Information Architecture, User Experience & Other Obsessions
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!
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.
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.
Good luck to Lou Rosenfeld’s new enterprise: Rosenfeld Media – Publisher of user experience design books. If anybody can make this kind of thing happen, Lou can.
There’s also an excellent interview with Lou about his venture over at Boxes & Arrows.
Evidently, my proposal to this year’s IA Summit has been accepted. Now comes the tough part of actually having a presentation.
I have plenty of stuff to present on … that’s just the problem. The challenge is getting it all winnowed down into something coherent and useful.
The conference organizers say I need to have my presentation materials to them by 2/1 so they can go onto the CD-ROM. But my PP decks usually have a lot of filler that only makes sense with the verbal narrative — so it may make more sense to provide an abstract, an outline, bibliography/links to research, and a link to a page here where people can download the latest-greatest if they so please.
Here’s the final version of the proposal/description (which I’m not sure if I got in on time, so this may not be identical to the actual conference info):
Clues to the Future: What the users of tomorrow are teaching us today.
What might Wikipedia have in common with World of Warcraft? And how might that affect design and business strategy today?
According recent academic and business research, there is an enormous wave of people on its way to adulthood that may very well take us by surprise. And while many designers may be aware of this, we still face the challenge of making it clear to our clients and stake-holders.
Beyond the hype and more obvious implications of the “net generation” are key questions that affect how business and design plan for the future. For example: the shift from hierarchical to nodal paradigms; the rise of new kinds of literacy (and authority); the blurring boundaries between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ economies; the splintering of identity; and users who, frankly, expect your web environment to be as well designed as the best games on their X-Boxes.
It’s important not to focus on the surface gadgetry, but to understand what is different about how these users think, how they solve problems and manage resources, how they socialize and organize, and how vastly different it may be from the assumed conventions of most business and design decision-makers (i.e. people born before 1985).
This presentation will:
1. Survey some of the current research and insights on the issue;
2. Explore some of the more challenging theoretical questions raised;
3. Discuss the practical business and design implications of those questions; and
4. Suggest how those implications might help make stronger cases for innovative design.
Hopefully this won’t just be a retread of stuff people already know. The basic theme is that by studying how the net generation uses things like social networks and multiplayer game environments, we can see what their mental models are going to be like when they’re full-fledged adult users.
This theme may sound obvious to many… but I haven’t heard much of a call for looking to these sources for planning business and design strategy for the near term.
If it takes most coporations about five years to get any truly ambitious technology shift into a mature state (and that’s if they’re in the quick crowd), why not go ahead and think about what that mature state should be once seventeen-year-olds are starting their careers? There’s amazing research and theory-making going on about online games, especially. They seem to me to be perfect laboratories, e-petri dishes, for seeing how an electronically mediated community (and that specialized community — the market economy) functions.
Here’s a separate page where I’ll be keeping info about it, links to related articles and research, and the final version of the presentation (eventually).
In an article from the February 2006 issue of Esquire (that’s unfortunately not online), David Childs, the architect for the “Freedom Tower” to be built on the old WTC site, has this to say about the role of the architect:
“The client’s role, whether it’s a museum board or an individual who wants to create something and gets involved, is a critical factor in the ultimate result of what we do. Unlike a painter or a sculptor … we do it through all sorts of strange smoke and mirrors and all that other stuff. You have to be persuasive to get your way. And the best way to do that is not a head-on fight, but to develop your arguments, and any way you can get there is ok.
… People want to have the architect seen as an individual artist doing his sculptural form. I’m much more pragmatic … I believe that the fascination of the program, and solving the problem, is part of architecture. First of all, you’ve got to do that — and then you’ve got to make it beautiful, rather than making the sculpture and then cramming stuff into it.”
Evidently there was also a Frontline episode about Childs, his firm, and the WTC project.
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