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.

Process

Notetaking workflow

Go toward what feels most alive

How to do the reading

Spandrels

Leveling in IA and engineering

Creativity needs empty moments to process

Communication

We have two different reference systems for spatial memory

Maintenance

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 making connections

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

Community

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

Biases are cognitively alluring

Benefits of IA

Balance originality in life and work

Autotagging

Attribution bias

An intellectual tradition can provide meaning

AI's modern synthesis

Write it down

Architectural debt

Working agreement

Windows of opportunity

What vs. How

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

Wayfinding for legible landscapes

Vocabulary is not all-purpose

Visual skeuomorphism

Vertical files

Uses of geographic knowledge

True IA is emergent

Thinking happens on paper

The opposite of IA is doing nothing

The job will never love you back

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

Technical architects and IAs

Taxonomy

Taskscape

Tabletops

Systems

Systems affect and enable certain kinds and shapes of documents

Switching between reference systems

Speak to be understood

Spatial scale

Spatial knowledge is phenomenal

Sondheim's creative principles

Something good

Signs of things going wrong

Relevance can be system- or user-based

Regular output is essential for creativity

Reference systems are intrinsic to an experience

Program entrepreneurship

Program entrepreneurship for beginners

Process teaches

Process mitigates bias

Process directs your attention to impact

Process creates resilience

Process allows you to relax

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

Objects are more useful than actions

Nobody understands information architecture

Nobody cares about information architecture

Networking is hard

Naïve geography

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

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

Man the artist

Make maps

Make friends and wait twenty years

Maintain critical distance from your organization

Maintain a sense of progress

Limit choices

Library science tradition

Levels of distance for making change

Letters and books diverged a long time ago

Language is beautifully various

Landscapes

LATCH & PMEST

Knowledge is constructed via connections

Intrinsic cues for reference systems

Inspiration is overly abundant

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

Geometric cues

Generous interfaces

Gen z can't use file structures

Attention is the beginning of devotion

Add signs

Add landmarks

A pattern library of architectures

A parable of the railroad

A label is a way to stop thinking

A history of navigation affordances

A career in IA

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

What's a documentalope?

The earth is flat and square