The transaction is an artificial social construct that enables people to interact without maintaining relationships. It is essential to the function of modern society, but exhibits limitations.
The redesign, as a concept, is neither necessary nor desirable when applied to working with the Web. I would also like to make it the technically, organizationally and financially inferior decision.
This is my first feature piece on Contents Magazine, about harnessing the properties of hypertext and the Web for superior reader experiences and business results.
A student from the University of Delaware contacted me with a questionnaire about information architecture. It was thought-provoking, so I figured I'd share it.
I have long believed that software the Web are a poor fit for the archetypal construction project, but I always imagined they could be brought into alignment. Now I'm pretty sure they can't.
I have been mulling for years over how to do the navigation for this site, such that it entices some people without turning away others (for all values thereof). I think I may have figured it out.
I have been working with information systems for over half my life, but never once had I assembled a fundamental set of principles for how I believe they should behave.
I made a tool to help me create and maintain editorial continuity on the Web. It is also an example of conceptual integrity in the design and implementation of a simple piece of software.
Here is another installment on data-driven content strategy. This time I demonstrate a technique for looking at the paths readers take through a site, specifically this one.
Consider this as more of an argument for not arguing with people that, by the very nature of their position, you'll never be able to win an argument with.
I came up with the cell a few years ago as a strategy for time management as it pertains to creative work, and with some help from a friend, I finally put it into practice.
This is a recap of the story behind the conceptual model I designed for the Information Architecture Institute, put somewhat more eloquently than I did on the microphone at the 2011 member's meeting on March 31 in Denver, Colorado.
Many of those who make a business out of innovation train on either iteration or incrementalism as the successor to prescriptive design and the key to productivity. I believe there is a time and place for each.
Here's the plan: I assemble a group of awesome subscribers and regularly send them a curated stream of novel, semi-custom software, IA and UX technique.
For a while I've been wanting to probe the distinction of needs and wants and how that relates to highly-synthetic work. I have just received my prompt.
A political scientist considers how the way information is organized can be used to control people. I agree, though I am also optimistic about the future.
This is 85 minutes of my scintillating conversation with Jeff Parks on his IA Podcast about a number of topics around user experience and the state of post-industrial business and work.
My concern about DRM anti-circumvention legislation is that it appears to value ephemeral intellectual property over tangible personal property, and erodes the very concept of the latter.
In order to perform in business, I needed to reconcile why I was doing it, the effect of my performance and how it compares to the behaviour and rhetoric I see around me. In order to do that, I went to the source.
I am unapologetically inclement when it comes to the brain-dead casting of information management tools to pre-computer standards. I recently caught some heat about a comment I made regarding the commutation of grid calendars, adapted for paper, to a computer screen which does not obey the same constraints. This document explains my position.
We create and market software with an emphasis on features, but I believe we should focus on people. I make this argument here, and look at four powerful and inexpensive artifacts that put people in the centre and define their experience around a piece of software with increasing precision: the ecosystem model, personas, scenarios and user experience sketches.
Too easily are we confused about the nature and value of private thought and activity, especially in an age when so many of these activities are recorded as a matter of course. Here I argue that our language distinguishing privacy and secrecy is poor, our expectations for disclosure are crude, and that privacy of information and communication are as essential to society as private property.
Though wildly unpredictable in character, the projects with which we concern ourselves in the 21st century reduce to actions that incur little if any capital or indeed any variable cost. Instead of betting on the successful engineering of an outcome to occur within a fixed envelope of cost and time, it may be beneficial to put immediately to work the results obtainable within a single conceptual degree.
I have considered for some time — and I am confident that I am not the first — that it is difficult to think more sophisticated thoughts than our present duties will allow. That is, our very ability to cogitate relies not only on our own economic surplus, but the surplus surrounding us.
Once upon a time it was a serious undertaking just to concentrate physical resources into one place and time. With that problem mostly solved, we devote much of our energy toward figuring out what to do with the resources we've concentrated.
According to legend, the ancient Greek scholar Archimedes discovered the solution to a confounding problem, by accident, in one of the most unexpected of places.
As a professional problem-solver, it is essential that I understand the character of my most important factor of production and key stock-in-trade: information.
As a mnemonic to myself and an attempt to be helpful to others, I have sketched out a pattern for an effective precursor to solving problems, which begins with taking a deep breath and getting the data.
This is a sketch of an idea for naming projects and other processes and properties within an organization by way of randomly-generated cryptonyms. These cryptonyms serve as intentionally meaningless handles to ultimately decouple projects from products and minimize the psychological implications that meaningful names may evoke.
This was a comment I left in response to Christopher Detzi's post called The Content Conundrum on Boxes and Arrows. It got mangled by their CMS, so I reformatted it here.
In this article, I evaluate a means of mitigating the distractions that impede on the productivity of creative work, specifically that on computers by way of relegating network-originated distractions to a separate account.
This is the first in a series of articles addressing the aspects of computational feasibility and computer and software engineering which pertain to interaction designers.
Back in 2008, I was puzzling out how to do a relative page layout à la Robert Bringhurst, but didn't appear to return to write down what I came up with.