1. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
  2. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
  3. Abo, Akinori 9
  4. aesthetics 19
  5. agile 30
  6. Albers, Josef 17
  7. Alexander, Christopher 135
  8. Alexander, Scott 5
  9. Allsopp, John 4
  10. Ammer, Ralph 6
  11. Anderson, Gretchen 7
  12. anxiety 9
  13. Appleton, Maggie 5
  14. Aptekar-Cassels, Wesley 5
  15. Arango, Jorge 4
  16. architecture 110
  17. art 86
  18. Asimov, Isaac 5
  19. attention 17
  20. Auping, Michael 6
  21. Aurelius, Marcus 14
  22. Bachelard, Gaston 12
  23. Baker, Nicholson 10
  24. beauty 58
  25. Behrensmeyer, Anna K. 7
  26. Bjarnason, Baldur 8
  27. Blake, William 5
  28. blogging 22
  29. body 11
  30. Boeing, Geoff 7
  31. boredom 9
  32. Botton, Alain de 38
  33. Brand, Stewart 4
  34. Bringhurst, Robert 16
  35. Brooks, Frederick P. 22
  36. Broskoski, Charles 6
  37. brutalism 7
  38. building 16
  39. bureaucracy 12
  40. Burnham, Bo 9
  41. business 15
  42. Byron, Lord 14
  43. Cagan, Marty 8
  44. Calvino, Italo 21
  45. Camus, Albert 13
  46. care 6
  47. Carruth, Shane 15
  48. Cegłowski, Maciej 6
  49. Cervantes, Miguel de 7
  50. chance 11
  51. change 16
  52. Chiang, Ted 4
  53. childhood 6
  54. Chimero, Frank 17
  55. choice 8
  56. cities 51
  57. Clark, Robin 3
  58. Cleary, Thomas 8
  59. Cleary, J.C. 8
  60. code 20
  61. collaboration 18
  62. collections 31
  63. color 23
  64. commonplace 11
  65. communication 31
  66. community 7
  67. complexity 11
  68. connection 24
  69. constraints 25
  70. construction 9
  71. content 9
  72. Corbusier, Le 13
  73. Coyier, Chris 4
  74. craft 66
  75. creativity 59
  76. crime 9
  77. Critchlow, Tom 5
  78. critique 10
  79. Cross, Nigel 12
  80. Cross, Anita Clayburn 10
  81. css 11
  82. culture 13
  83. curiosity 11
  84. cycles 7
  85. Danielewski, Mark Z. 4
  86. darkness 28
  87. Darwin, Will 10
  88. data 8
  89. death 38
  90. Debord, Guy 6
  91. decisions 10
  92. design 131
  93. details 31
  94. Dickinson, Emily 9
  95. Dieste, Eladio 4
  96. discovery 9
  97. doors 7
  98. Dorn, Brandon 11
  99. drawing 23
  100. Drucker, Peter F. 15
  101. Duany, Andres 18
  102. Eatock, Daniel 4
  103. economics 13
  104. efficiency 7
  105. Eisenman, Peter 8
  106. Eliot, T.S. 14
  107. emotion 8
  108. ending 14
  109. engineering 11
  110. Eno, Brian 4
  111. ethics 14
  112. euphony 38
  113. Evans, Benedict 4
  114. evolution 9
  115. experience 14
  116. farming 8
  117. fashion 11
  118. features 25
  119. feedback 6
  120. flaws 10
  121. Flexner, Abraham 8
  122. food 16
  123. form 19
  124. Fowler, Martin 4
  125. Franklin, Ursula M. 30
  126. friendship 6
  127. fun 7
  128. function 31
  129. games 13
  130. gardens 26
  131. Garfield, Emily 4
  132. Garfunkel, Art 6
  133. geography 8
  134. geometry 18
  135. goals 9
  136. Gombrich, E. H. 4
  137. goodness 12
  138. Graham, Paul 37
  139. graphics 13
  140. Greene, Erick 6
  141. Hamming, Richard 45
  142. happiness 17
  143. Harford, Tim 4
  144. Harper, Thomas J. 15
  145. Hayes, Brian 28
  146. heat 7
  147. Heinrich, Bernd 7
  148. Herbert, Frank 4
  149. Heschong, Lisa 27
  150. Hesse, Herman 6
  151. history 13
  152. Hoffman, Yoel 10
  153. Hofstadter, Douglas 6
  154. home 15
  155. Hoy, Amy 4
  156. Hoyt, Ben 5
  157. html 11
  158. Hudlow, Gandalf 4
  159. humanity 16
  160. humor 6
  161. Huxley, Aldous 7
  162. hypermedia 22
  163. i 18
  164. ideas 21
  165. identity 33
  166. images 10
  167. industry 9
  168. information 42
  169. infrastructure 17
  170. innovation 15
  171. interaction 10
  172. interest 10
  173. interfaces 37
  174. intuition 8
  175. invention 10
  176. Irwin, Robert 65
  177. Isaacson, Walter 28
  178. Ishikawa, Sara 33
  179. iteration 13
  180. Ive, Jonathan 6
  181. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  182. Jacobs, Jane 54
  183. Jacobs, Alan 5
  184. Jobs, Steve 20
  185. Jones, Nick 5
  186. Kahn, Louis 4
  187. Kakuzō, Okakura 23
  188. Kaufman, Kenn 4
  189. Keith, Jeremy 6
  190. Keller, Jenny 10
  191. Keqin, Yuanwu 8
  192. Ketheswaran, Pirijan 6
  193. Kingdon, Jonathan 5
  194. Kitching, Roger 7
  195. Klein, Laura 4
  196. Kleon, Austin 13
  197. Klinkenborg, Verlyn 24
  198. Klyn, Dan 20
  199. knowledge 29
  200. Kohlstedt, Kurt 12
  201. Kramer, Karen L. 10
  202. Krishna, Golden 10
  203. Kuma, Kengo 18
  204. language 20
  205. learning 30
  206. life 59
  207. light 31
  208. loneliness 12
  209. love 26
  210. Lovell, Sophie 16
  211. Lupton, Ellen 11
  212. Luu, Dan 8
  213. Lynch, Kevin 12
  214. MacIver, David R. 8
  215. MacWright, Tom 5
  216. Magnus, Margaret 12
  217. making 77
  218. management 14
  219. Manaugh, Geoff 27
  220. Markson, David 16
  221. Mars, Roman 13
  222. material 39
  223. math 16
  224. McCarter, Robert 21
  225. meaning 33
  226. media 16
  227. melancholy 52
  228. memory 29
  229. metaphor 10
  230. metrics 19
  231. microsites 49
  232. Miller, J. Abbott 10
  233. Mills, C. Wright 9
  234. minimalism 10
  235. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  236. Mod, Craig 15
  237. modularity 6
  238. Mollison, Bill 31
  239. morality 8
  240. Murakami, Haruki 21
  241. music 16
  242. Müller, Boris 7
  243. Naka, Toshiharu 8
  244. names 11
  245. Naskrecki, Piotr 5
  246. nature 51
  247. networks 15
  248. Neustadter, Scott 3
  249. Noessel, Christopher 7
  250. notetaking 35
  251. novelty 11
  252. objects 16
  253. order 10
  254. ornament 9
  255. Orwell, George 7
  256. Ott, Matthias 4
  257. ownership 6
  258. Pallasmaa, Juhani 41
  259. Palmer, John 8
  260. patterns 11
  261. Patton, James L. 9
  262. Pawson, John 21
  263. perception 22
  264. perfection 7
  265. performance 17
  266. Perrine, John D. 9
  267. Petroski, Henry 24
  268. philosophy 6
  269. photography 20
  270. physics 6
  271. Pinker, Steven 8
  272. place 14
  273. planning 15
  274. Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth 18
  275. poetry 13
  276. politics 9
  277. Pollan, Michael 6
  278. practice 10
  279. problems 31
  280. process 22
  281. production 7
  282. productivity 12
  283. products 21
  284. programming 9
  285. progress 16
  286. Pye, David 42
  287. quality 26
  288. questions 8
  289. Radić, Smiljan 20
  290. Rams, Dieter 16
  291. Rao, Venkatesh 14
  292. reading 16
  293. reality 13
  294. Reichenstein, Oliver 5
  295. religion 11
  296. Rendle, Robin 12
  297. repair 28
  298. research 17
  299. Reveal, James L. 4
  300. Richards, Melanie 3
  301. Richie, Donald 10
  302. Rougeux, Nicholas 4
  303. Rowe, Peter G. 10
  304. Rupert, Dave 4
  305. Ruskin, John 5
  306. Satyal, Parimal 9
  307. Saval, Nikil 13
  308. Sayers, Dorothy 32
  309. Schaller, George B. 7
  310. Schwulst, Laurel 5
  311. science 17
  312. seeing 36
  313. Sennett, Richard 45
  314. senses 11
  315. Seuss, Dr. 14
  316. Shakespeare, William 4
  317. Shorin, Toby 8
  318. silence 9
  319. Silverstein, Murray 33
  320. Simms, Matthew 19
  321. Simon, Paul 6
  322. simplicity 14
  323. Singer, Ryan 12
  324. skill 17
  325. Sloan, Robin 5
  326. Smith, Cyril Stanley 29
  327. Smith, Justin E. H. 6
  328. Smith, Rach 4
  329. socializing 7
  330. society 23
  331. software 68
  332. solitude 12
  333. Somers, James 8
  334. Sorkin, Michael 56
  335. sound 14
  336. space 20
  337. Speck, Jeff 18
  338. spirit 10
  339. streets 10
  340. structure 13
  341. Strunk, William 15
  342. Ström, Matthew 13
  343. style 30
  344. Sun, Chuánqí 15
  345. symbols 12
  346. systems 18
  347. Sōetsu, Yanagi 34
  348. Sōseki, Natsume 8
  349. Tanaka, Tomoyuki 9
  350. Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō 15
  351. taste 10
  352. Taylor, Dorian 16
  353. teaching 21
  354. teamwork 17
  355. technology 41
  356. texture 7
  357. thinking 31
  358. Thoreau, Henry David 8
  359. time 54
  360. Tolkien, J.R.R. 6
  361. tools 32
  362. touch 8
  363. transportation 16
  364. Trombley, Nick 44
  365. truth 15
  366. Tufte, Edward 31
  367. Turrell, James 6
  368. typography 25
  369. understanding 32
  370. urbanism 68
  371. ux 100
  372. Victor, Bret 9
  373. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 4
  374. vision 7
  375. visualization 34
  376. Voltaire 4
  377. wabi-sabi 8
  378. walking 23
  379. Wallace, David Foster 33
  380. Wang, Shawn 6
  381. war 7
  382. waste 12
  383. Watterson, Bill 4
  384. Webb, Matt 14
  385. Webb, Marc 3
  386. Weber, Michael H. 3
  387. Wechler, Lawrence 37
  388. whimsy 11
  389. White, E.B. 15
  390. Wirth, Niklaus 6
  391. wisdom 20
  392. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 7
  393. Woolf, Virginia 11
  394. words 35
  395. work 81
  396. writing 55
  397. Wurman, Richard Saul 18
  398. www 88
  399. Yamada, Kōun 5
  400. Yamashita, Yuhki 4
  401. Yudkowsky, Eliezer 17
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Information & Information Architecture

Close
  • To do some more pushups on the internet

    There may be a lot of things that have to be studied, but there is also what I call "occupational therapy for the opposition" that says, send them off to do some more pushups on the internet. You need to be mindful that it is possible to use information, and the need for information, as a delay for the call for action.

    Ursula M. Franklin, Every Tool Shapes the Task
    • information
    • ethics
    • www
    • justice
  • A history of content and sources

    91C435B6-5E9C-4611-A125-2620E5FE27D0_1_201_a.jpg

    Not all that many readers go to the back matter and look up the source for a single sentence. But the back matter can also be read as ordinary text, revealing a history of content and sources. And images and illustrations from the book in the back matter create a lovely visual/verbal summary quilt of the entire book, enjoyed by all.

    Edward Tufte, Seeing With Fresh Eyes
    • information
    • indexes
  • Good annotation

    4116CDBF-B094-4AF0-B7C7-DA29868CABA4_1_105_c.jpg

    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..."

    Edward Tufte, Seeing With Fresh Eyes
    • annotation
    • information
  • An immense wordy diagram

    F54F9CD7-EAD1-4ADF-9494-84AD4677C022_1_105_c.jpg

    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.

    Edward Tufte, Seeing With Fresh Eyes
    • information
  • 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."

    Edward Tufte, Seeing With Fresh Eyes
    • information
  • 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.

    Charles Broskoski, On Motivation
    1. ​​Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees​​
    • information
    • connection
  • 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.

    Charles Broskoski, On Motivation
    1. ​​barnsworthburning.net​​
    • identity
    • networks
    • information
    • i
  • 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.

    Will Darwin, Building a knowledge base
    www.willdarwin.com
    1. ​​What this site is​​
    • commonplace
    • information
    • collections
  • Reveling in infrastructure

    Image from uxdesign.cc on 2020-12-28 at 9.38.26 AM.jpeg

    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?

    Brandon Dorn, Web Brutalism, seamfulness, and notion
    uxdesign.cc
    • infrastructure
    • information
    • media
  • 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.

    Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture
    • thinking
    • information
    • size
  • 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.

    Richard Saul Wurman, Understanding Understanding
    • information
    • walking
  • 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.

    Roger Kitching, A Reflection of the Truth
    • information
    • organization
  • 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

    John D. Perrine & James L. Patton, Letters to the Future
    • time
    • information
  • 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.

    Richard Saul Wurman, Understanding Understanding
    • information
  • 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.

    Margaret Magnus, Gods of the Word
    • information
  • 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.

    Will Darwin, How to Think About Notes
    www.willdarwin.com
    1. ​​How to be a genius​​
    • notetaking
    • information
    • writing
  • 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."

    Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
    • information
    • intuition
  • 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."

    David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
    • information
    • organization
  • 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-demand

    Each 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.

    Ben Shneiderman, The Eyes Have It
    • visualization
    • information
  • Envisioning Information

    A Book by Edward Tufte
    www.edwardtufte.com
    • communication
    • visualization
    • information
  • Beautiful Evidence

    A Book by Edward Tufte
    www.edwardtufte.com
    • visualization
    • design
    • communication
    • information
    • seeing
    • truth
  • The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

    A Book by Edward Tufte
    www.edwardtufte.com
    • visualization
    • communication
    • information
  • The Ladder of Abstraction

    An Essay by Bret Victor
    worrydream.com
    1. ​​Collaborative Information Architecture at Scale​​
    • information
    • thinking
    • communication
    • abstraction
  • The Elements of Graphing Data

    A Book by William S. Cleveland
    1. ​​The Elements of Style​​
    • visualization
    • information
  • Understanding Understanding

    A Book by Richard Saul Wurman
    www.goodreads.com
    1. ​​A dot went for a walk​​
    2. ​​Admitting ignorance​​
    3. ​​Information imposters​​
    4. ​​Michaelangelo's hammer​​
    5. ​​I won't get​​
    • understanding
    • information
    • design
    • communication
  • Visual Explanations

    A Book by Edward Tufte
    www.edwardtufte.com
    • visualization
    • communication
    • information
  • Information Visualization: Perception for Design

    A Book by Colin Ware
    www.goodreads.com
    • visualization
    • information
    • seeing
  • The Eyes Have It

    A Research Paper by Ben Shneiderman
    www.cs.umd.edu
    1. ​​The Visual Information Seeking Mantra​​
    • visualization
    • information
    • data

    A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for Information Visualizations.

  • Looseleaf

    A Website
    rmo.zkm.de
    685BB98C-E3D6-4ADB-BD5D-CF7850B6DD26.jpeg
    1. ​​In search of visual texture​​
    • microsites
    • information
  • Wikipedia

    A Website
    en.wikipedia.org
    1. ​​The Pareto principle​​
    2. ​​Concrete poetry​​
    3. ​​Pinkas Synagogue​​
    4. ​​Saudade​​
    5. ​​Transclusion​​
    • knowledge
    • information
  • Tinderbox

    An Application
    www.eastgate.com

    Tinderbox 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.

    • notetaking
    • hypermedia
    • information
  • The medium is the message

    A Quote by Marshall McLuhan
    1. ​​Induced communication​​
    2. ​​Only a mind opened to the quality of things​​
    • technology
    • communication
    • information
    • media
  • Product Design Resources

    A Reference Work by Brandon Dorn
    www.notion.so

    Things 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.

    • design
    • information
    • software
    • collections
  • Blogging with Version Control

    An Article by Will Darwin
    willdarwin.com

    I’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.

    • blogging
    • writing
    • information
  • Nobody gives a hoot about groupthink

    An Article by Baldur Bjarnason
    www.baldurbjarnason.com

    Two 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.

    1. ​​On that of the highest authority​​
    2. ​​Personal Information Management (PIM)​​
    • productivity
    • collaboration
    • information
  • Two types of work

    An Article by Jorge Arango
    jarango.com

    There 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.

    • organization
    • information
    • making
    • work
  • Open Transclude for Networked Writing

    An Essay by Toby Shorin
    subpixel.space
    1. ​​Not an accumulation of facts​​
    2. ​​More that can be done​​
    3. ​​Open Transclude​​
    1. ​​Designing Synced Blocks​​
    • information
    • writing
    • hypermedia

    Open Transclude is a spec for networked writing on your own blog.

  • Websites are not living rooms and other lessons for information architecture

    An Essay by Sarah R. Barrett
    medium.com

    While 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.

    • information
    • software
    • metaphor
  • Web History Chapter 1: Birth

    A Chapter by Jay Hoffmann
    css-tricks.com
    1. ​​Microcosm​​
    • www
    • information

    A history of the web by Jay Hoffmann.

  • How to Think About Notes

    An Article by Will Darwin
    www.willdarwin.com
    1. ​​Thinking in terms of outputs​​
    1. ​​Maggie Appleton's Digital Garden​​
    • notetaking
    • writing
    • information

    The fourth post in the ‘Prose’ blogchain series on taking intelligent notes.

  • What we have known since long

    A Quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein

    The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.

    • notetaking
    • understanding
    • problems
    • information
  • Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think

    A Book by Ben Shneiderman
    • visualization
    • thinking
    • information

See also:
  1. visualization
  2. communication
  3. notetaking
  4. writing
  5. organization
  6. design
  7. thinking
  8. collections
  9. media
  10. seeing
  11. hypermedia
  12. understanding
  13. www
  14. software
  15. walking
  16. time
  17. commonplace
  18. intuition
  19. technology
  20. truth
  21. data
  22. abstraction
  23. knowledge
  24. problems
  25. size
  26. infrastructure
  27. metaphor
  28. making
  29. work
  30. ethics
  31. justice
  32. productivity
  33. collaboration
  34. blogging
  35. identity
  36. networks
  37. i
  38. connection
  39. annotation
  40. indexes
  41. microsites
  1. Edward Tufte
  2. Will Darwin
  3. Richard Saul Wurman
  4. Ben Shneiderman
  5. Brandon Dorn
  6. Charles Broskoski
  7. John D. Perrine
  8. James L. Patton
  9. Roger Kitching
  10. Margaret Magnus
  11. Lawrence Wechler
  12. Robert Irwin
  13. David Foster Wallace
  14. Marshall McLuhan
  15. Colin Ware
  16. Toby Shorin
  17. William S. Cleveland
  18. Bret Victor
  19. Jay Hoffmann
  20. Ludwig Wittgenstein
  21. Bill Mollison
  22. Sarah R. Barrett
  23. Jorge Arango
  24. Ursula M. Franklin
  25. Baldur Bjarnason