We just rolled out the AIfIA Information Architecture Progress Grants:
Two grants will be awarded in February, 2005… Each grant is for US$1000… Applications should propose work that has the potential to benefit information architecture practioners in a practical way. This includes, for example, original research, a new synthesis of important existing research, or development of an innovative new technique. The resulting reports will be published on the aifia.org website.
Since the 1703 Treaty of Methuen giving mutual trade advantages to Portuguese wines and English woolens, countries have recognized their own expertise and costs and opted to trade rather than compete in particular markets. So regardless of what our re-elected president tells us, the facts of economic life in the modern world will not change: we will lose jobs to less expensive workers elsewhere in the world.
But all is not lost. Everyone in the design world now has the gift of foresight and can adjust career trajectories to not only avoid pain in this, as yet, mostly unaffected field, but to additionally take advantage of the situation (I have). And this is the point I make in a new AIfIA editorial, The Best Sourcing of Information Architecture.
John Battelle reports on Google’s recent demo of word clustering algorithms, which could force them to take the UI plunge:
What do I mean by that? Well, of all the major engines, only Google has strictly maintained what might be called the C prompt interface to search: put in yer command, get out yer list of results (Google Local is a departure, but it’s still in beta). Yahoo, Ask, A9 and others have begun to twiddle in pretty significant ways with evolved interfaces which – by employing your search history, your personal data, clustering, and other tricks – deliver more filtered and intentional results (though it is still arguable if they are more relevant).
Link courtesy of Alex.
The Future of Information Architecture retreat was simply amazing, one of the top three professional events I’ve ever attended. Wonderful people, setting, format, discussion… everything. There’s already plans for more.
Lou Rosenfeld requests your participation in a short survey to “detect past and future trends regarding where information architects work, and how much of their work is dedicated to IA.” I’m going to guess that after the crash when a lot of consultants went in-house they have yet to go back to consulting, considering myself an exception.
I’ll be on a NYC CHI panel this Thursday about The State of Information Architecture in NYC. Co-panelists are my friend Elliott Trice from Avenue A/Razorfish and Organic’s IA leader, Laurence Lipkin.
Brian Alvey, speaking on a panel about CSS back at SXSW, asked, “Who’s building a CMS on these tools that spits out valid markup? Not many. A few. They’re going to heaven.”
Well, I don’t exactly believe in heaven, but to play it safe I wrote an article illustrating a few different ways you could integrate cascading style sheets with content management systems. The ideas came to me while I was working on a big Vignette-powered project, but the function is fairly easy to build in. The change is less about technology and more about organization and process: designers become empowered to improve the design through CSS as frequently and easily as authors change text.
It’s also just as useful on smaller systems, as demonstrated by Textpattern.
My man Anders started a NYC IA Meetup, first meeting tomorrow night.
I’m so looking forward to the Future of Information Architecture retreat. It’s two days of listening, talking, eating, drinking, walking through the woods and along the beach, with a little partying thrown in for good measure. I’ll be facilitating a session to create design patterns, a group exercise exploring how each of us approaches design management problems like sync’ing design change with business change and finding time to do research.
I think it’ll be a great time to flex the mind and the body, all without hurting the pocket (I found a roommate, so it’s only $221 for both days including three square meals a day). I’ve heard there’s still a few places left too, so all this can be yours.
There’s been some great conversation on social classification among myself, Jess, Stewart, Gene and Alex.
I just realized that James already built a system that combines the best of social and constructed categories, for example by creating equivalent associations on the backend to correct for too many, similar categories. His design has the virtue of having extremely nifty interaction design that let’s users type what they’re thinking while showing them what’s already there. Less cognitive load for the users, more yummy findability in the end.
Jess has a great comparison of faceted and social classification, go read it now. It reminds me of another solution to the metacrap problem: distributed classification. It’s an approach I’ve seen in my last two big taxonomy-driven projects: a financial services firm’s website and a retailer’s CMS.
In the case of the retailer, they have many thousands of products that need classifying on a regular basis. The products are relatively inexpensive commodities that change often and are sold through stores, a print catalog, and online. All the information about the products, including classification, is managed in one big content management system. They could hire a team of librarians to do the classification. Or they could hire less expensive office workers to do it. But they do neither of these, they let the manufacturers classify their own products. When I first realized they were relinquishing control of information that directly touched the customer I was shocked, and now I think it’s brilliant.
This addresses the tragedy of the commons by rethinking the business operations. Instead of looking around their own organization for someone to classify (someone who has no interest in getting it done right, other than being paid to do so), they moved classification outside the organization to those who already have a self-interest in getting it done, the manufacturers whose main focus is selling more products. This is a more scalable solution than hiring a team of librarians. The rules of the system keep the manufacturers from abusing it. And because they have a self-interest in classifying the products they’ll use a pre-existing system, so there’s no need to resort to ad hoc categories.
This worked, meaning 95% of entries were just fine and the other 5% could be easily caught and cleaned up. Classification experts go absolutely bonkers just thinking about this scenario, but this is the scalable way to get the job done. The fact is, the structure of the system was created by non-experts using common sense and the data is added by people using common sense, all without traditional classification training. At the end of the day the retailer tests the findability of items in the catalog with customers and if it works then the classification is correct.
Ultimately the organization of our exploding volumes of information may be less of a classification problem than an organizational design problem. These two clients I’ve worked with pushed the classification outside their organizations and achieved successful, scalable systems.
Michael lays out the advice very nicely.
The The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms is a compilation from the journal that asserts “reading is the last refuge from the real-time epidemic. To that end, the selections gathered here are grouped by how long they offer escape from real time: waiting rooms need long stories, for example, while elevators demand poems.”
Brilliant user experience-oriented organization.
More tools, more translations, more learning resources, more jobs, more features, more seminars, and more hanging out with good, smart people. All this at cheaper prices than last year, in some cases it’s even free. It’s the second year of the Asilomar Institute. Yay for us!
We’re also holding elections for the Board of Directors, and to continue the goodness we need to the best leaders we can find. Is that you?
The AIfIA Education Initiative is surveying IA practitioners to get a better picture of our skills and what skills we think today’s students will need. We will use this information to help form a recommended educational curriculum. The survey only takes a few minutes to complete; help out if you have a chance.
The survey results will be reported in aggregate on the aifia.org website. No personally identifiable information is recorded.
Thanks!