Writing

This is my ongoing file box of notes. Nothing in here is ever really done, it’s where I work out ideas and develop new work. If you’re curious how it works, I’ve written up my process.

Navigation

Doing the work

Cyberspace

What is information?

Fluidity has its benefits

Taylorism

The best ia is contingent

Contingency

Liminal spaces

Big ball of mud

Structurelessness

People create architectures that mirror their communication structures

Why information architecture?

Kishotenketsu story structure

Demonstration

Lectures

A label is a way to stop thinking

A pattern library of architectures

Communication

How to do the reading

Maintenance

Uses of geographic knowledge

Teaching

Place

You can't see the pattern and weave it at the same time

Working agreement

Windows of opportunity

What vs. How

We form and lose memories of tabletops and landscapes at different rates

Vocabulary is not all-purpose

Visual skeuomorphism

Vertical files

True IA is emergent

Thinking happens on paper

The job will never love you back

The feeling of a thing and the reality of it often differ

The earth is flat and square

Taxonomy

Tabletops

Systems affect and enable certain kinds and shapes of documents

Switching between reference systems

Speak to be understood

Nobody cares about information architecture

Language is beautifully various

Inspiration is overly abundant

Wayfinding for legible landscapes

Notetaking workflow

Community

Spatial scale

Spatial knowledge is phenomenal

Spandrels

Sondheim's creative principles

Something good

Signs of things going wrong

Relevance can be system- or user-based

Creativity is making connections

Write it down

Play

Man the artist

Creativity needs empty moments to process

Attention is the beginning of devotion

Regular output is essential for creativity

Reference systems are intrinsic to an experience

Program entrepreneurship for beginners

Attribution bias

Program entrepreneurship

Process teaches

Process mitigates bias

Process directs your attention to impact

Process creates resilience

Process allows you to relax

Process

Precision and recall

Planning for enterprise adoption

Plan for what won't change

Personalization

Pave paths

Pace layers

Overconfidence bias

Organizations earn their architecture

Organizational problems manifest in the site

Nobody understands information architecture

Naïve geography

Networking is hard

Navigation in an ecosystem

My expectations of people who report to me

Multitasking

Multiple maps at different levels of detail

Moving up and down the ladder of abstraction

Method of loci

Metaphors limit our technology

Metaphor requirements

Metadata

Maps need to be visually coded as such

Maps are more real than experience

Mapping

Many difficult experiences are difficult because of poor use of scale

Management philosophy

Make maps

Make friends and wait twenty years

Metaphors

Maintain critical distance from your organization

Maintain a sense of progress

Limit choices

Library science tradition

Leveling in IA and engineering

Letters and books diverged a long time ago

LATCH & PMEST

Landscapes

Knowledge is constructed via connections

Intrinsic cues for reference systems

Inputs to spatial memory are functionally equivalent

Information technology bends toward speed

Information technologies travel together

Information is at least three different things

Incomplete geographic information is fine

Identify locations

IAs are well-suited to program entrepreneurship

IA needs community more than other fields

IA maturity model

IA is orthogonal to other disciplines

IA is more apprenticeship than schooling

IA is everywhere and accidental

IA is a creative discipline

Hierarchies

God is in the details

Go toward what feels most alive

Geometric cues

Generous interfaces

Gen z can't use file structures

Biases are cognitively alluring

Architectural debt

A history of navigation affordances

Levels of distance for making change

Uncertainty

We have two different reference systems for spatial memory

Findability

Gas vs brakes

Files are and have always been relational objects

Extrinsic cues for reference systems

Experience bias

Expedience bias

Executive presentation framework

Establish sight lines

Establish precedent

Elements of information architecture

Domain-driven design

Distance is measured in travel time

Discussion as an activity in the classroom

Different scales need different focuses

Creativity is a cycle

Creativity

Create shared experiences

Create edges

Counter stress with moments of joy

Controlled vocabularies promote communication

Continuity of community beyond teams

Content type

Content dictates form

Content classification

Complexity is not complicatedness

Complex areas don't have clear answers

Collaboration models

CEO Exercise

Burnout

Brilliant conman syndrome

Attributes

Architectural skeuomorphism

Architectural metaphors

Architecture is what's expensive to change

Bounded contexts keep large models usable

Benefits of IA

Balance originality in life and work

Autotagging

An intellectual tradition can provide meaning

AI's modern synthesis

The opposite of IA is doing nothing

Technical architects and IAs

Taskscape

Systems

Add signs

Add landmarks

A parable of the railroad

A career in IA

What's a documentalope?

Xerox parc