To prove it in purity The series of photos of the 1959 model ends or stops with the photograph in which Kiesler triumphantly shows us the shell of his house like the remains of a creature taken from the seabed, a kind of Moby Dick harpooned and finally captured after the obsessive pursuit of a project that has taken up ten years of the life of the architect. "I think that everybody has only one basic creative idea and no matter how he is driven off, you will find that he always comes back to it until he has a chance to prove it in purity, or die with the idea unrealized." — Frederick Kiesler Smiljan Radić, Some Remains of My Heroes Found Scattered Across a Vacant Lot creativitylifeobsessionpassion
Collaborative Information Architecture at Scale An Article by Brandon Dorn www.viget.com Here I describe an approach for defining new information architectures for large organizational websites managed by many stakeholder groups. Broadly speaking, there are four general phases to the approach: Auditing. Begin by immersing yourself in existing content and encourage stakeholders to adopt a critical, audience-minded perspective of their content. Diagramming. Work with stakeholders to develop new conceptual categories that better serve audiences and organizational direction. Elaborating. Think through content in detail and test new categories against specific instances and edge cases. Producing. Prepare content teams for production using a shared database of new sitemap pages and editorial considerations that you’ve developed incrementally. Half of design is facilitation The Ladder of AbstractionA Pattern Language decisionsorganizationpatternsanalytics
Half of design is facilitation At least half of the work of design is not design, because design isn’t just "making things"—it’s making things with other people, many of whom usually aren’t designers. This is true any time you’re working with others from a domain outside of your own. Communicating ideas, marshaling stakeholder consensus, soliciting and incorporating feedback, and redefining problems that weren’t fully known at the start are all the non-design work of design, what we might generally call "facilitation." designcommunication