking off; and Jason Fried, author of the provocative design manifesto Getting Real.

That’s just scratching the surface. They’re going to have in-the-trenches expert speakers from places like Maya, IDEO, The New York Times, 37 Signals, and more. In addition, I hear Jesse James Garrett will be doing an in-person presentation of Aurora.

It’s happening October 7-8, 2008; early registration is still in effect for another week or so, until August 17!

All your selves collide

August 6, 2008 by Andrew | No comments

There’s been a lot of writing here and there about social networks and privacy, but I especially like how this professor from (one of my alma-maters) UNCG puts it in this article from the Washington Post:

“It’s the postmodern nightmare — to have all of your selves collide,” says Rebecca G. Adams, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who edits Personal Relationships, the journal of the International Association for Relationship Research. … “If you really welcome all of your friends from all of the different aspects of your life and they interact with each other and communicate in ways that everyone can read,” Adams says, “you get held accountable for the person you are in all of these groups, instead of just one of them.”

It’s a pretty smart article. I also liked the phrase “participatory surveillance” for describing what happens socially online.

Words we use for what we make

August 5, 2008 by Andrew | No comments

I just saw that the BBC tv documentary series based on Stuart Brand’s “How Buildings Learn” has been posted on Google Video. Huzzah!

It’s been a while since I read the book, so I watched a bit of the first episode, and it kicked up a thought or two about the language we use for design. Brand makes a sharp distinction between architecture that’s all about making a “statement” — a stylistic gesture — and architecture that serves the needs of a building’s inhabitants. (Arguably a somewhat artificial distinction, but a useful one nonetheless. For the record, Joshua Prince Ramus made a similar distinction at IASummit07.)

The modernist “statements” Brand shows us are certainly experiences — and were designed to be ‘experienced’ in the sense of any hermetic work of ‘difficult’ art. But it’s harder to say they were designed to be inhabited. On the other hand, he’s talking about something more than mere “use” as well. Maybe, for me at least, the word “use” has a temporary or disposable shade of meaning?

It struck me that saying a design is to be “inhabited” makes me think about different values & priorities than if I a design is to be “used” or “experienced.”

I’m not arguing for or against any of these words in general. I just found the thought intriguing… and I wonder just how much difference it makes how we talk about what we’re making, not only to our clients but to one another and ourselves.

Has anyone else found that how you talk about your work affects the work? The way you see it? The way others respond to it?

Even “useless” categories can help

July 31, 2008 by Andrew | Permalink

Ok… before the flames start… nobody’s saying that categories are useless, just the opposite. And it’s not saying that “useful” categories are no better. But it’s still a fascinating insight… From the Frontal Cortex blog:

“Now Iyengar has published a new study showing that one way to combat the effects of excessive choice is to group items into categories. It turns out that even useless categories make people happier with their choices.”

Jyri Engestrom on “Nodal Points”

June 27, 2008 by Andrew | No comments

Dave Weinberger is blogging bits of the valuably fecund “Reboot” conference this week. Included is a nice summary of Jaiku-founder Jyri Engestrom’s talk. In the past, he’s been very influential among social design folk for pushing the idea of “social objects” — a powerful notion that helps clarify why people do what they do socially (usually it’s around some artifact, subject or object).

This time, Jyri pulls the frame out a bit to look at the bigger picture of social patterns and talks about “nodal points” — there’s more explanation on the post, but here’s a taste:

“Social peripheral vision” lets you see what’s next. If you are unaware of other people’s intentions, you can’t make plans. “Imagine a physical world where we have as much peripheral information at our disposal as in WoW.” Not just “boring update feeds.” Innovate, especially on mobiles. We will see this stuff in the next 24 months. Some examples: Maps: Where my friends are. Phonebook: what are people up to. Email: prioritized. Photos: Face recognition.

Context and “Choice Architectures”

June 23, 2008 by Andrew | Permalink

Within a larger, and more political, point in his column, George Will explains something about structuring systems so as to “nudge” people toward a particular behavior pattern, without mandating anything: George F. Will: Nudge Against the Fudge

Such is the power of inertia in human behavior, and the tendency of individuals to emulate others’ behavior, that there can be huge social consequences from the clever framing of the choices that nudgeable people—almost all of us—make. Choice architects understand that every choice is made in a context, and that contexts are not “neutral”—they inevitably encourage certain outcomes. Organizing the context can promote outcomes beneficial to choosers and, cumulatively, to society.

It’s describing a thesis behind the book “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness” from a couple of people who just happen to also be advising Obama.

Will’s examples are things like automatic-yet-optional enrollment in an employer’s 401k, or automatic-yet-optional defaulting organ-donor checkboxes on drivers’ licenses.

But, beyond the implications for government (which I think are fascinating, but don’t have time to get into right now), I think this is an excellent way of articulating something I’ve been trying to explain for quite a while about digital environments. Basically, that even in digital environments, there are ways to ‘nudge’ people’s decisions — both explicit and tacit — with the way you shape the focus of an interface, the default choices, the recommended paths. But you still give them plenty of freedom.

To the more libertarian or paranoid folks, this might sound horribly big-brother. But that’s only if you have a choice between a system and no system at all. The assumption is that — as with government — anarchy isn’t an option and you have to build *something*. Once you acknowledge that you have to build it, then you have to make these decisions anyway. Why not make them with some coherent, whole understanding of the healthiest, most beneficial outcomes?

The question then becomes, what is “beneficial” and to whom? That’ll be driven by a given organization’s goals and values. But the technique is neutral — and should be considered in the design of any system.

Information Architecture