Information & Information Architecture
A history of content and sources
Good annotation
Information displays should be annotated, combining words, images, graphics, whatever it takes to describe and explain something. Annotation calls out and explains information and, at the same time, explains to viewers how to read data displays. Good annotation is like a knowledgeable expert/teacher at the viewer's side pointing and saying, "Now see how this works with that, how this might explain that..."
An immense wordy diagram
In ~1560 Ettore Ausonia, a polymath with interests from mathematics to mirror-making, constructed an immense wordy diagram depicting reflections from concave spherical mirrors. Then, between 1592 and 1601, while teaching at the University of Padua, Galileo made this handwritten copy of the diagram, which was fortunate since Ausonio's original has since gone missing. Three helpful architectures for the off-the-grid sentences are deployed – word trees, stacklists, annotated linking lines.
No wonder you think it's complicated
We were very proud of our user interface and the fact that we had a way to browse 16,000 (!!) pages of documentation on a CD-ROM. But browsing the hierarchy felt a little complicated to us.
So we asked Tufte to come in and have a look, and were hoping perhaps for a pat on the head or some free advice. He played with our AnswerBook for 90 seconds, turned around, pronounced his review:
"Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care is a best-selling owner's manual for the most complicated 'product' imaginable – and it has only 2 levels of headings. You have 8 levels of hierarchy and I haven't stopped counting yet. No wonder you think it's complicated."
Infinite varieties of contexts
Over the course of 10 years of using Are.na, I have fully adopted the view that any piece of information can be important to a person given the right context. And on Are.na, pieces of information can be arranged in infinite varieties of contexts – their respective meaning shifts as the proximate information shifts. In other words, the more connections a block has, the more opportunities it has to be a nodal point.
Nodal points
I started thinking about all the other important “nodal points” (I don’t know what else to call this) of people, places, books, albums, websites, etc. that all played a part in shaping who I am as a person and what I think is important. These points are a combination of seeking things out myself and getting a recommendation that felt like it was actually for me. A mixture of both passive and active knowledge acquisition.
ultimately, it's the totality of those “nodal points” that indicate one’s own unique perspective. It doesn’t matter if you specifically sought out the nodal point or not, it’s the recognition that counts. When you encounter a piece of life-changing information (no matter how large the change part is), you are simultaneously discovering and creating “yourself,” becoming incrementally more complete. Your perspective (where your gaze is directed) is made up of a meandering line through these points. Learning (or maybe some precursor to learning) is a lot about developing the intuition to recognize when something you find in the world is going to be a nodal point for you.
What is a commonplace?
In all cases, a commonplace is a method of compiling knowledge for later use. In digital or analog form, this continued growth of stored ideas and projects is a key driver of intellectual development. Any time you decide to work on a project, you should attempt to collect and categorise all information that is relevant and useful.
Reveling in infrastructure
Hunstanton Secondary School (1954) in Norfolk, England, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson. Photo by Anna Armstrong (2011)
When the Smithsons placed the water heater for the Hunstanton Secondary School prominently above the school’s roofline, they weren’t just revealing the building’s infrastructure, they were reveling in it. What does it look like to do this on the web?
Of course there’s no single answer, because the web is simultaneously a physical and digital medium. It is material and it isn’t. It depends on how literally you interpret the question. But taking it somewhere in-between, seeing the web as primarily an information medium, we can ask the question a little differently: what does it look like to design something that is true to the material of digital information?
The quality of thought
It is the quality of thought and the information we use that determines yield, not the size or quality of the site.
A dot went for a walk
A dot went for a walk and turned into a line.
The dot, the line, the dance, the story, and the painting had found connections. Memory became learning, learning became understanding.Learning is remembering what one is interested in. Learning, interest, and memory are the tango of understanding.
Creating a map of meaning between data and understanding is the transformation of big data into big understanding.
The dot had embraced understanding.
Understanding precedes action.
Each of us is a dot on a journey.The need to record
With collecting comes the need to record. A specimen without a label is simply a (sometimes) pretty object. Without its associated data it is scientifically worthless.
The lapse of many years
At this point I wish to emphasize what I believe will ultimately prove to be the greatest purpose of our museum. This value will not, however, be realized until the lapse of many years, possibly a century, assuming that our material is safely preserved. And this is that the student of the future will have access to the original record of faunal conditions in California and the west, wherever we now work. He will know the proportional constituency of our faunae by species, the relative numbers of each species and the extent of the ranges of species as they exist today.
— Joseph Grinnell, 1910
Information imposters
Information imposters: This is nonsense that masquerades as information because it is postured in the form of information. We automatically give a certain weight to data based on the form in which it is delivered to us. Because we don’t take the time to question this, we assume that we have received some information.
My favorite example of this is in cookbook recipes that call for you to “cook until done.” This doesn’t tell you very much. Why bother? Information imposters are fodder for administravitis.
Like a prism
When you look at phonemes, you look through the perspective of morphemes, which are one linguistic level higher. The higher level is like a prism that splits the light in two. What was one thing, like ‘length’ at the phoneme level, looks like two opposite things ‘long’ and ‘short’ from the perspective of the morphemes. In practice, when you find both a word and its opposite, then the phoneme is not about either of these two things, but about what is common to them.
Thinking in terms of outputs
In our use of digital and analogue filing tools, we classify information through folders. An article about railway construction gets filed under ‘infrastructure’ or ‘transport’. In Evernote we tag it with ‘rail’ or ‘construction’. This is thinking like a librarian and not like a writer. We are classifying the information as an input. The reason you take notes as a writer is to produce content. It makes sense, then, to take notes in line with this goal.
Traditional filing like this tends to fail when you attempt to write your content. You are stuck trying to figure out which categories will be relevant for your proposal, paper or blog post. Interesting writing often comes from connecting separate fields through a common idea. By revealing the common denominator. By unifying two seemingly-contradictory ideas. How can you possibly achieve this if you’re looking in the same category for your information? The categories simply do not fulfil the function required by the writer.
The notes you take and indeed, the way you process information, should be with a specific project or idea in mind. You must classify information in terms of its outputs. When you take notes on a book, think about how this could apply to a specific idea you had or how it argues against a paper you read last week. The premise is that you should be organising by context and always trying to connect the dots between the content you're consuming.
Off to the races
"You get to the point where you're about to place your wager; the race is about to be run. You evaluate the sum total of the information, which has to do with how the money has been bet, what the horses looked like on the track, all this information—and it's like you run your hand over the race—I've had this happen so many times, it's the only way to explain it—you run your hand over the race. All the information is logically there, but there's something wrong. You don't know why something is wrong, but something is not correct. Then I have to reevaluate everything in terms of this feeling I have about the thing, which is derived from information, but which is so complex and so intricate and so subtle that there's no way you can put a tag on it."
The pie has been made
"In today's world, boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentleman, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classification, organization, presentation. To put it another way, the pie has been made—the contest is now in the slicing."
The Visual Information Seeking Mantra
There are many visual design guidelines but the basic principle might be summarized as the Visual Information Seeking Mantra:
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demandEach line represents one project in which I found myself rediscovering this principle and therefore wrote it down it as a reminder. It proved to be only a starting point in trying to characterize the multiple information visualization innovations occurring at university, government, and industry research labs.
Envisioning Information
A Book by Edward TufteBeautiful Evidence
A Book by Edward TufteThe Visual Display of Quantitative Information
A Book by Edward TufteThe Ladder of Abstraction
An Essay by Bret VictorThe Elements of Graphing Data
A Book by William S. ClevelandUnderstanding Understanding
A Book by Richard Saul WurmanVisual Explanations
A Book by Edward TufteInformation Visualization: Perception for Design
A Book by Colin WareThe Eyes Have It
A Research Paper by Ben ShneidermanLooseleaf
A WebsiteWikipedia
A WebsiteTinderbox
An ApplicationTinderbox is a workbench for your ideas and plans, ands ideas. It can help you analyze and understand them today, and it will adapt to your changing needs and growing knowledge.
Your Tinderbox documents can help organize themselves, keeping your data clean. We believe in information gardening: as your understanding grows, Tinderbox grows with you.
The medium is the message
A Quote by Marshall McLuhanProduct Design Resources
A Reference Work by Brandon DornThings I‘ve read, people I‘ve tried to learn from, and things I‘ve done to become a better designer. This is an idiosyncratic list reflecting what has helped me along the way, rather than an exhaustive list of design classics.
Though the list leans toward theory — principles are more durable than technique — I offer a few ideas further down about how to practice design. It also leans toward information design, because the task of presenting rich, dense information in an accessible way is ultimately the task of any digital product.
Blogging with Version Control
An Article by Will DarwinI’ve been musing for a while now on the way blog posts are typically presented—in reverse chronological order. This format has never truly made sense and does not reflect the way good writing and thinking happens.
...The main issue with the ‘pile’ system is that this post is eventually buried beneath more recent pieces of writing; there is no incentive for revisiting or updating the work. Even worse, if an author does decide to unearth the piece and make some major changes, those who read the original piece are not made aware of these alterations. The sorting order is static.
Nobody gives a hoot about groupthink
An Article by Baldur BjarnasonTwo relatively common ‘fashions’ today are real-time collaboration and shared data repositories of one kind or another.
Both increase productivity in the naive sense. We work more; everybody is more active; the group feels more cohesive.
The downside is that they also both tend to reduce the quality of the work and increase busywork.
Two types of work
An Article by Jorge ArangoThere are two types of work: growth work and maintenance work.
Growth work involves making new things. It can be something big or small. In either case, growth work often follows a loose process.
Maintenance work is different. Maintenance work involves caring for the resources and instruments that make growth work possible. This includes tools, but also body and mind.
Maintenance is ultimately in service to growth. But effective growth can’t happen without maintenance. As with so many things, the ideal is a healthy balance — and it doesn’t come without struggle.
Open Transclude for Networked Writing
An Essay by Toby ShorinWebsites are not living rooms and other lessons for information architecture
An Essay by Sarah R. BarrettWhile there is a lot that IA can learn from actual architecture or city planning, websites aren’t buildings or cities, and they don’t have to work like them. Instead, they should be designed according to the same principles that people’s brains expect from physical experiences.
Web History Chapter 1: Birth
A Chapter by Jay HoffmannHow to Think About Notes
An Article by Will DarwinWhat we have known since long
A Quote by Ludwig WittgensteinThe problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think
A Book by Ben Shneiderman
Managing Oneself
Only from strength
Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong. More often, people know what they are not good at—and even then more people are wrong than right. And yet, a person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all.
Feedback analysis
The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.
Taking pride in ignorance
First and foremost, concentrate on your strengths. Put yourself where your strengths can produce results.
Second, work on improving your strengths.
Third, discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it...First-rate engineers, for instance, tend to take pride in not knowing anything about people. Human resources professionals, by contrast, often pride themselves on their ignorance of elementary accounting or of quantitative methods altogether. But taking pride in such ignorance is self-defeating. Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths.
But bulldozers move mountains
A planner may find that his beautiful plans fail because he does not follow through on them. Like so many brilliant people, he believes that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.
Waste as little effort as possible on low competence
One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
How do I perform?
For knowledge workers, How do I perform? may be an even more important question than What are my strengths?.
A few common personality traits usually determine how a person performs:
- Am I a reader or a listener?
- How do I learn? Writing? Taking notes? Doing? Talking?
- Do I work well with people, or am I a loner? And if I do work well with people, in what relationship?
- Do I produce results as a decision maker or as an adviser?
- Do I perform well under stress, or do I need a highly structured and predictable environment?
- Do I work best in a big organization or a small one?
To improve the way you perform
Do not try to change yourself—you are unlikely to succeed. But work hard to improve the way you perform. And try not to take on work you cannot perform or will only perform poorly.
The mirror test
In the early years of this century, the most highly respected diplomat of all the great powers was the german ambassador in London. He was clearly destined for great things...yet in 1906 he abruptly resigned rather than preside over a dinner given by the diplomatic corps for Edward VII. The king was a notorious womanizer and made it clear what kind of dinner he wanted. The ambassador is reported to have said, "I refuse to see a pimp in the mirror in the morning when I shave."
This is the mirror test. Ethics requires that you ask yourself, What kind of person do I want to see in the mirror in the morning?
Your organization's values
Organizations, like people, have values. To be effective in an organization, a person's values must be compatible with the organization's values. They do not need to be the same, but they must be close enough to coexist. Otherwise, the person will not only be frustrated but also will not produce results.
Values vs. strengths
There is sometimes a conflict between a person's values and his or her strengths. What one does well – even very well and successfully – may not fit with one's value system. In that case, the work may not appear to be worth devoting one's lift to (or even a substantial portion thereof).
Values are and should be the ultimate test.
Successful careers are not planned
Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person – hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre – into an outstanding performer.
The best-laid plans
It is rarely possible – or even particularly fruitful – to look too far ahead. A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific. So the question is most cases should be, Where and how can I achieve results that will make a difference within the next year and a half?
The second half of your life
Today, most work is knowledge work, and knowledge workers are not "finished" after 40 years on the job, they are merely bored.
There are three ways to develop a second career. The first is to actually start one. The second is to develop a parallel career. Finally, there are the social entrepreneurs.
There is one prerequisite for managing the second half of your life: You must begin long before you enter it. If one does not begin to volunteer before one is 40 or so, one will not volunteer once past 60.