Articles by AndrewH

Owner of inkblurt.com

Back from the IA Summit, and my brain is full… brimming and spilling over.

One thing that I came away with was a newly energized zeal to preach the wisdom of Information Architecture as a practice of creating digital spaces for people to collaborate, live, work and play in. The focus being not on the individual-to-interface interaction (or individual-to-retrieved-information interaction), but between the individual and other individuals or groups.

Focusing on tags or taxonomies or even “organization” itself is focusing on the particular raw materials we use to get the social-engineering result. A city planner’s job isn’t defined by “deciding where to put streets and sewers.” But knowing where those go is central to their job of making urban spaces conducive to particular kinds of living — commerce, residence, play, etc.

That is, an urban planner’s real focus is human systems. But the materials used to affect human systems are concrete, steel, electricity, signage, roads and the rest. Lots of specialties are required, and knowledge of many of them is necessary.

Anyway, I ran across this today: Here’s an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas – New York Times

The concept is maybe a little cheesy, but evidently it works. This software is essentially “an internal market where any employee can propose [an idea]. These proposals become stocks, complete with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Employees buy or sell the stocks, and prices change to reflect the sentiments of the company’s engineers, computer scientists and project managers — as well as its marketers, accountants and even the receptionist.”

It seems to me an excellent example of information architecture — creating this application to enable, encourage and refine the collective idea-making wisdom of a whole organization. Getting the labeling right in such an application isn’t the focus of “IA” anymore to me. That’s taxonomy or c.v. or interaction design work that is essential to the success of the architecture, of course.

But the Information Architecture is the larger issue of understanding what structures are made out of those materials (vocabularies, search tools, labels) to enable and encourage the human system inhabiting that structured environment.

Speakers – ASIS&T 2006 Information Architecture Summit

Here are my notes from David Weinberger’s opening plenary.

What’s Up With Knowledge??

David Weinberger, March 2006 IA Summit

Everything is Miscellaneous

bizarre artifact of publishing on paper that you have to be *done* with something

we’ve been org’ing ideas using same principles we use for physical stuff
a limitation we don’t need due to digitizing, so we now need new ways of organizing.

imporant changes to knowledge

Data -> Info -> Knowledge -> Wisdom … to my mind, you have to ask why is this an appealing formulation

looks too much like the old formulation of evolution, apa up to man…Jay Gould saying this is a fallacy.

we generated all this information and it wasn’t helping us, still a lack

stripped out context to get stuff to fit into databases (!!!)

how do we get to knowledge if we stripped out the context???

this idea that we can go from info to knowledge is very new in our culture … for 2500 years our culture has thought knowledge had to do with a lot else.

Hume: Impressions, sense data/perceptions, then three relationships we order them through, resemblence, contiguity, cause, then the filter of reason…then *maybe* we get knowledge

Facts, experience and wisdom — what we need to make it work

Wisdom is what guides knowledge, not a product of it. (traditonally)

This has the causality backwards, this new formulation.

You need knowledge to figure out what info you want.

They very prototype of wisdom in our culture was socrates who was wise because he said I know I don’t know anything.

“informationalization” — the reduction of all experience, knowledge, feelings and awareness to information. It’s permeated what DNA is — everyone seems to know it’s information. We depict DNA as a nice clean info view — the double helix

DNA is actually clumps of atoms … twisty and irregular. Not information. Important we can address it as info…but we don’t usually confuse the magical landscape.

Seven properties of knowledge:

1 Knowledge … started as connection between knower and known.
2 Same for everyone — only one knowledge. world is very confusing in its appearance, but knowledge is the ‘true’ view. it’s simpler than the world. because of that, most things aren’t knowledge.
Doesn’t matter who says it if it’s true.
Bigger than we are. Francis Miksa — we believed “there ixists a realm of knowledge that grows through individual contributions and is transmitted from generation to generation such that its existence is thought to be continuous and is capable of being exasmined.” like gardeners and garden
same descrip works for physical libraries
7 Orderly: a system. Hierarchy/tree is the main way of ordering. We don’t have to think explicitly but we can if we need to by going through the tree…compresses a lot of info and highly valuable knowledge artifcat.

(Same for all, one, independent of knower, outlasts us, orderly)

These are formal properties.

We’ve had to collect and save knowledge in physical objects. Can’t be in 2 places at once. have to have primary categories. Paper — have to explain things in 2-D. Our knowledge largely has been shaped by the nature of books, paper, and econ of publishing.

Traditional knowledge view under attack:

Postmodernism, Wittgenstein, etc.

(in some ways tagging an absolute fulfillment of posmodern ideas — readers and taggers are better at saying what the b ooks are about, like what postmoderns say)

Rush (?) showed it’s not how we think … a robin is a much better example of a bird than a penguin. Not an ostrich. Your parents pointed at robins and said “birdie!”

don’t argue about what is tagging: point at it! delicious, flickr. some other things are close, but delicious etc are the prototypes.

Digitizing everything:

Three orders of order — gross simpl.

First Order: Organize things themselves

Second Order: metadata — organize that (huge reduction of knowledge to come up with that second order — lots of utility, and we’re used to it)
(what constitutes metadata is simply the thing you use to find the other stuff — including the thing itself — line between metadata and data ends up being an artificial construct necessitated by limitations of paper)

Third Order:
What can you do easily digitally that the real workld makes really hard?
1. leaf on many branches
– photographic equipment –put it in as many categories as possible to sell it to lots of people, makes it messier traditionally having a clean order was 2. ? sign of virtue, crossing over said your work needed to be redone. digital world: messy is better — lots of associations.

3. Unowned order:
you see UNC’s faceted classification system… allwos users to dynamically select trees that suit them, always leap from a branch.

tagging also allows users to control org of info

Amazon: tagging system that nobody uses.

Tree designed by experts for use by others.

Excludes what we don’t need to know.

Pile of leaves: each highly imbued with metadata of all sorts, including tagging but not just that. The old value of exclusing the noise gets turned on its head, has more value the more it includes. Excluding stuff from the pile has negative value. You can afford to include everything because storage is cheap and users can filter on the way out, post-filtering.

Knowledge’s properties:
one and the same, siple, impersonal, bigger than we, filtered, orderly, has a know-er

Possibly most authoritative journalist is a comedian, john stewart — because of his point of view and how he says things.

Editors at a newspaper: filtering — old version — editorial function has already moved to the web. Digg, etc.

Everybody here reads the newspaper through the web, i guess. You may get the paper paper, but it all happened yesterday, I read it for other reasons…i’m online most of the day, but maybe more importantly i learn news from blogs and things. Socially filtered sites, mailing lists, this web is a huge recommendation engine. Also a huge distraction engine.

Authority: beyond its utility, it gives you social standing, aggregates power for institutions, can control conversations, personal virtue (we’ve been told in our culture) a fulfillment of species destiny–disastrous idea, but it’s there. And money.

Britannica:
wikipedia doesn’t have authority! not the way britannica does — they have a board of advisors, etc. that’s how they earn their credibility and authority… so why do we believe the article on the JFK assassination. We will believe it if it’s a major article more than if it’s a minor one. In part because if it’s a major article we’re more likely to know something about it already.
Trust it more if lots of edits and discussion.
Another thing that give sit reliability — also posts these metadata notices saying we should question the article. The fact wikipedia is willing to tell us where it’s weak increases our trust in it!!

A list of ways encyclopedia articles can go wrong. Neutrality disputed, e.g. Trust article because the conditions are understood. That notice will NEVER show up in the NYT or Britannica.

Traditional sources for all their value, for truth vs. authority, opt for Authority!!!

One reason: printed on paper.

Publicly Negotiated Knowledge:

Tomato page — how to pronounce! Publicly Negotiated Knowledge.

The greatest expert in the world, if she’s unwilling or unable to engage this public negotiation, is OUT of wikipedia.

Knowledge WITHOUT a Knower!

Individual authorities don’t count unless can negotiate position in public.

One thing about wikipedia makes me nervous: imagine 10 years from now, most of the major and minor topics have settled down. Used to their being fact boxes. Knowldge is a commodity as well, wikipedia representing the knowldge we agree on (some of we…nature of we problematic, of course)

Wikipedia not a single thing, more of them in other languages, and others who do their own. Lots of wikipedias all based around it.

Does this mean we have separate knowledge? Baseline from which controversy emerges? Re-calcification of knowledge? Knowledge alliances? Fragmentation or reflection?

[my note: don’t we have this now, and always have?]

Point 2: new infrastructure (“getting vaguer and vaguer and speaking faster and faster”)

leaves/links

Heidegger: Being & Time

hammer — to understsand the hammer you have to understand other things like nails, and wood, and thus lumber yardsa nd trees and forests and economy and sun and earth, etc. Everything. It’s referential context. Which is what Heidegger called “The World” — this is “MEANING”

relationships among things … we cannot make it explicity, it’s the unspoken that allows us to speak.

we have a tendency to externalize parts of our consciousness — libraries meaning, calculators arithmetic — are we in fact seeing the externalization of meaning??

Big problem with this — if we were to TAG a real jar of jam. we’d put a lable on it, seeing strawberry in context on jar on a stand, if we saw a picture at the same jar art flickr, cann’t rebuild the context of the real jar. Too rich in the world. We’d have to rebuild the world. Can’t happen.

Can’t make things explicit.

My kids: if i could make everything explicit about them, it would mean we have a very shallow relationship.

Start button: not raised so nobody could see it was a button, looked like a label. had to add a sign, “press start b utton” (on gas pump)

Quotes morville: the inability of folksonomies to “handle equivalence, hierarchy , and other semantic relationships cause them to fail miserably at any significant scale”

if the task is to rebuild the world, certainly it’s true… scaling is part of the solution though, won’t rebuild the stuff entirely, but scale a way of getting there. Over a hundred million photos tagged at flickr, can ccluster cat noses vs. dog noses, work sbetter with bigger set.

will never get to perfect hierarchies — not with tagging, like we did by hand… i don’t want aircraft control or much of science to be handled with tagging.

I’m happy with good enough — beer on a hot day example.

We just need good enough info.

“cool, local and refreshing”

We’re going to keep going with plalists, tags, etc. we’re going to do our own front pages, get really godo at them, and have social groups based on what we’re making … at a pace like we cannot imagine. we’ll draw from ti what we want. It is not the case that the king is dead: no more hierarchy…of course not. But something is going on… the king isn’t dead but has fallen in love.
In love with this rich context of meaning, to have knowledge and hierarchies.

The splendiferous David Weinberger made it to my IA Summit talk and gave me a generous writeup… thanks Dave!!
Joho the Blog: [ia summit] Andrew Hinton: The future according to kids

(side note: this is actually pretty freaky for me, even as used to this technology as I am, that within an hour of it there’s a blog post and I’m blogging back… I may need a 12 step program)

I just presented at the IA Summit, and it seemed to go ok.

I’m keeping a page about the presentation here.

It’ll take me a few days to get the presentation shaped up with notes to upload it if anyone wants to see it. For now, if you want to contact me about the topic, I made a handy topical email address: gamelayer at inkblurt dot com.

For those who made it, thanks for coming and listening!

Summit fun

So, here I am. Vancouver. It’s raining. But the city looks pretty interesting. I doubt I’ll have time to actually experience the city much, but at least I can see a lot of it from my hotel window.

I’m in MIG‘s seminar today, and it’s been chock full of strategic/business goodness. If it were a cereal, it’d be one of those Kashi variations, with cranberries and walnuts and soy milk. Which to me is pretty yummy, but others may prefer Golden Grahams.

I am convinced I’ll be brutally jetlagged when I return to PA next week.

It’s terrific hooking back up with IA buddies I haven’t seen in a long time.

Ok, it’s starting up again, time to pay attention.

Ok, it could be that my current obsessions are just warping my otherwise good sense (cough), but I couldn’t help but comment on Lou Rosenfeld’s recent post (Developing a Participation Economy) that the participation economy among IAI volunteers he envisions sounds an awful lot like game-thinking.

That is, motivating people to create innovative stuff and work on it to completion — the two places where that seems to happen naturally are in Open Source Development communities and Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games. (MMORPGs) Otherwise known as MMOs or MMOGs.

In the Open Source movement, the incentive seems to be building one’s reputation and authority in a distributed meritocracy of developers. Being a part of that community is very powerful, and so is knowing that you created a tool that thousands of others use every day and think you’re amazing for making and maintaining it… or even being just one of thousands of people contributing to something so big (FireFox, etc) that being part of a combined effort on something that affects millions of users is, again, a huge incentive.

Lou brings up the point that for the IAI, the above incentives don’t seem to be quite enough. I suspect they could be if IAs were making things like software, but it’s much harder with the sorts of things we make. Curricula, methodologies, etc.

Still, the bottom-up mechanisms for allowing collective intelligence to more freely make things would be helpful. IAI doesn’t currently have anything as sophisticated as Source Forge, for example.

But anyway, Lou mentions another way to do this (which is actually not incompatible with the open source approach), a “participation economy” where people actually get a sort of currency for doing things in the community — currency they can then cash in for things they may need later on.

This sounds very much like what happens in MMORPGs like EverQuest and SecondLife.

So it made me wonder if we could learn anything by looking at communities like those and applying the lessons to making a sort of economy-driven community of practice?

Not that I have time to really dig into that right now… but it’s something to think about.

In discussing some weird policies in the World of Warcraft online game, Cory Doctorow nicely articulates an important insight about environments like WoW:

Online games are incredibly, deeply moving social software that have hit on a perfect formula for getting players to devote themselves to play: make play into a set of social grooming negotiations. Big chunks of our brains are devoted to figuring out how to socialize with one another — it’s how our primate ancestors enabled the cooperation that turned them into evolutionary winners.

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/27/world_of_warcraft_do.html

This is truly astounding. It bends the mind in a Philip K Dick-like way … I realized that advertising and mass media were powerful, but when you see concrete examples like this, it’s disturbing.

This is an article from 1982 in the Atlantic Monthly that explains why, even with the glut of diamonds from South Africa, they still command such high prices, and such cultural importance (at least in many places).

Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?

The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life. To stabilize the market, De Beers had to endow these stones with a sentiment that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them. The illusion had to be created that diamonds were forever — “forever” in the sense that they should never be resold.

ADDED NOTE: I have a more recent post than this where I finally manage to sort some of it out. See it here: A Layer Model for the IA Profession.

I’ve been letting these thoughts roll around in my head for a while, but haven’t jotted them down. I figure I’ll jot them here. Lacking the energy to explain them much, this really is just a jot … but hey, it’s my blog.

There’s been an ongoing issue among “information architects” (or at least those who call stuff they do information architecture) regarding “defining the d**n thing.” It rears its convoluted head nearly in sync with phases of the moon, especially on the IA-related mailing lists.

This is in no way an argument for any particular definition. Just thoughts on why we can’t seem to get there.

Let me start by saying that I do think Information Architecture is an appropriate term — that what we do is much like traditional architecture, at least conceptually. We design shared environments; they just happen to be made of bits, not atoms. Frankly, for me, that’s enough … but if you want to start making official curricula, licensing, job descriptions, etc, it of course gets stickier. So …

1. Distinguishing between the “title,” the practice, and activities within and related to the practice is essential before we can even discuss the issue. In one frame of reference, one definition makes some sense, whereas in another it just doesn’t. (Saying that card sorting is an IA-related activity is clearly true, but saying that IA as a practice or discipline is defined by card sorting just going the wrong way up the hill.)

2. Unlike traditional, physical architecture, which is essentially about walls, information architecture is essentially about links. IA is an essentially interstitial concern. Whereas physical architecture’s final form can be noticed because you end up with a visible container, the “spaces” we make are defined by stuff that, when we do it well, is invisible. (Yes this is a simplification, but I warrant it may have merit.) True the best architecture concerns how a building is used, not just what its walls look like. But even the most usable buildings are discussed in architecture criticism (and noticed by people as something with identity and value) as physical objects with shape. If the inside is made so they don’t have to think about how it’s made, excellent … but that’s not the part people talk about. Information architects, however, don’t get to skin their buildings with post-ironic waves of aluminum, or in sheets of shimmering glass. (I’m not criticizing all architecture here, ok? Much of it’s quite beautiful and/or usable.) So, whenever we try pointing to something concrete as “that’s IA” some other discipline can easily say “hey, um, no, that’s what *we* do.” Why? Because they probably have a point. IA done well makes sure that A and B are designed in a way that makes semantic relevance live on their surfaces, and that getting from A to B and back again (or to whatever else) is also relevant, functional and valuable. This of course influences the visible design, but I think we mainly act as consultants to the craft of interface design here — not as the primary actors (at least as concerns the role of practice of IA itself — of course any individual may be doing both the interface design and the info-architecture, but that’s more a question or roles and responsibilities, not the definition of one practice in contrast to another).

3. Information architecture is also basically about making things out of language — but not only language as a concrete (if it can be said to ever be concrete) but out of the relationships between bits of language. That is, we make things out of semantic relevance. It’s inherently ethereal, and places us in a weird tautological relationship to our raw material — how does one define it, if it is made of the very stuff we use to define things? (Unlike, say, linguistics, which is a discipline *about* language. Ok, this distinction doesn’t hold up written down, but it does in my head, so I need to figure out the diff.) We end up in a strange Heisenbergian conundrum: every time we try manipulating a bit of this semantic goo in order to shape a definition, we change its relationship to us for that moment, and the relevance seems to sort of slip through our fingers.

I’m not sure if any of that made sense, but it’s been itching at my frontal lobe. And my frontal lobe has enough trouble keeping up with regular daily life.

Red


Red

Originally uploaded by inkblurt.

Last fall, I was with my daughter in a suburban parking lot, and looked up to see this amazing contrast.

Jeffrey Skinner, my mentor from what seems a previous life, recently published a new book of poems: Salt Water Amnesia (published by Ausable Press, and also available on Amazon.)

I realize it came out in September, but it’s still “recent” by poetry publishing standards.

I’m awaiting arrival of the book to my mailbox, but I’ve read a lot of it already in the things I’ve seen published hither and yon. Excellent, wonderful prose-poems that play along the cracked peripheries of the “lyric voice.”

Here’s one of the poems, The Long Marriage, at Slate — you can also listen to Jeff read it in audio.

Also, Ausible has a few of the poems here.

I posted a working bibliography of sorts (not sure if the word works for a list of links to things that may or may not be books or articles) over on my Summit 2006 presentation page.

But I keep running across more excellent resources, such as the fab Terra Nova blog. I’ll have to update the other list periodically.

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