Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Adam Greenfield

Adam Greenfield — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:34 GMT

Jeez, were there any women at BarCamp? Forgive me, forgive me, but I’m so very tired of events that are little more than conclaves of Aspergerian boys…

Andrew’s success at Design Engaged – or one of them; there were many – was that it felt like a retreat with a bunch of very smart, very funny human beings, in which things like space, food, and the city around us mattered at least as much as the presentations. For my money, this – the “engaged” part – is what is missing from so many conferences, even the latterday crop of “unconferences.”

Adam Greenfield — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:41 GMT

But institutional change doesn’t work the way a Web site does! The two are completely different domains, and after several years of beating my former-IA head against intractable issues that were in fact grounded in the way a given client chose to do business, I’m less than ever convinced that they have meaningful things in common.

I mean, oh my goodness, anyone who knows me knows that I’ve long upheld the idea of using *insights* gleaned from the practice of information architecture in other problem domains. But to literally map the practice itself onto managing the process of institutional change? That, I’m afraid, is a no-go.

Why? Andres correctly points out that IAs often wind up “really making business recommendations [rather] than organizing content.” But most of the time IAs are forced to make such recommendations to the wrong people, an echelon or two at least beneath the appropriate level for such interventions.

If reengineering business is what you dig, by all means, rebrand yourself a strategic consultant and take those insights and rock them at the appropriate level. You’ll certainly be able to bill more, and you may even face a less frustrating time in winning buy-in.

But don’t saddle the common-or-garden variety IA – who’s been brought in, remember, to fix a Web site or an application – with the futile challenge of wrangling a re-org, almost invariably without the internal constituency, championship, or critical mass of consensus necessary to such an ambition. It’s just not fair to sandbag someone in the IA position with the additional responsibility of fixing everything that’s institutionally dysfunctional in the client.

And especially don’t call it “change architecture.” ; . )

Adam Greenfield — Fri, 25 May 2007 16:12:37 GMT

In the HCI community, the sort of ambient audio signals you’re discussing here are generally called “earcons.”

I would not make the mistake of collapsing ambient signals with those that occur at low frequency. Indeed, it may be difficult to learn a “language” of cues invoked at infrequent intervals, and many of the most successful ambient signalling channels are those that are engaged constantly or nearly-so.

Adam Greenfield — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:21 GMT

Ross, I’m glad to see your clarification. I’d like to propose that for consistency’s sake we take the next step here, and define ambient interface elements as those that remain peripheral and are not ordinarily focally attended to by the user. (This would both bring our discussion into line with standard usage and allow us to eliminate any consideration of “frequency.”)

That said, I feel that the use of ambient audio-channel indicators remains an interesting and underutilized strategy in interaction design. The MIT Media Lab Tangible Media group’s 1999 ambientROOM is a crucial early elaboration of the idea; I suppose the whirring of Natalie Jeremijenko’s “Live Wire” (also known as “Dangling String”) could be considered a still-earlier example. While innovators like Schulze & Webb continue to explore the possibilities of ambient display in the visual channel, relatively few recent projects have fully exploited the possibilities of ambient sound.

Adam Greenfield — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:27 GMT

Eric: As it happens, I *don’t* use spellcheck. I simply spell correctly the first time. ; . )

I’m not sure why there’s a picture of me next to this comment, by the way. I don’t want there to be one.

Adam Greenfield — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:28 GMT

Hey Jorge – great to hear from you. Do me a favor, though, and repost that where I feel it belongs, in the thread on v-2?

I don’t feel as strongly as others, perhaps, that forking this discussion was a bad idea, but there’s certainly a conversation going on over there that isn’t happening here. Cheers!

Adam Greenfield — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:28 GMT

Shit, I had no idea that little exclamation point meant “Mark as Offensive” – I thought it was a permalink. There’s no way to permalink comments here?

Adam Greenfield — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 05:05:21 GMT

Oh, jeez, sorry, Donna. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why I suddenly had access to every text field on the page and scribbled a few lines of nonsense to see if it would save. Thought I’d deleted it before leaving the page. Again, apologies.

Adam Greenfield — Thu, 17 May 2007 10:30:10 GMT

“Zen is the art of practicing meditation in everything you do and existing solely in a mental space.”

Not to quibble, but as a thirteen-year practitioner of the form (at least in one of its variants), I have to disagree rather sharply with your definition. It has nothing to do with “existing solely in a mental space” and rather more to do with existing fully in everything you do, whether that’s chopping wood, carrying water, singing a song or developing a Web site.