inkblurt

It’s always fun to think of slippery words like facilitator and think about how they’re put together… like, “facile” isn’t really the most positive word I can think of, but it’s about ease, which isn’t necessarily negative, and if you’re a facilitator, it sounds like you’re doing something very nice, modestly enabling. Anyway, here I am in cloudy Portland, Oregon, tucked into my hotel room (a “facility”) and listening to the news on CNN as I type, where the term “facile” actually applies nicely: there’s a certain blissful ease with which the news is being reported about the war. One anchor actually referred to the conflict as “The Big Dance.” If that isn’t the nastiest sort of unearned ease of affect, I don’t know what is.
But, hey, enough about that. Why am I here? Well, I’m here for the AIFIA | Information Architecture Leadership Seminar of course! Where I am a “facilitator” — which is like being a “dictator,” but more about making things easier on others (“facili…”), and less about being a … well, you know.

Never been to Portland before. There have been protestors arrested, squatting in the streets here. But it’s pretty… reminds me of Louisville, if Louisville had a rocky range of home-spotted hills surrounding the river. It’s actually like Louisville, KY and Asheville, NC squished into one. Though I probably would think differently if I were here in, say, January.

For some reason ‘love your hearth’ seemed a very Christopher Alexander-ish thing to say in the title. Though I’m still a neophyte when it comes to his writings… I’ve read only small chunks of his gorgeous A Timeless Way of Building and other amazing books. I’m thinking about delving in again now that I’ve run across this excellent synopsis of his work.

At my company, we design our own business cards. I ran out of mine, and so it was time to make more… i made a new one using a painting I discovered, Kandinsky’s “Etages” (“Storeys”).
I think it’s fabulous as a kind of mandala for IA. It’s sort of of obvious once you see it. At least to me. What do you think?

250k.

I got a brief mention in OJR article: Understanding Information Architecture over at the Online Journalism Review. Much of the article is slightly offbase, the way it feels when you read toy-assembly instructions translated from Korean. But it’s nice for IA just to be getting talked about at such thorough length. Props to Rusty for making the effort.

(edit: this article disappeared but then reappeared at some other spot here: http://69.20.61.37/ojr/technology/1042357331.php)

There’s a new survey up for IA types over at AIFIA called Future of Information Architecture. Some interesting thoughts gathered there, plus info on the upcoming pre-conference seminar in Portland, OR.