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October 26, 2006

IDEA 2006 Conference wrapup

I was at the this week here in Seattle. I’ll admit to never having actually been to any “real” information architecture conferences, none of the official IA events. That’s been because they’ve always seemed so focused on things like taxonomies and vocabularies and boxes and arrows, especially as the field’s grown up and settled down. Since I really don’t do that sort of work, I haven’t gone. So I really appreciated that IDEA was an attempt to expand the scope across disciplines. Peter Merholz did a great job putting the thing together.

There really wasn’t much about IDEA I was disappointed with, though I was unimpressed with Linda Stone’s talk (repeated verbatim from Supernova in 2005) about continuous partial attention. It’s clearly a valuable observation, but her talk was based on sweeping, unsupported, and a-historial generalizations about “everyone”, what “we” do, what “kids today” do, and tidy 20-year cycles of behavior. She’s done the research to back up some of her points—too bad it came across as anecdotal and casual here. The second day’s “Next Generation Libraries” panel somehow never gelled, despite all three speakers having something interesting to say. MAYA’s work on libraries is great, a genuine integration of information architectures (Peter has a good summary of the project from a couple of years ago). I’d really hoped Seattle “City Librarian” Deborah Jacobs would talk more about how the SPL’s had to work with some rather austere and user-unfriendly aspects of the Koolhaas library with boring stuff like, you know, actual signs. Unfortunately things were running late and Jacobs disappeared right after her talk.

Highlights for me included Dan Hill, who reprised and extended his “Movements in Modern Media” talk. It was a pretty dense set of ideas—being already pretty well-read in Dan’s stuff helped :-). He told me afterwards that most of what he’d shown, including a note-perfect facsimile issue of the Economist imagining the BBC in 2015, he’d put together for work presentations, not just to illustrate his talk. It’s impressive and confident stuff. Definitely look for his slides at cityofsound.com at some point, they’re worth a close look.

I’d heard of some of Local Projects’ work before, StoryCorps in particular. Jake Barton’s terrific talk followed on really beautifully from David Guiney’s; both understood the emotional connection their work made with people. The Stamen boys showed a selection of their work, which looked great, of course. I think everyone in the room was impressed by their co-presenter Fernanda Viégas’ “Many Eyes” project (out soon, hopefully). It’s IBM Research’s effort at “democratizing data visualization.” They’ve cracked one of those problems that I hadn’t even really noticed before: the ability to point at and bookmark states of, or places in, data visualizations, which can facilitate blog-like conversations around those bookmarks. It’s the difference between being able to bookmark a few seconds halfway through a film rather than having to fast forward to that point again.

Bruce Sterling closed the conference in his full professional keynoting-curmudgeon mode, often bouncing up and down like a toddler dancing to a marching band. Although it was actually quite an indictment of information architecture, it was a fairly thrilling speech. Though he’d looked to be engrossed in his laptop in the back of the room for two days, he’d clearly been listening closely. We could tell because the first five minutes or so of his talk was a William Burroughs-style cutup of the IDEA speakers’ own words, with all the professional jargon and high-end designer flourishes intact. It’s a technique he’s used elsewhere, but it was especially appropriate at IDEA. Speakers had talked about building structures or processes that would elicit user-generated contributions (Jake Barton, for example, talked about “designing a process that created an exhibition”). Sterling was basically saying: you guys like that user-generated stuff, well how do you like this. Sure, IA is guilty of being a bit in love with its own academic and technical jargon (though I’d say it’s more down to earth than other design disciplines), so sure, that petard was sort of sitting there for him to hoist us on. But Scott Berkun pointed out in his notes, what professional conference wouldn’t be to some degree an excuse to indulge in insiders-only language for a couple of days?

Sterling also compared IA work to the “useless voids” in Koolhaas’ library building (yeah, we were kinda asking for that one by having IDEA there), he had a pretty simple point: there are real problems out there, mostly due to petro-centric and destructive legacy production systems, that need solving. That need solving now, by designers who can do better than their predecessors, and do it faster. So stop building your fancy craft marketplace web sites with their clever little color wheels and go fix the shit that’s killing us. Ok, Sterling didn’t specifically call out young Robert Kalin, who’d had the bad luck to have the next to last slot on the schedule, but you get the idea. He’s right, of course. Even purely digital stuff’s starting to affect the environment directly.

And it was at this point that David Guiney’s two sessions on design at the National Park Service suddenly felt most relevant to me. Here’s a hundred-year old organization, responsible for looking after and providing access to a staggering amount of collectively-owned resources in the face of budget cuts, environmental decline, and waning public interest.

Guiney spoke about the NPS’ role as “interpreters” of their resources, which it defines as “the process of helping each park visitor find an opportunity to personally connect with a place. Each individual may connect to the place in a different way….” In other words, it’s a designed process that depends on negotiating both facts and feelings, frequently through narratives. The best “architectures of participation”, like Local Projects’ work, or the trends Dan mapped out around Lost, work best when filled with something like storytelling. As Eric once said to me of data visualizations: “this stuff’s gotta sing.” I think that’s why Cooper’s work at the Getty Museum didn’t seem to sing, despite the user-centered process used to create it. I’m wary of art or design which has as its aim merely to “make people think” or to “raise awareness”; Sterling’s point was that that’s not nearly enough.

Posted by Andrew at October 26, 2006 03:12 PM

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Comments

Fine summation. Your write-up of Sterling’s talk reminded me of his exhortation to the audience to go out and purchase the new Worldchanging book available on Amazon, etc. I have a feeling that book will prompt a whole lot of discussion—and action—around “fixing the shit that’s killing us.”

Robert Kalin’s criticism of Linda Stone’s talk represented an interesting intergenerational conflict. I suppose that relates to your comment that Stone’s talk was too anecdotal and didn’t refer enough to the kinds of research she may have access to but didn’t share.

But in terms of being reality-based, I believe Stone’s take provides a wider lens and perspective than Talin’s on what’s happening to our attention as life speeds up. Kalin’s joy at being in a playful relationship with technology, however, was certainly more buoyant and infectious. And it’s his immersion in that playfulness that may not allow him to see how many others are being negatively impacted by accelerating change.

Posted by: Sanjay Khanna at October 26, 2006 04:26 PM

Thanks for the useful and cogent summary, Andrew. A few points spring to mind:

  • I really, really wish this conference hadn’t implicitly endorsed Koolhaas by taking place at SPL, especially since (as you quite correctly point out by linking that wonderful picture of the ad-hoc sign) its most egregious failures are explicitly ones of information architecture.

  • That IDEA appeared to miss the point here speaks, I think, to my assertion that architecture itself is properly a domain for IA, and that IA in general has not faced up to the challenge of understanding architectural space. Unless the intention was to be pointed and ironic, holding an event on information architecture in a building already notorious for its lapses in the understanding of everyday use is akin to having a PETA meeting in an abattoir.

  • I’m simultaneously sympathetic to and suspicious of the desire to assert narrative order that you’re here referring to as storytelling - sympathetic because I do agree that it’s almost a sine qua non of user engagement, suspicious because it’s so often manipulative and paternalistic, especially in the hands of organizations that have no actually compelling value proposition to offer their user. (I’m reminded of the hostility I always used to feel toward Nathan Shedroff’s notion of “experience design,” my sentiment being that experience cannot be designed, merely constrained.)

In a way, the storytelling aspect presents an intriguing contrast with Architecture and Situated Technologies, the other conference going on this week at which three DE veterans were present (me, Molly, Anne). There, the word of the day was “underspecification,” and I understood the interest in same as a way of reframing the question you effectively asked and tried to answer with your design of DE itself: what’s the least amount of structure one can get away with asserting, and still provide enough hooks to hang rich interactions and other behavior off of?

So I think you owe yourself a pat on the back for having not merely anticipated this interest by two years, but for having proposed some provisional and fairly successful solutions. ; . )

Posted by: AG at October 26, 2006 06:33 PM

Yeah, “storytelling” is maybe not quite the word. To be clear, no one at IDEA uttered it, even regarding work like StoryCorps that’s explicitly about it. “Narrative”, maybe? Not quite right…not sure what the right term here is.

Posted by: heyotwell [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 26, 2006 09:40 PM

Thank you Andrew for this excellent writeup!

As much as I would have loved to see this disparate group of presenteres together, it’s good to see your references to earlier, similar presentations by the same speakers which to me say I didn’t miss that much. And it’s always good to hear that DE speakers rocked :-)

One question: from the pictures I’ve seen (http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=IDEA2006), it seems there can’t have been more than 300 or so attendees. Do you have a better estimate?

Posted by: Peter Boersma at October 26, 2006 11:13 PM

Thanks for the wonderful write-up. The past two months have been loaded with conferences and this was one that had many people who I have heard this year or follow their stuff closely. It would have been good to see Dan in person again (it has been too long) and hear Bruce Sterling again.

BTW, I really missed DE this year. I was looking at going to the Architecture and Situated Technologies, but was just beginning to catch-up from being sick.

Posted by: vanderwal [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 27, 2006 10:36 AM