Noise Between Stations

Information Architecture

  • MIG Seminar in Vancouver, March 23

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    3 min read

    We’ll be teaching a full-day seminar prior to the IA Summit called Enhancing Your Strategic Influence: Understanding and Responding to Complex Business Problems. I’ll be joined by John Zapolski and Scott Hirsch of MIG, Harry Max (formerly of Dreamworks), and Mark McCormick (Director of Design at Wells Fargo). We’ve been designers. And we’ve partnered with…

  • Full-on cocktails, plus panel discussion, Feb 28 in NYC

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    1 min read

    If you’ll be in New York at the end of February you should consider attending the Design 2.0 day of presentations and panel discussion on strategy, design, brand, product, service, customer experience, and all things innovation. Also, full-on cocktails. Among the speakers will be Andrew Zolli, of whom I’ve written, “If you ever get a…

  • Teaching design to enterprise architects

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    1 min read

    More from New Challenges… James Melzer has made impressive progress on expanding the Zachman model to accommodate design (i.e. user experience) activities, vital to his challenge to educate and work with enterprise architects in U.S. Federal agencies.

  • Philosophical underpinnings of system design

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    1 min read

    More from New Challenges… Dan Brown leverages Lakoff’s ideas on the central and exceptional elements of concepts in categorization to question how we design computer systems. We’ve built a lot of exception handling into systems to the point where we take some actions for granted, where computers are enforcing rules that perhaps people should (or…

  • Designers and cultural influence

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    1 min read

    I’m at the New Challenges retreat in upstate New York this weekend. Whereas the last retreat was unexpectedly diverse by background, this one has attracted a geographically diverse audience, both ex-pats living on the East coast as well as visitors from Europe. Pouring rain is expected all weekend, so I expect folks to hunker down…

  • Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Johnson at the Strand in NYC

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    1 min read

    Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, The Tipping Point) and Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good For You, Emergence) will be at the Strand in NYC to read from their books and discuss economics, social trends and other topics. September 21, 6:30 – 8:30PM

  • Product development workshop this October in NY

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    1 min read

    I’ll be giving a workshop at the New Challenges retreat in New York in October. I’m still massaging the format, but I want to workshop a situation where designers must use their creativity and design skills to simultaneously develop a product and its revenue source. Pencil in one hand, spreadsheet in the other.

  • The Information Architecture Institute

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    1 min read

    It’s official, AIfIA is now the The Information Architecture Institute. Dig the new logo and design courtesy James Spahr, designer extraordinaire.

  • IA Leadership Seminar

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    1 min read

    The early registration deadline for the Information Architecture Institute’s Leadership Seminar is January 28th. If you sign up now you’ll get a significant discount for this star-studded event, 1 ½ days including: “Managing Up: The Business Strategy of Information Architecture” – Christina Wodtke and Scott Hirsch “The Enterprise IA Roadmap” – Louis Rosenfeld ”Homeland Security…

  • Why does free tagging seem so familiar?

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    2 min read

    Tim Bray on Technorati Tags: “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about metadata and have written on the subject; the most important conclusion was: There is no cheap metadata. I haven’t seen anything to make me change my mind. …I think that it would be nice if a huge number of web pages converged…

  • Navigate by fabric pattern

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    1 min read

    It’s little experiments like this that reassure me there’s still fun to be had on the commercial web.

  • Falseonomies

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    1 min read

    The Clay Shirky spin on the ethnoclassification discussion is amusing. How such a large percentage of the community manages to discuss a classification technique without explicitly illustrating how it aids in retrieval misses the whole point of classification. But I’ve already covered that ground, so let’s move along to the more interesting, subtle developments. At…

  • America’s funniest home nomenclature

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    1 min read

    I sympathize with the folks that rail against the word user to mean the visitor, reader, etc. of a computer system, but it’s so widespread and useful a term it seems a lost battle at this point. Still, I had to laugh this morning when my wife — who had been using a system called…

  • UX: please stop talking to yourselves

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    1 min read

    I’m so glad Christina wrote what I was thinking: “dudes, can we collectively move on now? …read businessweek instead of alertbox for a change.“

  • Ethnoclassification and retrieval

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    2 min read

    I’ve been doing some product development consulting for a content-centric company, and started to wonder if ethnoclassification could benefit them somehow. I was hard-pressed to think of how, after the content was tagged, the tags would lead to better sets of content. Although they have a lot of content, they only have a few authors…