Boxes and Arrows: Stories by Erin Malone

Learning from the "Powers of Ten"

Erin Malone — Mon, 11 Mar 2002 12:00:12 GMT

Charles and Ray Eames. To most designers, the Eames name brings to mind rows and rows of molded plywood chairs and Herman Miller furniture of the 1950s. But the Eameses were more than just designers of furniture, they were masters of exploration and experimentation into the realm of experience. The Eameses used many media to model experience and ideas. The model was a key tool in their design process. The model allowed them to walk through an experience and offered a way to visualize the possibilities and the layers of meaning. One of the modeling tools they used quite frequently was film.

Throughout their career, they made over 120 short films.1 They ranged in topic from the world of Franklin and Jefferson to advanced mathematical explanations to the scientific exploration of scale in the “Powers of Ten.” The exploration into film helped them explore an idea, work out the presentation and the layers of information and understand a process or theory. The Eameses often carried an idea through multiple versions in order to find the right approach to a problem. On the Eames Office website, Lucia Dewey Eames writes:

“A film could be a model, not simply a presentation of an idea, but a way of working it out. Looking back at the way the office worked, there is a constant sense that the best way to understand a process was to carry it all the way through. For example, in the creation of the project that became the film “Powers of Ten,” first came a test known as “Truck Test,” then the production of “Rough Sketch” (8 minutes; color, 1968), which was a model of the idea of the journey in spatial scale. Only by carrying the idea all the way through could one see the right way to approach the problem. And, indeed, the final version of “Powers of Ten” (9 minutes; color, 1977) has quite a few differences. But both films are models in a more important sense: they are models of the idea of scale. Because such Eames models managed to capture the essence of the problem, they were in fact quite satisfying in their own right.”2

In an interview in ISdesigNET magazine, Charles and Ray’s grandson, Eames Demetrious says:

“There may be a tendency to assume the films are a charming footnote: Furniture designers making films. But that is not how it was, not how Charles and Ray saw it at all. For them, the films were an intrinsic part of the process.”3

“The Powers of Ten,” perhaps their most successful film, is one such model into the nature of scale. The first version, developed in 1968 for the annual meeting of the Commission on College Physics, went under the title, “A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of the Universe.” (8 minutes; color, 1968). In 1977, with the help of Philip Morrison, professor of physics at MIT, they updated and refined the work under the new title, “The Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero” (9 minutes; color, 1977). The film sought to visualize the relative size relationships of elements through space and time and expose what happens when you add another zero to the equation.

“The ‘Powers of Ten’ also represents a way of thinking—of seeing the interrelatedness of all things in our universe. It is about math, science and physics, about art, music and literature. It is about how we live, how scale operates in our lives and how seeing and understanding our world from the next largest or next smallest vantage point broadens our perspective and deepens our understanding.”4
—Powers of Ten website

Series of Sketches for the Films Chart plotting sequences of "Powers of Ten" Storyboard sketch 1 Storyboard sketch 2 Storyboard sketch 3 Storyboard sketch 4

The film starts by showing an image of a sleeping man at one meter square (100) and gradually pulls back, moving ten times away for every ten seconds of time that passes, eventually reaching the edge of the universe (1025). The camera then zooms forward, into the sleeping man’s hand, finally reaching the inside of an atom (10-18).

The exploration of information presentation in the "Rough Sketch" and in the final “Powers of Ten,” speaks to the value of models that the Eameses used to explain their ideas about information organization and presentation. The imagery explores both size relationships and time. It explores the visual relationships of elements and developing patterns that emerge at different scales. The control panel (in the “Rough Sketch”) that is always present on the screen visualizes another six levels of information at its peak. The combination of imagery and the control panels explores the nature of simultaneous presentation of information. The Eameses push the boundaries of what can be taken in and understood at any one time, they play with the notion of information overload and information absorption. The 1968 version (“Rough Sketch”) explores more levels of simultaneous information than the 1977 final version, in which the panel display is reduced to its most essential information and relocated for better comprehension and retention. Sponsored by IBM, the film was one of the many efforts that the Eameses worked on to bring science, technology and art together in a way the average person could understand.

“Eames approached the problem in universal terms (to please the ten-year-old as well as the nuclear physicist) and, as in designing a chair, sought to find what was most common to their experience. Sophisticated scientific data was not the denominator (although the film had to handle such matters with complete accuracy to maintain credibility), but it was the inchoate ‘gut feeling’ of new physics which even the most jaded scientist, as Eames says ‘had never quite seen in this way before.’”5

Although more than 20 years old, the series of films offers lessons on successful presentation and explorations of layered information. The information problems explored through film, by the Eameses, are really no different than many of the problems facing information architects today. Studying the Eames’ work and their processes may yield effective processes for today’s IA. Using different media and methods in prototyping and modeling of ideas, as well as presenting layers of information in a way that is simple and elegant, the Eameses succeeded in their original goals:

“The sketch should, Eames decided, appeal to a ten-year-old as well as a physicist; it should contain a ‘gut feeling’ about dimensions in time and space as well as a sound theoretical approach to those dimensions.”6

For more information:

View All End Notes

Eames Office
Powers of Ten
Library of Congress Eames Exhibition
Loop: AIGA Journal of Interaction Design Education: Three Information Design Lessons
By Philip C. Repp
Eames Design: The Work of the Office of Charles and Ray Eames
By John Neuhart, Marilyn Neuhart, Ray Eames and Charles Eames
The Work of Charles and Ray Eames : A Legacy of Invention
By Donald Albrecht (Editor), Beatriz Colomina, Joseph Giovannini, Charles Eames, Philip Morrison
Powers of Ten : A Book About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero
By Philip Morrison, Phylis Morrison, Office of Charles and Ray Eames
The Films of Charles and & Ray Eames—The Powers of 10 (Vol. 1)
Charles and Ray Eames
Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century
By Pat Kirkham

AIGA Experience Design - Past, Present and Future

Erin Malone — Mon, 15 Apr 2002 00:04:09 GMT

Clement Mok, widely considered one of the early leaders of the IA/UE movement, is the current president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. He served as a creative director at Apple for five years before he founded Studio Archetype interaction design and branding agency in 1988. When Sapient "Can those who design experiences find a useful, lasting home within the age-old AIGA?"acquired Studio Archetype in 1998, Mok became Chief Creative Officer. Now consulting, he continues to shape Sapient's long term strategy as Chairman of its Innovation Advisory Board. Terry Swack, a 20-year veteran of the design profession as well as a leading digital strategist and designer, is the AIGA Experience Design national chair and serves on the AIGA board of directors. Formerly, Terry was founder and CEO of TSDesign, an Internet strategy and product design firm acquired by Razorfish in 1999. Terry now consults independently, is a contributing reviewer to Internet World's Deconstructing column and is writing a book on the impact of experience design strategy on business. In 1998 Terry and Clement, organized the Advance for Design Forum, an initiative of the AIGA. Its purpose was to 'create a forum for the advance of experience design in the network economy and to define and build a community of practitioners who will shape and advocate for the role of design in a world that is increasingly digital'. In 2000 it formally became the AIGA Experience Design community of interest and now has a national membership with groups established in major US cities and London. The two are uniquely qualified to elucidate the evolution and future of AIGA ED and to answer the important question: Can those who design experiences find a useful, lasting home within the age-old AIGA? They recently talked with Erin Malone of Boxes and Arrows: B&A: What was your original motivation for beginning the Experience Design community of interest? Terry & Clement: Like many design practitioners in the mid-'90s, Terry and I were thrust into developing and evolving our respective design practices for the growing needs of online initiatives by our clients. Being early converts, we found ourselves in conferences, workshops and seminars preaching the Internet gospel and sharing insights and methodologies on creating order out of the inherent unstructured nature of the Internet. Repeatedly, we found ourselves with other like-minded practitioners in hallway conversations comparing notes. We rarely had time to see each other's presentations or have meaningful discourse about the challenges of advancing the practice and the profession. Each of us were making the same mistakes and essentially inventing the same methodology only with different labels. Terry and I were fed up with these chance meetings, and we were hoping someone would organize a conference that will bring together people who we admired and respected from afar, but we didn't know what organization would do it. Coincidently, Ric Grefe, the director of AIGA, approached both Clement and I to see if we wanted to develop 'New Media' design programming for AIGA. Despite the large number of AIGA members who worked in this arena, we felt this new community and practice was more than just media involving the integration or the complimentary use of different design processes with varying emphasis on different visualization and behavioral manipulation skills and disciplines. There was no obvious home for this community, but we had to start somewhere. AIGA was willing to incubate this group as Clement and I envisioned it. The attendees of the first Advance for Design summit in Nantucket in 1998 were drawn essentially from our personal Rolodexes. They were from a range of design and design-related specializations: designers, clients and educators from corporations, agencies, user research firms and new media/Internet consulting firms. The background of the attendees represented the composition of the community we wanted to build-eclectic and diverse with a common passion for (big as well as little) design. Interestingly, the attendees were surprised AIGA would sponsor Advance for Design, but it was clear these practitioners felt equally disconnected from ACM SIGCHI, IDSA (Industrial Design Society of America) or AIP (Association of Internet Professionals). So we opted to define our own community and appreciated the AIGA's support. !!!!! B&A: Why was it called Advance for Design? Terry & Clement: It was not a conference or a meeting. All participants were presenters and attendees. The goal was to figure out how to learn and share knowledge among us. In short, to advance the profession and the practice of design ... hence the name. B&A: The AIGA Experience Design community of interest began over four years ago. Why has it taken so long to come into the mainstream IA/UE/UI community? Terry & Clement: Yes, we've had four Advance for Design summits, but the group really did not become an official part of AIGA until after the third meeting. That's when it became apparent that "Design"- the creating of form, the process, as well as the commitment to human-centered design and user experience-was the common thread. We all contributed to the design of experience. AIGA had already demonstrated its willingness to help develop the group, so we made the affiliation official and gave the group a name. So we see this as a two-year-old organization rather than four. B&A: Do you feel change, inclusion and acceptance of this practice and organization is happening fast enough? Terry & Clement: It's relative to one's perspective as to what's fast. Behaviors and beliefs don't change overnight. It changes at the speed of habit (that's a Paul Saffo quote). We also don't believe the practice and the organization are one and the same. Things happen at different speeds out in the world relative to the speed of a volunteer organization. ;)

B&A: How do you reconcile the notion of an Experience Design Community of practice with being sponsored/supported by the AIGA, which has a reputation out there of being solely the home of graphic designers? Terry & Clement: AIGA has been around nearly a hundred years because it has adapted to the regular transformation of the design profession. "AIGA uses the term "Experience Design" to describe a community of practice-not a single profession or discipline."AIGA used to be an organization about printing (graphic arts-the GA in AIGA). It changed into an organization about typographic design and publication design. It morphed into an organization for graphic designers in the '70s and now it's out to earn the reputation to be an organization about Experience Design. Those who perceive AIGA as a home of graphic designers may want to look closely at its activities, membership, conferences and competitions. In recent years, it has become a leader in a number of areas that are not part of its traditional perception-visual culture, design for film and television, converging media and brand strategy. And lastly, for those who simply have problems with the name, AIGA is not unlike SPRINT or IBM. Those companies chose to keep their historical names-through the use of acronyms-despite how they've changed over time. I'd wager to say that many people have never heard a mainframe computer referred to as a 'business machine'. IBM is now the name of the company that invented "e-business". B&A: Do you think AIGA ED will ever branch off on its own, as a separate organization? Terry & Clement: Simply put: AIGA has 12 staff and 17,000+ members. The organization is the membership. AIGA has put no limitations on who the community is or how it evolves. The Experience Design community's growth is purely a function of who has chosen to be involved and what they believe is important-and it is largely made up of IA/UE/UI folks. Despite this, we think the more important question is which institutional characteristics will serve practitioners best in achieving a sense of community, the ability to share information and the means to develop effective communication programs that will enhance understanding and respect for the role of the practitioners. These are the needs of a profession. We think the organization should have sufficient infrastructure to survive the ebb and flow of volunteer energy and be able to reach out to those in allied fields who share teams and who will advocate for the highest and best practices. Within this structure, one can be as introspective as one wants without becoming self-limiting on the reach of this new community. At the moment, it appears these conditions are better met within AIGA than on one's own. There are many organizations with great intents yet no critical mass or influence. B&A: The concept "A Community of Practice," which was discussed at last year's Summit, has a lot of value. How are you evangelizing this notion to the greater field? Terry & Clement: AIGA uses the term "Experience Design" to describe a community of practice-not a single profession or discipline. Designing effective experiences requires many different types of professionals with a broad range of knowledge. However, we now better understand the difference between a community of interest and a community of practice. This distinction has become an important question as we move forward in the community's development relative to other user-experience professional organizations. Posted recently to the SIGIA-L discussion list was link to an article titled Communities of Practice, by Martin White:

'A community of practice is a way of developing best practice in a given area, established by members who wish to develop their specific expertise through open participation in the creation and exchange of knowledge. Of course best practice changes with time and with business circumstance, and so these communities will also need to adapt ... .... To be successful, online communities must show prompt and relevant benefits to both the employer and the employee. Communities constantly evolve and must be managed to keep them fresh and alive. Every community has a life cycle of infancy, maturity and death. It is possible however with good community management to prevent the death of a community by constantly evolving it with the changing needs of its members, and introducing new functionality, topics or subgroups.'

Martin's article was written for a business audience (i.e., communities within one organization). This perspective helped us realize the statement's relevance to us-how we should be looking at the communities within AIGA Experience Design. It also distinguishes the two terms: community of interest (COI) and community of practice (COP). At the risk of contradicting ourselves, by this definition, AIGA Experience Design is really a community of interest made up of many communities of practice. We are continuing to examine how AIGA Experience Design can support and advance the causes for discrete types of COPs, and which ones. A clear start are the role and knowledge presentations presented at the 4th Advance for Design, in 2001 (visit http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm?contentalias=fourthadvancefordesignsummit to download these presentations - which are all listed in the right column of the page). We will continue to refine those definitions and add tools, models and processes to support them. B&A: There is a lot of work being done by both of you, by Lou Rosenfeld and others, to create a community that embraces the new collaborative discipline. Do you feel that the AIGA is the right home for this or should there be some sort of triad (AIGA, ASIS, CHI) coalition or even an organizationally agnostic new group created? Terry & Clement: Given that experience design is about collaboration, we value the opportunity to participate in the group to determine how we collectively can serve the needs of the community. The group will have several meetings in the coming months with the goal of defining some actionable strategies. That said, we started AIGA Experience Design specifically to build a community that draws from a variety of disciplines. Practitioners will be attracted to organizations that reflect the narrowness of their interests and/or their ambition for broader reach-and this will allow a number of institutions to fill the need. We believe that the interdisciplinary nature of experience design as we see it and the commitment to developing educational and professional standards, as well as communication and advocacy programs, is well supported within AIGA. Rather than agnosticism, we believe that an organization that can advance the community's interest is the predominant attribute we are seeking. B&A: Recently there was an interesting discussion on the AIGAED discussion list that criticized the Graphic Design field for perpetuating the "Designer as Stylist" perception, through annuals and awards and the cult of personality that is so often showcased in the magazines. What is your reaction to"AIGA Experience Design is the community that brings all types of Experience Design practitioners together to focus on larger issues of business value and collaborative practice and methods." this? How do you think the ED SIG can help change people's perceptions of Design and the AIGA? Terry & Clement: Design having a balanced focus on behavioral, social and visual esthetics is what's important to us. There will be always be practitioners who will work at the extremes. It will require practitioners, educators and professional organizations to shape and redefine the new center of gravity for design. It's hard work and it needs to be done if our profession will have any credibility in the marketplace. The ED SIG can't do it alone. It requires changes at all level. AIGA is the only organization that has the critical mass and numbers to make the meaningful changes. B&A: Do you think the party is too big? Are we fracturing the discipline too finely? The list on the AIGA ED page consists of:

Design planner
Design strategist
Business strategist
Brand strategist
Visual systems designer
Brand applications designer
Creative director
User researcher
Usability specialist
Information architect
Information designer
Interaction designer
Software designer

Terry & Clement: To the contrary- the party is not too big by virtue of being inclusive of those who tend to work together on teams to accomplish a solution within the practice of experience design. AIGA Experience Design is the community that brings all types of Experience Design practitioners together to focus on larger issues of business value and collaborative practice and methods. Because of this, AIGA Experience Design members are designers who are interested in exploring new boundaries of their professions as they are evolving across multiple disciplines. This includes people who belong to other professional organizations, as well as people who don't identify with a traditional profession and are looking for a new "home" community. The list above is from last summer's summit when we examined experience design 'roles' people might play in their organizations or on teams. The words serve to summarize skills and knowledge required to play them. As many of these roles have overlapping skills and knowledge, it's not as important what they're called, as long as we know what they do. You'll find on our new Web site, coming within the next month, an even more inclusive and expanded list of skills-not roles or titles-found in the AIGA Experience Design community (following are just the headings for each section). Members of this community have skills from:

the online and digital industries
the software industry
the communication design and broadcast industries
the marketing/research/advertising industries
industrial design
exhibit design
the environmental/interior design industries

B&A: What happened to the Graphic Designer? Is this title good enough anymore? Is it too loaded within the software, IA, HCI field to be a respected member of the team? Terry & Clement: The titles software engineer, programmer, information architect and HCI specialist are also loaded, so why single out graphic designer? People who call themselves graphic designers might also use terms like designer, visual designer, communication designer or communication strategist to describe their current roles. But in the new Web site text, you'll find the term graphic designer. ;) B&A: The joint forum with CHI at this year's CHI is a great start in embracing the related disciplines. How has the CHI forum been received? Terry & Clement: Anecdotally, the CHI2002 / AIGA Experience Design FORUM is being received quite well. People are happy to see more design at CHI, and we're collaboratively happy to accommodate. We'll know better when the rubber hits the road and we know the final attendance numbers! B&A: What outcomes are you hoping for when it is all over? What events, conferences, seminars are next? Terry & Clement: There will be further collaboration, which we expect to discuss at the FORUM. B&A: Is there anything like this planned with the ASIST community? Was there an official AIGA presence at the ASIST IA Summit in March? Terry & Clement: I (Terry) attended, but the timing was difficult for others simply because of the scheduling of AIGA's national design conference the following weekend in DC. A challenge of logistics not interests. As far as collaboration, I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of the planning group you asked about a few questions earlier. B&A: Where do you see the AIGA ED community going in the next few years? Terry & Clement: We plan to continue to execute on our mission "to build an interdisciplinary community of professionals who design for a world in which experiences are increasingly digital and connected" by continuing to address the most relevant issues of the community. B&A: At last year's summit, there were a lot of design educators there. Has AIGAED been working to develop a recommended curriculum for universities and art schools for this new community of practice? Terry & Clement: Yes. AIGA is the institution that works with the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD) to develop accreditation criteria for four-year and graduate programs in design. In this capacity, we have developed with the ED community a set of criteria for an effective program (focusing on outcomes). The involvement of educators in the community and the publication of Loop, AIGA Journal of Interaction Design Education, are attempts to work with the education community to stimulate thinking about curricular issues. B&A: How is it being accepted? Terry & Clement: NASAD and the schools it accredits welcome the guidance. Acceptance in the educational community, however, is not as important as their engagement. In this regard, AIGA and the ED community are attempting to enable the community to become engaged around critical issues to the professional community (and its needs from the educational community). This takes time, but there do not appear to be other comparable efforts going on. B&A: As a hiring manager myself, I have found the well-rounded skills needed for this role are often lacking in fresh graduates-or they have two degrees and have spent too many years in school. Are there any schools with something acceptable in place? Terry & Clement: Schools are in dire need of overhauling their curriculum to reflect the realities of the marketplace. This is not a criticism of design schools but also of computer science programs, business schools and engineering schools as well. B&A: As the AIGA ED gets off the ground, sponsoring conferences and seminars beyond the small Summits, what's next for the two of you? Terry & Clement: Clement is the president of AIGA and Terry is a national board member and chair of AIGA ED. We have our hands pretty full, not only planning this year, but also working with Ric and the rest of the board to determine where the organization is going. For more information than that, you'll just have to get involved and contribute to what you'd like to see happen! We'd also like to thank you for inviting us to participate in Boxes and Arrows!

For more information:

Erin Malone is currently a Product Design Director at AOL in the Web Properties division. She has been a practicing interaction, interface and information designer since 1993. She can be reached at .

Foreseeing the Future: The legacy of Vannevar Bush

Erin Malone — Sun, 16 Jun 2002 12:00:01 GMT

In 1945 a seminal article appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Titled, “As We May Think,” the article’s author, Vannevar Bush (1890–1974), proposed a new mechanical machine to help scholars and decision makers make sense of the growing mountains of information being published in to the world. This article presaged the idea of the Internet and the World Wide Web and was directly influential on the fathers of the hypertext and the Internet as we know it today. Ted Nelson, who coined the term “hypertext” in 1967, describes Bush’s article as describing the principles of it.

Bush has been hailed as the conceptual creator of “hypertext,” laying out the notion of the modern link 50 years before the web became a public phenomenon. Bush was a distinguished scientist and a scholar. He served as dean of the school of engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington D.C. and was the President’s top advisor during World War II. He was chairman of the President’s National Defense Research Committee (1940) Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (1941–1947), Chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (1939–1941), founder of the National Science Foundation and was a central figure in the development of nuclear fission and the Manhattan Project. But he was also an inventor and invented several types of machines—the profile tracer, the justifying typewriter and the differential analyzer which was used in World War II to calculate ballistics table. As early as the 1930s he was concerned about the glut of information coming out of academia and the government and wanted to improve the way people accessed, stored and communicated information. He recognized the limitations in how that information was accessed. In this landmark article he describes a machine, the memex, which would help someone find information based in association and context rather than strict categorical indexing. “A memex is a device in which an individual stores his books, records and communications and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”1 The article goes on to describe the physical desk as having a set of translucent screens, keyboard, buttons and levers. The desk would also serve its user as a large storage device. It is because of this article that Bush has been hailed as the conceptual creator of “hypertext”. The article is at its most innovative and interesting in the description of how the memex device was to work for the reader. The memex “affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.”2 This description, some 30 years before the invention of the personal computer and 50 years before the web became a public phenomenon, lays out the notion of the modern link. George P. Landow, author of Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology says of Bush, “Bush’s idea of the memex, to which he occasionally turned his attention for three decades, directly influenced Ted Nelson, Douglas Englebart Andreis Van Dam and other pioneers in computer hypertext. […] In “As We May Think” and “Memex Revisited” Bush proposed the notion of blocks of text joined by links and he also introduced the terms links, linkages, trails and web to describe his conception of textuality. Bush’s description of the memex contains several other seminal, even radical, conceptions of textuality.”3 Some of the ideas, the concept of associative indexing, trails and sets of trails are prescient to the modern topical blog. A single author connects documents that are associated by some common theme, annotated with commentary and available for others to read long after the original associations are made. Bush described the memex reader reading documents and tying them together with links. “Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it to the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. […] He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.”4 Bush goes on to describe the sharing of trails between people and the creation of a “new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of common record. The inheritance from the master becomes not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.”5 The memex and its description have long been hailed as inspiration for the creators of hypertext and even the web. However, the importance of his legacy reaches far beyond this in the description of information organization and associative context. We are only now beginning to develop software and interactive spaces that allow a reader’s associative ability to be more automated and made available to others across the Internet. Through the addition of linking and the creation of trails, as well as personal commentary and annotation, the reader becomes author as well. The modern weblog starts to walk down the path Bush described. Wiki, the software that allows one person to aggregate and publish information and then allows others to modify and add and change the original information is also akin to his vision as well. Bush was as concerned with people authoring content as well as managing associations around existing content, and the fluid nature of the Wiki, the sharing of data and the sharing of the responsibility for the data trails, is a direct descendant of his ideas. Theodor Nelson, in his essay “As We Will Think” (1972—republished as a chapter in From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine in 1992), says that the “famous call for the memex has been generally misinterpreted for it has little to do with information retrieval as prosecuted today. Bush rejected indexing and discussed instead new forms of interwoven documents.”6 Bush’s vision for how we handle and interact with information took a step towards reality with the creation of hypertext and the basic linked web, but those of us working with information and creating information spaces and connections would do well to take another look at his vision and be as inspired to create new and innovative ways to gather and share information as other have been in the past.

For more information:

As We May Think Vannevar Bush; July 1945, Issue #176, p 101-108. http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm
The Victorian Web: Book Review: From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine. George Landow; 1992 http://65.107.211.206/cv/Reviews/Nyce_977.html
Dead inventors’ Corner Michelle Slatella; 1998 http://www.discovery.com/stories/deadinventors/dead980807/deadinventors.html
The Electronic Labrynth: Vannevar Bush Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin, Robin Parmar; 1993 http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0034.html
The Godfather G. Pascal Zachary, Wired Magazine, November 1997 http://hotwired.lycos.com/collections/computers/5.11_vannevar_bush_pr.html
Hypertext Concepts: A Historical Perspective (PDF) Niels Erik Wilde; Roskilde University, Denmark, November 2000 www.komm.ruc.dk/personale/NEW/CommCourse/Hypertext.pdf
Hypertext and the Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology George P. Landow; 1992, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London http://www.press.jhu.edu/press/books/landow/memex.html
Hypertext in Historical Context: Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson Revisited Mary Hopper moderating; October 1998 http://media-in-transition.mit.edu/forums/hypertext/hypertext.htm#memex
Internet Pioneers: Vannevar Bush Masters Project, UNC Chapel Hill, 2000, Scott Griffin http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/bush.html
Technocracy in America A new Biography traces How Net Visionary Vannevar Bush Orchestrated A Grand Postwar Alliance of Scientists, Industry and the Military Andrew Leonard; 1997, Salon Magazine http://www.salon.com/21st/books/1997/12/08books.html
Vannevar Bush bibliography: Events in the Life of Vannevar Bush David Klaphaak, Jr.; 1996 http://www.cs.brown.edu/research/graphics/html/info/timeline.html

Photos of Vannevar Bush

MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium; 1995 http://www.histech.rwth-aachen.de/www/quellen/bush/photos.htm

Erin Malone is currently a Product Design Director at AOL in the Web Properties division. She has been a practicing interaction, interface and information designer since 1993. She can be reached at .

AIGA Experience Design Summit #5

Erin Malone — Tue, 16 Jul 2002 01:01:17 GMT

Every year, for the past five years, the Experience Design community, now part of AIGA, gathers together for two days to think about the state of the profession and to have conversations around a particular aspect of the world in which Experience Design lives. The summit happens each year as a check point to the profession. “One has to isolate what is going on out there from the perception of what is going on out there” —James WoudhuysenThis year was no exception. 70+ people came together in Las Vegas, Nevada to network and talk about the big ideas and issues that face the profession today. The weather was hot and the strip was hopping. The fountains of the Bellagio danced with the heat and the Cirque de Soleil's “O” was the experience of choice. Despite the state of the economic climate today, there was a good showing. Many attendees were from California (cheap flights) but there were several folks from as far away as Canada, England and Italy in attendance and there were many new faces in the mix. The theme this year: Integrating our values, processes, and insights into the business community The summit began with the traditionally well-attended cocktail hour on Thursday evening, followed by dinner. Terry Swack, Clement Mok and Nathan Shedroff welcomed the group and initiated the beginnings of conversations by asking a handful of new attendees to share with the group who they are, what they do and why they were attending.

AIGA-ED Summit attendees, George Olsen, Rebecca Blood, Patrick Hunt, David Hoffer's back, Jesse James Garrett

Julie Stanford, Nick Ragouiz in the background

Amanda Willoughby, Peter Merholz and Molly Wright Steenson

Dinner, which was beautifully presented, finished off with small groups breaking out to gather for drinks and explore Las Vegas. Friday, July 12, 2002 The first full day of the summit was programmed to provide different viewpoints around the topic of design's relationship to business. There were a range of speakers from James Woudhuysen, a design forecaster, to Artie Wu, founder of Vividence, to David Rose, professor at Harvard School of Design and principle at Ambient to Lou Rosenfeld, consultant and IA spiritual leader and Peter Morville, Semantic Studios. Opportunity James Woudhuysen, from London, started the day off with an inspiring commentary on the nature of design, IT, business and their place in the global economy. He spoke about risk and risk aversion. Woudhuysen took the larger IT discipline to task for failing to overcome their fear and not innovating. He blamed the casual, frat boy, play is work mentality prevalent in IT and Silicon Valley for much of this. He also warned against becoming so USER CENTRIC that we lose the edge of innovation and become overly driven by users rather than guided by their needs. James Woudhuysen was inspiring and made some very good points, in particular about fear and the differences between being inspired by users and being informed by them rather than being led by them. This stifles creativity and innovation which are as important to design as creating something useful and usable. Measuring Value Following Woudhuysen were three presentations that looked at some practical ways to measure the work of design - in economic terms as well as social, environmental and ethical terms. Allistair Williamson, WebCriteria, Artie Wu, Vividence and Anne Willoughby each presented. Artie Wu began by asking us to consider the context for measuring ROI. The main thrust of his presentation lay in the premise that if you aren't on the critical path to success or are and you fail, then you won't get funded or you are irrelevant. The goals of design and the success of design in making the relationship with business work are inherently tied to whether or not the project you are working on is on the critical path for the project sponsor. He went on to show some examples of how the role of design and the impact of design in a project could affect the bottom line. He spoke a bit about Vividence and the type of work they have done for clients. Wu's presentation did not become a pitch for the company but stayed on track. The information presented was important to hear - "If you can't measure the impact you cant defend the value". What was not discussed or presented were more tangible techniques design could take into the process for actually making measurement claims on the work. “Understand what matters; measure what matters; change what matters.”He was followed by Allistair Williamson, who continued the mantra of learning to speak the language of business in order to be understood and valued by business. He recommended that design be prepared to boil down its messages to their most basic elements. Business folks will not listen to the subtleties. He also emphasized that every project must have clear, measurable customer centered business objectives and that these provide the guidelines for what can be measured later. He emphasized the need for clear before and after comparisons as one way that design can specifically point to change. The last speaker on this topic was Anne Willoughby. Her focus was to look at alternative ways to measure the impact and value of design. Environmental and social actions should be important to design as they work with business and in many cases, these factors are as important as the economic factors. There was no real specific example given of how this could or should be done, but the presentation was a reminder to us all that design has a social responsibility as well as a monetary responsibility to the field, to business and to the world. Redefining the Practice The second topic of the day was redefining the practice of experience design. The presentations began with Nico Macdonald, Design Agenda, and then replacing Alan Cooper, who was originally scheduled to speak, a roundtable report by Clement Mok and Davis Masten, Cheskin. The goal for this topic was to look at some of the trends in the field as the economy has evolved and shifted. Macdonald, a journalist specializing in writing about design and technology, presented some thoughts and observations from many interviews and conversations he has had in the last year. The practice has seen layoffs and shifts into freelancing and smaller boutique firms being created. Innovation and opportunity are still all around but design as a practice is having to evolve and adapt as clients are more cautious, expecting more for their money and becoming more customer centric. The climate is one of change and adaptation as design figures out its role with business as well as what it needs to learn from other disciplines in order to continue to be a valued member of the team. The roundtable report by Mok and Masten, was from a dinner that was held a few months ago. The dinner brought together designers, business leaders and other thought leaders including:

David Liddle
David Kelly - IDEO
Paul Saffo
Susan Rockrise - Creative VP Intel
Todd Holcomb
Nancy Hill - Hill Holiday
Christopher Ireland - Cheskin
Tahl Roz, Inc magazine
Ray Riley

They discussed the nature of the economy and the design practice within the business environment. They talked about structural issues, cultural issues, and education. Masten and Mok shared a few quotes from the conversation “Designers wander around looking around for their higher purpose the way a golden retriever looks for his tennis ball… I just know there's something here if I could just claim it… like this itch that can't be scratched” —Paul Saffo “The more successful the relationship the more able you are to change the conversation to where you need it to go.” —Susan Rockrise It sounded like an interesting dinner, but seemed somewhat out of place and not so practical for the summit attendees. Interesting quotes, but how does that help the Product Designer when they go back to work on Monday? The q&a discussion around this topic offered some interesting models that the field could look into adopting. Analogies to the movie studio production model as well as the union model were offered for discussion as well as thoughts about what exactly the problem was in the first place. Repositioning the Practice The final set of conversations on Friday were loosely collected around the idea of repositioning the practice; what changes in thinking, in working, in doing need to happen in order to keep the practice of Experience Design moving forward and vital. Kicking off the discussion was Peter Morville, Semantic Studios. He put onto the table the notion of Findability as a dimension of Experience Design that offers an interesting and robust opportunity for the design community. Morville offered several examples of what is not working currently and how adding the layer of findability to the table can create better products. Google, the Flamenco project from Berkeley and others were offered as beautiful examples where findability was in the forefront of the objectives. He challenged the audience to think about this concept —findability equals beauty —in their design work —beyond usability —and to look for this beauty in new places. Lou Rosenfeld followed with a very pragmatic presentation around organization and organizational structure. He proposed the creation of strong autonomous Experience Design groups at the enterprise level of business. The model for the group would offer a variety of services and solutions and would look to create a centralized vision for long term and short terms needs within a company. He put forth a very well thought out model that not only had practical application but had a built in business model as well. The idea of becoming a more entrepenurial styled organization within a traditional business organization is interesting and may yet prove successful for those with enough clout and vision to pull it off. Rosenfeld was followed by David Rose, of Ambient Devices. Rose talked to the group about a series of initiatives he and his company have been working on in the wireless space. The goals in thinking and products they have been prototyping have been to decouple (a word heard quite often over the course of the two days) the interface from the technology. Rose had several devices on hand to demonstrate some of this thinking, including an orb [show picture] that plugged in and glowed different colors to indicate the stock market activity. Another example was a pair of picture frames that blinked and glowed lights as messages when the person shown in the picture was physically near a companion picture frame. The philosophy that they have taken involves capitalizing on people's awareness of the environment, on everyday objects and adding layers of meaningful but not overwhelming or confusing information to those objects. This was a very interesting presentation and offered up to the group new ways to think about design and the design process. Interface does not always equal screen. The last presentation was Jeffrey Huang of the Harvard Design School. Jeffrey presented a more traditional sort of conference presentation - a recap of some of the work he has been doing with his design curricula at Harvard around visualizing information and then went into an overview of a recent project that took some of the ideas from the class work and research and applied them to a real project. The recent project was done for the Swiss Consulate and consisted of the creation of what is known as the Swiss House located in Boston. The project entailed the design and creation of physical and virtual environments. Utilizing multiple layers of technology and full wall size curtains of information projection, the Swiss House attempts to create a feeling of single spaces of interaction across multiple disparate physical locations. The project was extremely interesting to see and is an example of how design can combine physical and virtual technologies to create new business architectures for everyday activities. The day ended with groups breaking off for drinks, dinner and many of us attending the grandest of all experiences Cirque de Soleil's “O”.

Saturday, July 12, 2002 Saturday's agenda began with an overview for the day and a look back at what the Experience Design group had accomplished over the last year. The CHI/AIGA Forum and the Case Study initiative were the two major undertakings for the last year. There are plans for more case studies, evolving into several different types of cases as well as the new DUX (Designing User Experience) conference that is in planning with CHI and SIGGRAPH. Terry Swack and Clement Mok mentioned that the AIGA is also working on initiatives that represent the process of design rather than the design artifacts. The AIGA-ED initiatives are part of the larger picture of the shifting organization.

Julia Whitney presents a recent project from WGBH

Straddling the two presentation rooms, attendees get a little of both show and tells

Eugene Chen from Aaron Marcus and Associated presents a recent project

Show & Tells The formal part of the day began with a morning of Show & Tells. Seventeen presenters, one hour and ten minutes, one room with a couple of divider screens and a whole lot of attendees moving back and forth between simultaneous presenters, made for a really interesting and dynamic part of the summit. The presentations were given by Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path, George Olsen of Capital Group, David Shavrick of ModemMedia, Davis Masten of Cheskin and Nathan Shedroff, Gillian Crampton Smith from Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Molly Wright Steenson of Razorfish, Gilmer Maluyao from the ACTION project, Kristee Rosendahl of Classroom Connect, Julia Whitney from WGBH, Thomas Mueller of Razorfish, Angela Shen-Hsieh and Mark Schindler of S+A Visual I/O, Eric Wilcox, from IBM Research, Molly Rutten from Intel Corp., Julia Stanford of Sliced Bread Design, Sharon Poggenpohl from the Illinois Institute of Design, Chris Jones of Small Pond Studios and Eugene Chen of Aaron Marcus and Associates. The presentations ranged from conceptual looks at the future of brand (Masten and Shedroff) to the latest project launched at WGBH (Julia Whitney) to the set of deliverables created for a recent consulting project (Kristee Rosendahl) to a scenario and concept presentation pitch to Kodak (David Shavrick) to what's been going on in the first year at the new Interaction Institute at Ivrea (Gillian Crampton Smith). The presentations were all interesting and the discussion very lively. This was one of the most dynamic and enjoyable parts of the summit because it had to be quick - presenters were given seven minutes to present and three minutes for questions. Following the Show & Tells, the entire group posed for the traditional group photo, gathering outside into the 110 degree plus weather and then returning inside to talk about the break out section of the day. Break Out Sessions Throughout the two days of conversations, presentations and their followup discussions, Swack and Mok, as well as the presenters jotted down themes, questions and big ideas that surfaced, onto large white tablets. In addition, attendees added thoughts and other questions to these pages. At the end of Friday, the planning committee gathered to review the ideas and group them into common themes. These became the topics of conversation for the break out sessions. Five topics, with discussion facilitators were introduced to the group. The five topics were offered for discussion and the large group was given a chance to choose which topic interested them. The next three hours, including lunch, were spent in these groups. The goal, to come back to the larger group in the afternoon with some ideas, some initiatives and next steps that could be taken on as projects for the AIGA Experience Design group for the coming year. After the allotted time was up, the groups came back together and presented their thoughts and ideas. There was lively discussion after each as well and it was apparent that this was a favorite of the summit. 1. ROI and development of consistency and standards in descriptions and communication, Allistair Williamson Highlights:

You have to care about business results
We need more, clear, evidence of business results
We need a framework for linking attributes to business benefits to measurable objectives
We need research around existing measurement systems
Business values people who care about their results rather than some just delivering widgets

2. Vocabulary / Criteria to articulate value, Rick Robinson Highlights:

First condition for talking about designing. Saying that something can be a design = thing A can be changed through an intervention we x to y in order to z
an activities - objects - outcomes defining product business reasoning service social delivering process objectives what makes design design and not meddling? The way in which you make the choices, the standards and principles that guide the process - the thread that ties the community together
Decisions within the process are informed by the value to the constituent. (useful, usable, desireable) Design brings value to the constituent Design makes decisions based on standards
What do you get by having the design organization that designs you get capabilities, outcomes, comprehensibility, clarity The design organization has ability to innovate, to imagine, to deliver something that didn't exist before
Tell this story clearly to business technology public press other professions

3. Redesigning practice and our fit in organizations, Nick Ragouzis “ We have the students focus on designing the right thing and designing the thing right.” —Gillian Crampton Smith, Director, Interaction Design Institute IvreaHighlights:

Design wants to be more effective in - business - society - environment - greater good
define problem - can simplify and summarize - can visualize - typically generalists - self perception is a detriment
strengths - in communication - different useful toolset - we are doers, get things done - able to quickly prototype
weaknesses - credibility - lack domain knowledge and common vocabulary - not conversant in business - we're generalists but not necessarily managers
opportunities - become better known in business and part of business - can act as change management and change consultants - act not just as problem solvers but project definers
threats - design perceived as a commodity - designers are outsiders - culture is threatening - brought in too late to really solve problems and then are scapegoats when they dont go well - internal resources, or incorrect resources brought in - substitutes for us
Plan - continue to work through this process in the nine areas - further distill the commonalities - put in place a plan of action for acting on our learnings

4. Stepping away from the screen - what ideas are out there in this new landscape and what do designers need to know to participate, David Rose Highlights:

Questions were to help understand what it means to step away from the screen
Who has the money to do these things?
How do we get invited to the table to ask why?
What skillsets do we need to know to cross these barriers?
What tools, techniques do we need?
Technologies, knowledge base?
How is design positioned to be a critical component in designing products
Why do we care?
Positioning Ubiquitous
The advance of beyond-the-desktop is inevitable. The infrastructure for embedded wireless is nascent which creates important windows of opportunity. The ED community needs to drive the dialog or our role as designers will be limited. Designers need to acquire a new skill set to participate and have a valued voice. And as true advocates for users we can lead the emerging and critical conversation around ethics and privacy.
How do we help shape these decisions?
Research topics for ubiquitous
What is the framework to balance convergence devices and divergence
Tactical
Find new partners for this community to learn from and interact with
Research education initiatives - where should training come from
Develop a more holistic skills taxonomy and road map for progression. Address deep core skills and wide skills
Develop a new technology radar system, establish scouting and forecasting roles and publish to the community
Establish a process and structured format to critique new products

5. Where opportunities for design may lie in the future, Nico Macdonald Highlights:

Looked at the areas where there might be opportunity for design in the future.
Transportation
Medical
Education
Family
Financial
Government
Narrowed down to transportation.
Looked at the notion of transportation in context of public and private modes.
Opportunities in a travel scenario might include creation of devices to harness the community of travelers on a plane, messaging between travelers, or the need to broadcast information about the nature of the travel method - are there seats in the full subway car, or the line at the airport check in is 300 people long.
Future things designers might need to know in this space include traffic patterns, census growth, government initiatives, research and observation about travelers

The breakouts seemed to be one of the favorite activities for the summit, and this attendee wishes they came earlier in the programming. The presentations and discussions fed the breakout, but by the time they actually happened, the group was tired and not as focussed as they were in the morning. Closing The summit officially ended after the last of the break out groups presented. Terry Swack and Clement Mok invited attendees who were interested in pursuing some of these initiatives as well as others mentioned throughout the weekend, to join the steering committee meeting happening the next day. Overall, the summit was informative and offered a lot of high level conversation and discussion around a few key ideas. The need to discuss these ideas and come up with strategies and solutions is important in our industry. The parting mood seemed positive and there are changes afoot in the way these ideas and initiatives are going to be pursued in the next year, which is hopeful. The failings of past summits have been the lack of follow through and the little evidence of practical initiatives that have actually come to pass as advancement for the practice. This year's discussions and plans are encouraging to look forward to over the coming year.

Books mentioned during the Summit

The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim
Strategy and the Internet PDF download by Michael Porter
Risk Society - Towards a New Modernity by Ulrick Beck
The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi
The Experience Economy by B. Joseph Pine, James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II
Creating Breakthrough Products: Innovation from Product Planning to Program Approval by Jonathan Cagan, Craig M. Vogel

Erin Malone is currently a Product Design Director at AOL in the Web Properties division. She has been a practicing interaction, interface and information designer since 1993.

The Tool Makes the (Wo)Man

Erin Malone — Thu, 01 Aug 2002 12:00:01 GMT

The other day at work, we were planning some new processes for bringing work into the team. One team member suggested we use a product that another group was using to track our projects. The suggestion on the table essentially meant we would force fit our way of working into this tool “because we already had the tool.” This was proposed instead of doing the work to figure out how we needed to get our jobs done and then doing the due diligence to find the tool that best matched our needs. The tool we should be cultivating here is our brain—our skill for problem solving and providing value to our clients and companies.This scene resonated with me because it is an example of not understanding the problem at hand. Jakob Nielsen’s exclamation “Flash is 99% Bad” is another example of barking up the wrong tree. He is now working with Macromedia to make the tool more usable—as if that was the source of the problem. What I can’t understand is why more people aren’t getting riled up about the fact that the problem isn’t the tool. The SIGIA list occasionally erupts into the “Which tool do you use?” or “Which tool is best for information architecture/best for flow mapping/best for wireframing” conversations. Even Steve Krug noted this at the IA Summit in his Top Ten list of what IAs talk about. These questions arise as if the perfect tool would make the perfect IA. We lose sight in these discussions of the fact that we already have the perfect tool: our brains. The knowledge, expertise and skills to solve problems are right between our ears. The visual manifestation of a solution—whether done in Illustrator, Omnigraffle, Visio, HTML, Flash or even on a cocktail napkin—is beside the point. If the solution is appropriate to the problem and the end user, then it doesn’t really matter how it is implemented. But, you say, “the best, the right, the perfect tools will help us.” “It will make us more efficient and give us more time to think, to solve problems.” And I would say, you are right… to a degree. Solving the problem will come from a deep understanding of the issues, of the users’ needs, of the task—from research, from analytical thinking and then sketching out solutions. Sketching these solutions can be done in any way—on a whiteboard, on paper with (gasp) a pen or pencil, or on the computer with the tool of choice. My concern and angst over these types of discussions, as well as the kind of proclamations that Nielsen and other gurus make, is that focusing on the tool—either finding the right tool or badmouthing the perceived “wrong” tool—moves our energies away from the real problem at hand: design solutions that are inappropriately or poorly executed. In all the talk of Flash being bad, I have never seen Nielsen and others offer to work with design schools or to help craft curricula, lessons or workshops that will teach the appropriate skills to the generation of designers who are being taught tool after tool rather than how to appropriately solve problems. So what’s my point? The tools of the trade that we use to solve our problems are mostly irrelevant. They come down to personal preference, to comfort level, to speed of learning and what others in the group are using, which is generally a concern when sharing documents. The tool we should be cultivating here is our brain—our skill for problem solving and providing value to our clients and companies. The tools used to implement solutions (as opposed to the tools used to design solutions) also matter a little less than we’d like to think. Of course, the solutions need to be appropriate to the medium, to the end users’ needs and should solve the problem in the best way possible. So even if Nielsen and Macromedia succeed in making rich media best practices 100 percent “good” (Macromedia press release, June 3, 2002), or even if someone comes along with the killer app for IA work, it still won’t matter much if designers and IAs don’t understand the medium or how best to solve the problem. We have a responsibility to kick things back—to our bosses, to our clients, to our colleagues—when the recommendation to use a certain tool or technology just because it is there doesn’t fit the needs of the task, whether that task is designing a solution or implementing a solution. We have a responsibility to be smart problem-solvers and use the one tool that we all have—our brains.

Talking with Jesse James Garrett

Erin Malone — Sun, 27 Oct 2002 17:15:41 GMT

“Many an information architecture has run aground on the rocky shoals of corporate politics.”B&A: Congratulations on the new book. You must be excited to be finished and have the work out there for the community to learn from. JJG: I’m very gratified by the reception people have given the book so far. The initial feedback I’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive. Also, if nothing else, writing this book has really changed the way I experience bookstores. I have a whole different appreciation for the amount of work packed into even the slimmest volume on the shelves. B&A: The new book, “The Elements of User Experience”, grew out of the diagram (EOUE) you created a few years ago. What made you decide to expand these ideas into a book? JJG: When I released the diagram, I really thought only the insiders—people who had to wrestle with this stuff on a daily basis—would find it interesting or valuable. And, in a sense, I was right. But what I discovered was that those insiders were not just using the diagram to talk among themselves. They were using it to help communicate to outsiders about their work. As I heard more and more stories about people using the diagram in this way, I came to realize that there might be a market for a book that did all that explaining on our behalf. B&A: What are you trying to communicate with the book that is different from the original diagram? JJG: The big difference is that the book doesn’t make any assumptions about what you already know. The diagram assumes some familiarity with concepts like HCI and the work of Edward Tufte. The book starts from scratch, assuming only that the reader has some experience using web sites. This was a big reason to keep the book so short—so that newcomers to the field wouldn’t get overwhelmed with procedural minutiae, and so that experienced practitioners wouldn’t get bored silly as I recount all these details they already know. B&A: Who is your primary audience for the book? Once they finish that book, what do they read to learn more? JJG: I’ve got two main audiences in mind for the book: newcomers to the field, those who may have web design or development skills who want to know how to bring a user-centered approach to their work; and decision-makers, the people who have to decipher what the heck these web people are talking about. Each of the main chapters has a list of additional books for those who want more detail on a particular topic. In addition, I’m putting together a resource page at jjg.net/elements/resources that will point to further reading on the web. B&A: Can senior practioners benefit from the book? JJG: The main benefit of the book for the more experienced practitioners is as an evangelical tool. The book will give you some ways of expressing the value and importance of your work that you may not have had before. B&A: Where did the idea for the original diagram come from? JJG: Well, the whole story is in the book, but the short answer is that I was the first information architect in an organization that was traditionally design-oriented, and I felt I needed a tool to help me gain the trust and support of my colleagues. I toyed with the idea some, couldn’t make it work, and gave up on it entirely—or so I thought. My subconscious had other plans. B&A: Did your series of articles, ia/recon, influence the book? JJG: There’s one section of the book, in which I talk about the relative value of generalists versus specialists, that’s strongly reminiscent of ia/recon. That part probably would have been different, or maybe not in the book at all, if I hadn’t done recon first. But overall, the book covers pretty different territory; ia/recon is very much inside baseball—you have to be familiar with the issues facing the community to get the most out of it. The book is very much directed at outsiders to our community, people who may not have much interest in the issues covered in the essay. B&A: Has your work with Adaptive Path affected your perspective on User Experience? Are the roles more fluid or more defined? JJG: I now have a broader understanding of the different ways of looking at a user experience problem than I had before we started Adaptive Path. Within the partnership, we’re more or less interchangeable—we’ve really gone out of our way to make sure that knowledge doesn’t get compartmentalized. B&A: What's the hardest project you ever worked on? What made it so challenging? JJG: The most difficult projects I’ve faced have been cases where I didn’t have direct access to the people making the final decisions about my work. Many an information architecture has run aground on the rocky shoals of corporate politics. As much as we may want to withdraw into a world of pure problem solving, we have to acknowledge that the most successful architectures are the ones you can actually convince someone to implement. B&A: Do you have to do IA on every project? Is usability needed on all design projects? JJG: People get hung up on specific techniques too easily. Look past the technique to see the problem the technique is intended to address. If “doing IA” means diagrams, nav specs, wireframes, then no, you don’t always have to do IA. But if “doing IA” means thinking about the structure of your site, then absolutely, you need to do IA every time. B&A: If you had to hire an IA or an interaction designer for a typical ecommerce site, who would you go with? JJG: One big frustration that I have with the current state of our discipline is that I can’t identify the people doing the best work. Everybody says Amazon’s interaction design is a big factor in the company’s success—why don’t I know the names of any of the people responsible for it? Why do most consultancies hide their talented staff, whose expertise makes their success possible, behind a faceless corporate identity? B&A: If you had unlimited budget to redesign a giant site—say Amazon—what would your ideal UX group consist of? What would your process be? JJG: Mmm, unlimited budget. There a few things I’d include in the process. Deep research—really get inside the heads of users. Controlled real-world deployment of alternative approaches to defined segments of the user base, gathering detailed metrics on actual user behavior. Constant iteration, creating a steady stream of incremental refinements. B&A: Should designers learn usability? What about ID and IA? JJG: The more everybody knows about all aspects of the problems we face, the better off all of us will be. Less time spent explaining things means more time for coming up with creative solutions. B&A: Are there some roles better filled by consultants and some by in-house folks? JJG: I’m not sure that you can say definitively that some roles are better filled by consultants, but I would say that some projects are better handled by consultants. If you need to take a step back from day-to-day operations and plot out the long-term direction of your user experience strategy, consultants can give you a perspective you can’t get on your own. B&A: Has your perspective/definition of the different elements of user experience changed since the creation of the original diagram? Did the work on book change any of the original definitions or did you just refine what was already defined? JJG: There are some aspects of the diagram that I wish I had expressed a little more clearly. The book has given me the opportunity to elaborate on and refine those definitions. The underlying ideas remain the same, though. I toyed with the idea of updating the diagram to more precisely match the book, but in the end I decided it would be best to leave it intact. The document’s flaws are not worth fussing over, and anyway the execution always falls short of the conception. B&A: Do you consider yourself an information architect? JJG: Absolutely, though I wouldn’t suggest that my job description should be applied to all IAs. My job involves a lot of different skills now—I’m as much entrepreneur and management consultant as anything else these days—but IA is still my favorite part of the work I do. The information architecture community is my home turf. Plus, I figure that if enough of us keep writing “information architect” on our tax forms, somebody will sit up and take notice. B&A: If you could ask Jakob Nielsen one question, what would it be? JJG: What would you do if you had to create an interface without being able to test it? B&A: Microsoft uses your document “EOUE”—does this scare you? JJG: It doesn’t scare me. It should scare Microsoft’s competitors. B&A: Why did you use Fisher Price people instead of Weebles in your book diagrams? You know, “Weebles wobble but they don't fall down...” JJG: Any resemblance between my illustrations and any toy figures, past or present, is purely coincidental. Besides, Weebles are too hard to draw—they just end up looking like eggs, not people. B&A: How did journalism influence your brand of user experience design? JJG: A journalist and an information architect face exactly the same problem—how to give shape to the pile of information in front of you in a way that will make it easy and natural for people to comprehend. I can’t imagine any better preparation for the work I do now. B&A: Do you own any color of clothes other than black? JJG: No. It makes clothes shopping easier. B&A: Now that the book is here, what’s next? JJG: Right now, I’ve got to make it up to my partners in Adaptive Path for letting me take time off to write this book. We’re cooking up some ideas for 2003 that I think the community will find very exciting. In the meantime, I’m eager to get back to doing some IA work. That’s what it’s all about for me.

The Elements of User Experience, Jesse James Garrett, New Riders, 2002
The one-page diagram (PDF)
Additional resources [jjg.net/elements/resources]
ia/recon, six-part series
Adaptive Path

Erin Malone is currently a Product Design Director at AOL in the Web Properties division. She has been a practicing interaction, interface and information designer since 1993. She can be reached at .

Coming of Age

Erin Malone — Fri, 01 Nov 2002 22:03:57 GMT

“Our future colleagues will not remember a time when the field of ‘information architecture’ did not exist.”It seems like a lifetime ago when I asked my boss if I could adopt the title Information Architect. After all, according to the definition from the Richard Saul Wurman book “Information Architects,” that is what I was. He laughed at me and said Information Architect isn’t a title, or a role. It’s not a job. He had never heard of information architects, therefore they didn’t exist. That conversation took place only four years ago. We have come a long way since then. Individuals in companies have passionately championed the need for IAs in the development process. Some have even succeeded in building a discipline, a practice of people, a foundation for others to build on. Despite the dotcom bust, where it has been difficult for even the best of us to persevere in championing this role, many of us are thriving and succeeding. We have been nurtured within the halls of ASIST, AIGA-ED and SIGCHI. We have discovered that in spite of our original backgrounds, we have far more in common with each other than with many in the organizations that fostered us. We are beginning to see leaders emerge; think back to the last conference you attended and the voices that resonated with you long after you returned home. We now have conferences dedicated exclusively to the field — the field of information architecture. We are emerging as a profession. We are being taken seriously. As the information glut moves more and more online, our skills and expertise are fundamental to the success of an audience intent on finding the information they seek. The need for structure around our profession is becoming clearer. Most of us come from other fields: library science, technical writing, graphic design, among others. We have the responsibility now to establish a body of knowledge, a legacy for those who will practice information architecture after us. Like the generation of kids who have grown up with computers their entire lives, our future colleagues will not remember a time when the field of “information architecture” did not exist. The last several months, culminating in the last few weeks, marks a milestone in the evolution of information architecture as a profession. Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville authored a second edition of the famed Polar Bear book, “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.” Christina Wodtke’s “Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web” and Jesse James Garrett’s “The Elements of User Experience” were both released the same day. New IA textbooks are being published every year, adding to the ever-growing list from which educators build their curricula. In fact, an excerpt from a recently released textbook, “Information Architecture: An Emerging 21st Century Profession,” can be read here this week. While publishers invest more money in publishing and promoting new books for and about the field of information architecture, new voices, more voices are added to our foundation. This is a good thing. Diversity of experience makes us stronger and in turn, the profession richer. As companies, corporations, governments and other organizations move more and more of their information online, the role of the IA becomes increasingly critical to the development of web applications and websites . The act of finding information goes from a casual, personal endeavor to a necessity, to a way of doing business. In some cases, quick, efficient information retrieval can even mean the difference between life and death. As we head into the holiday season and the end of 2002, we witness the birth of a new organization. One devoted solely to information architecture and its practitioners. No longer the little special interest group, the stepchildren who never quite belong, IAs will find a home within the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture (AifIA). Placing emphasis on education, research and advocacy, the AIfIA is stepping up to the challenge of creating a strong voice for IAs in the evolving information age. As a profession, we are coming of age. Over the last several years a solid foundation has been laid, upon which we will all continue to build. Tools and organizations and leaders have emerged to help us do our jobs with confidence and expertise. We have become a strong community of both practitioners and innovators. We are standing on our own, ensuring that our profession is recognized, our skills appreciated, and our voices heard.

Erin Malone is currently a Product Design Director at AOL in the Web Properties division. She has been a practicing interaction, interface and information designer since 1993. She can be reached at .

Modeling the Creative Organization

Erin Malone — Mon, 10 Feb 2003 23:03:09 GMT

“Once I had an understanding of the current landscape of responsibilities, I was ready to take a look at the roles currently covered by the team and the roles that should be covered by the team.”A few months ago, on the cusp of another reorganization, my boss challenged me to present some ideas about how my group should be organized. The challenge: “If you could organize the group in whatever way you wanted, what would you recommend doing?” Everyone who has ever been a manager longs to hear those words. I often thought, “If I could do it my way, I would do things differently.” Now, suddenly, I was being offered an opportunity to make a difference—to design the perfect design group. As with any design problem, I first needed to assess the current situation. What was working? What wasn't? What skills were already in-house and what skills were missing? What type of work did we specialize in and what kind of work did we have to turn away because of lack of expertise? Did we need to be centrally located or could we continue to function in two geographic locations? While researching the subject, I uncovered a couple of interesting things:

There is not very much information out there about building a creative organization. Being a researcher-type person, I immediately went looking for models and guidance from others who have had to solve this same problem. I was not very successful, although the Design Management Institute offered some interesting articles from their journal (see For More Info).
Asking friends and colleagues for advice yielded as many variations of organizations as the number of people I asked.

With external research in hand—which ended up being interesting, but not really helpful—I began to look at the details of the situation I was currently faced with.

The group is an internal group—we live within a large corporation.
The group is a separate entity from engineering/development and product marketing. This means being an equal partner at the table. This is very important when looking at how a creative group should be structured. Certain roles may not be needed internally because they are the responsibility of other groups.
The design group is responsible for content design—channels of partner content, and product design—downloaded clients and applications as well as web-based applications where the focus is primarily interaction design.
The design group was also responsible for several brands, brand style guides, some writing, and various other side functions.
The group contains a user research group, which supports the designers as partners in the design process.

Once I had an understanding of the current landscape of responsibilities, I was ready to take a look at the roles currently covered by the team and the roles that should be covered by the team. Uncovering roles Analysis showed that the various roles practiced by the group didn't necessarily match the distribution of people on the team. Several people were performing multiple roles. Some roles were missing altogether. Other roles were in place but understaffed. These are the roles that were in play:

UI design. This role primarily consists of interaction design specialists. Many of these folks also skilled in IA and research and pull those skills out as needed.
Visual design. Responsible for the visual design of products and content areas.
Brand design. Creator and visionary of the brands and brand style guides.
Research. Usability and early user research specialists.
Web technology/HTML. Prototype specialists and front-end technology folks who interface with the development and engineering teams.

In addition to current roles, certain roles had to be recognized more formally, as they were often overlooked, given short shrift, or just plain ignored:

Information architecture. The organization delivers a portal product full of content and full search, yet no single person had the role of IA exclusively, which showed in the quality of the final product.
Visual standards. While the visual designers were responsible for upholding visual standards, no single person owned the creation, dissemination, and maintenance of visual standards documentation.
Technical/copywriting. Copy delivered in the interface was usually written by the user interface designers during the UI phase, with the intent of enlisting a tech writer to do copy clean-up. In reality, this responsibility was foisted on one specific team member who could only do it when they had spare time, so most copy was never cleaned up.
Producer/project management. Project managers lived within the larger development teams, but didn't track the milestones of the creative team. This role was sorely lacking in our organization.

Vertical or horizontal The next step in analyzing the roles needed was to determine whether or not each role was vertical or horizontal. Vertical roles are generally one step in an overall linear design process. For example, UI/interaction design is generally done before visual design and is handed off upon completion. (While this is not strictly true, as UI and visual designers should collaborate together from the beginning of a project, for the purposes of this classification these roles are considered vertical.) Horizontal roles are generally overarching throughout the whole process and generally support or inform the other roles. For example, a global information architect creates a framework and structure that an application may live within. Likewise, research informs the designer at all stages of the project. The research may take different forms at each stage but the need is constant throughout the project lifecycle.

Wrapped around all the disciplines is strategy—the business goals that define the work that all these teams work toward. Recognizing this role is important because each team needs to be aware of the overall product strategy in order to make the best design decisions possible. Leads from each group should be part of the team defining the strategy, to ensure that the users' needs will be integrated with the needs of the business.

Creating the models Once I had the roles defined by discipline, I began to create different drawings of the organizational structure to share with my boss. With each, I carefully identified the pros and cons and how the organization should be aligned for growth. I needed to identify what changes could be made with the teams currently on staff and come up with a plan for how to fill out the missing roles. Looking at the base model, I realized that the needs of the publishing projects were very different than those of the product team. In many cases, the type of design practiced varied greatly. I decided to split the horizontal roles into Product and Publishing and under each place the role of UI Design and the role of Visual Design. By doing this, I could further differentiate the two groups by establishing that the UI designers in the Products area would primarily practice interaction design, while the UI designers in the Publishing group would primarily be practicing variations of information architecture and information design. The advantages of this model are:

Clearly identified roles.
Broader roles that are responsible for the big picture and touchpoints across products are elevated in importance.
All support roles are identified.
Very clear distinction between product and content design, with specific teams for each.

A variation of this model breaks up the horizontal groups up by UI and visual design and then creates specialties within the larger disciplines. Model 4 shows the UI team as consisting of two specialties—product design and publishing design. Visual design is broken up this way as well. I thought about the roles of architecture and visual standards carefully as I drafted these models. On the one hand, they were very horizontal roles (Models 2 and 3) that were important to think about throughout the design and production process. On the other hand, they could be considered a subset or specialty within the greater design group. In Model 4 I have indicated these roles as being the responsibility of both design teams. Model 4 also looks at the production group as a vertical bucket rather than as a horizontal support group. The vertical representation recognizes its position in the process as coming after the visual designers are done, who then generally hand off their work for final production. In the previous models, production is shown in a horizontal fashion. This is to acknowledge the responsibility production has across the design process to inform design about technical issues and to be a bridge between design and development throughout the process. Conclusion When all was said and done, there were only a few variations that made sense for our particular set of needs. The models I created brought to the table clarification of roles. They indicated areas where the organization was lacking, areas that had to be addressed. Discussion around many of these roles—information architecture and visual standards in particular—revolved around whether the role should be filled by one person, a whole team, a designate from within the UI team and visual team respectively, or just be identified and assign someone to the role on a project-by-project basis. With models in hand, I was able to have meaningful discussions with my boss around the future of the organization, and work with him on a plan for growth as well as how to shuffle current staff around to bring the idea to life. We settled on Model 3 as our long-term goal. We chose this model for a couple of reasons—the clear delineation of product design from publishing design offered easy management of the responsibilities across two geographic locations (publishing design was in one area, product in another) and well-articulated horizontal roles could be managed separately and staffed with one person to start and expanded as necessary. This model expressed, for us, the need to have these horizontal roles recognized and utilized by all the different design groups. With the support and approval of my boss, we had plans to divide the product team from the publishing team and to identify and carve out clear roles around UI and visual design related to the different design types (product, publishing). Our intent also was to beef up the research team, which at the time was approximately 1 researcher to 4 designers. Our goal was to get it closer to 1 to 2 or even, if we were lucky, up to a 1-to-1 ratio. Of course, the head of our research group was very excited about this plan and offered a lot of thought about how and when to grow her team. We discussed starting with one or two producers and growing the team as needed, and hiring a writer, as well as converting one of the UI designers into an information architect and a visual designer into the keeper of visual standards for the whole organization. I felt that these roles and our products would be better served by recognizing one person as the owner, rather than having the role fractured as a subset of an existing designer’s set of responsibilities. Overall, there would have been two directors over this large organization—a creative director over the design disciplines and a production/implementation director over the support groups. So how did it all turn out? We got as far as creating a traffic/producer group that was horizontal in nature. We were in the middle of clearly differentiating the publishing design group from the product design group before we were hit with another major corporate reorganization and layoffs, and my whole team was transferred into another division. Ah, the joys of corporate life. Fortunately, the new group already has a strong structural model in place—although it is slightly different than any of these.

Note: These links lead to abstracts of articles published by the Design Management Institute. There is a charge from DMI for full articles.

Lessons From a Creative Culture, Constantine Andriopoulos, DMI Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2, Spring 2002
Structure and Status in Design Teams: Implications for Design Management David A. Owens, DMI Academic Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, Academic Review 2000
Creating the Conditions of Creativity Rick E. Robinson, DMI Journal, Vol. 8, No. 4, Fall 1997
Managing Within a Creative Environment Sarah A. Meyer, DMI Journal, Vol. 11, No. 3, Summer 2000
Developing a Strategic Design Culture Julie H. Hertenstein, Marjorie B. Platt, DMI Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2, Spring 1997
Crisis and Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change David Hurst, 20th DMI Design Management Conference

Erin Malone is currently a Product Design Director at AOL (America Online). She has been a practicing interaction, interface and information designer since 1993. She can be reached at .

Coloring Outside the Lines

Erin Malone — Thu, 01 May 2003 22:44:28 GMT

Once upon a time, we were curious and everything we encountered was new. We were excited about discovering new things and the world offered unlimited possibilities. Then we went to school and were taught to color inside the lines, that everything had its place and the world was ordered. But, outside of school, there was still the chaos of life to revel in, the unexplored woods at the end of the street where nothing was ordered and we could be cowboys or astronauts or presidents. We learned to balance the structure of school with the infinite possibilities of playtime. Now we are grown and the ordered world of work weighs us down. The deadlines line up one after the other, and everything is and must be in its place. We create order and structure so others can find their way in the chaos. And we wonder if we are really, truly, happy. A bit melodramatic, I admit, but I’m sure this resonates with some. I bring this up because, I, like many folks out there, have become weighed down with the stresses of work, with the narrowness of the discussions about what we are doing, and what sometimes looks like limited options for solutions. Recently, at the IA Summit, Christina Wodtke issued a reminder to everyone to remember the things that make us who we are. To be curious and to experience everything life has to offer. She reminded us that we can learn from poetry, from cooking, from travel—from our own curiosity about things outside of what we do for a living. This really resonated with me. I recently made a commitment to myself to spend more time with friends and to rediscover what I need to stay creative. I spent five days in Death Valley taking photographs—away from computers, away from phones. Just me, a few other folks in a class and my camera, experiencing the landscape, becoming part of the landscape. These few days brought me back refreshed and rejuvenated. They reminded me that I need to immerse myself in non-work creative endeavors and to satisfy my curiosity about the world in order to be a whole person. I garden for the same reason; it teaches me I can't control everything and that serendipity is a good thing. Understanding what else makes you tick and makes you happy and then spending time doing those things will make you a better designer and craftsperson. Experiencing new things outside of work will open your mind to alternative solutions and ways of thinking while you’re at work. Being curious, reading anything and everything, traveling to other places and meeting new people will give you insight in your work that you may not have had otherwise. Learning how to balance the things that make us who we are with the work that pays for everything is as important a skill as figuring out the shortcuts in Visio. I often repeat this same mantra to my coworkers and staff to show them that I care about the whole person, the fully creative person. Many of us have forgotten how to work to live and instead live for work. So, go—play in the woods, color outside the lines. If you let the passion you have for your work seep back into the rest of your life, the rewards will come full circle.

Erin Malone is currently a Product Design Director at AOL (America Online). She has been a practicing interaction, interface and information designer since 1993. She is editor in chief of Boxes and Arrows.

DUX: Five Lessons Learned

Erin Malone — Mon, 30 Jun 2003 22:15:14 GMT

“Great things can happen when you move beyond the bullet point.”Normally I would write a traditional conference overview to inform people about the recent Designing for User Experiences conference (DUX) held in San Francisco, June 6-8. But the format of the sessions was set up in such a way that my overview would be even further distilled from the panels, which were 8-minute distillations of the papers. So, instead, I would like to impart a few of the impressions I came away with and recommend that everyone go to the AIGA Case Study Archive to read the papers that were accepted. We are a like-minded community. The attendees of DUX—members of AIGA, SIGCHI and SIGGRAPH—while having different professional emphases, are a rich and robust community with much more in common than we generally think. This blended community is curious and vibrant and surprisingly interested in sharing personal stories of our work. The conversations in the breaks and at the receptions were as rich and informative as the dialogue during the panels. There was no “us vs. them,” or academia vs. real world—research and practice blended well together. As a matter of fact, unless someone explicitly pointed out that they were from one space or another, the conversations were incredibly similar. There is a positive undercurrent in the community as a whole. My impressions, after three days at the IA Summit in Portland this past March and two days at DUX this past weekend, is that the atmoshpere of the field is looking up. Yes, I know many people are still out of work, but it seems to me that more folks are working and less are whining; people seem genuinely excited about their work. The challenges within organizations are still there, but the stories told show that design (this includes all the flavors—IA, visual, interaction, etc.) is engaging in productive partnerships with the other organizational disciplines. Engineering and marketing are collaborative partners. I heard less “They don’t take me seriously, how can we be heard and involved?” than “What else can we do to make improvements?” and “Where else can our skills be used in the process?” this time around. Maybe it’s just me, but I think there is definitely a shift happening. Great things can happen when you move beyond the bullet point. I was excited to see that many of the presenters moved beyond the traditional PowerPoint deck of bulleted items and actually spoke to the audience conversationally rather than reading their slides—which we can all do ourselves. It makes it harder to take notes, but as an attendee, I appreciated the effort and the conversational nature of it. Jess McMullin chaired a panel that focused on constraints. He challenged his panelists to create their presentations without any bullets and to include more images and fewer words. This challenge worked. For the most part, the presenters were more lively, the slides were illustrations of the points rather than lists of the points, and overall, the collection of presentations was more interesting and entertaining. I challenge the rest of us to try this at home — er… work. What if we began to give presentations at the office that followed this logic? Would it help elevate the status of design within the organization? It definitely makes the presentation more challenging to give, but it forces people to listen since they can’t take away a list of bulleted items to throw into the shredder bin. Try this and let us know how it worked. One presenter reminded us that while a “constraint is a factor identified as a barrier,” an “opportunity is a factor identified as a liberator.” Liberation within design. Liberation within an organization. Liberation from the bullet point. This is a pretty cool way of looking at things. Design can have great impact, and shoulders great responsibility. This community is having an impact. We “design” the products people are using every day. We create new behavior and change behavior. We have a responsibility to be smart about what we do and how we do it. One of the presenters reminded us that it is our responsibility to understand the communities of practice that already exist as we design products and experiences. These communities of practice contain deeply embedded structures and processes, and in understanding these, we can create more effective experiences. Several presenters reiterated this theme, and I think it’s good to continue to remind ourselves that it is more than the user that we need to understand; often it is a collection of people within a community that will give us the insight we need. Mentors can be found in all sorts of places. You might even be one. One of the closing plenary speakers on Saturday was a woman named Sara Little Turnbull. She is 85 and has worked for six decades in the realm of strategic design development. She is still working, currently at the Process of Change, Innovation, and Design Laboratory of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. As I watched her converse with Richard Anderson and relate some of her experiences, I realized that I personally was in desperate need of mentors. I try to mentor my team at work, and am always open to answering questions from colleagues in the community via email. I hope that as I share my experiences I am mentoring those coming behind me, but I sense a lack of knowledge about those who have paved the way, of those who I can learn from. What this speaker reminded me of was that we have leaders in the field who may not be recognized, yet have much to offer. I believe there is a need for more formal mentoring structures to help get people together. There are many of us—particularly females over 35—who don’t necessarily have a lot of role models to learn from. We have a lot of great peers, but the women who have gone before us are unsung heroes, women who haven’t been recognized and are still trying to get by in a corporate culture that is predominately male. This speaker reminded me that mentors are out there, and we all should seek out one or two, as well as remembering to be one ourselves. In conclusion, I enjoyed this conference, and for being a ”dot two” release (dot one was the Forum at SIGCHI last year) the organizers did a good job. The days were interesting, I feel like I learned a few things and, most importantly, I felt excited to be a part of this vibrant, rich, and curious community, particularly at this point in time. I would love to hear how others felt, and welcome your thoughts and feedback. I'm sure our feedback will be welcomed by the organizers as they plan the next version of DUX.

AIGA Case Study Archive As of this posting, the DUX cases had yet to be posted but keep checking back.

Some other conference thoughts can be found from other attendees here:

brad lauster day 1 | day 2
Aaron Oppenheimer
Amy Lee
Danny O'Brien (who by the way was on Nico's panel)
Gene Smith's photos

There is also discussion going on at the AIGA Experience Design [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AIGAExperienceDesign] list about the conference and other attendee's thoughts as well as a few posts on SIGIA-L (archives) [http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/0306/0077.html]Erin Malone is currently a Product Design Director at AOL (America Online). She has been a practicing interaction, interface and information designer since 1993. She is editor in chief of Boxes and Arrows.

The Power of Process, The Perils of Process

Erin Malone — Mon, 28 Jul 2003 23:42:54 GMT

“The power of a well-defined process is the creation of order amidst chaos. When it works, it can be like a fine-tuned machine, and our design work is better for it.”Traditionally, information architects and designers (UI, visual, ID) are creatures of process. We generally work in prescribed ways—discover, design, validate, repeat. We sketch first, then create rough flows and then finetuned detailed wireframes and mocks. This usually works well, once accepted, and most companies—whether in-house teams or consultancies—work along similar lines. In my experience, I have found that creating and documenting process has been a good exercise to help institutionalize ways of working, to help educate new team members as well as to unveil the mysteries of what we do for executives, product folks, and development teams. In my currrent situation, an agreed upon process has helped teams working in multiple time zones and across several locations to get their work done. The process — discovery and exploration, concept UI development, review, creation of wireframes and user interaction flows into a draft UI, review, finetuning into final UI and then creation and finetuning of a functional spec — is the same no matter who is working on the project or what country they sit in. There is a lot of comfort in this shared way of working. There are fewer concessions that need to be made. Roles and responsibilities are clearly defined and everyone knows what they are going to receive at each point in the schedule. The framework within which we all work allows us to be creative, but also keeps teams on track. The power of a well-defined process is the creation of order amidst chaos. When it works, it can be like a fine-tuned machine, and our design work is better for it. On the flip side, problems happen when people get complacent about the structure they are working within. Expanding phases excessively, becoming rigid about the order or duration of each phase, or even over-documenting the elements within a phase can backfire on a team. There are also problems when one team decides to work in a totally different way than another within the same group. Suddenly, no one knows what to expect, what the level of thinking or quality of the product will be, and internal fighting over whose process is best ensues. There can also be credibility issues surrounding process and how teams work with it and within it. No one wants the reputation of being so bound to a way of working that they lose sight of the reason they are working in the first place. I was recently called out for rigidness about process by a client who went crazy over a proposed schedule. The client didn’t understand why some of the work couldn’t be done in parallel, and why certain phases of the project couldn’t be shortened. Ultimately, we were under a tight deadline to ship, and to make the deadline we all (design, product, and development teams) had to make compromises. I assured this client that we generally needed to “ask for the moon” at first, and then would pull back to something more realistic given the circumstances. The conversation got me thinking though about how we work and how structure can overpower the actual needs of the project. If a group is not careful, the process can take on a life of its own and make demands that exceed the requirements of the situation. For all the benefits a well-documented and richly detailed process has, it should also be a framework that is flexible, that can be adjusted at a moment’s notice to fit the situation at hand, and shouldn’t exist for its own sake. I like to think of design process as a grand buffet. One that has discrete sections—discovery/early user research, exploration/concept, draft, final—and review checkpoints throughout. I generally like to think of each section as being collapsible or expandable depending on the needs of the project and the time allowed. Ideally, no section would be collapsed down to nothing, but sometimes it might feel that way. I also see each section as having a buffet of tools and techniques available to help solve problems, keeping in mind that just because a tool is available in a particular section doesn’t mean it must be used every time. That’s the beauty of the buffet: the framework and structure are there, but usage of the tools is flexible and can be fine-tuned for the needs of the team and the project.

Thinking about your work process in this way, getting your team or company to agree upon the framework and toolsets, and then remaining flexible within the overarching process structure will ultimately free you up to apply your skills to the tough problems—the design problems—and not the process. Erin Malone is currently a Product Design Director at AOL (America Online). She has been a practicing interaction, interface and information designer since 1993. She is editor in chief of Boxes and Arrows.

Looking Forward and Back

Erin Malone — Mon, 12 Jan 2004 21:34:32 GMT

“I resolve to spend less time worrying about educating people about what I do, and more time doing what I do—designing websites people can use.”

—Brenda Janish

Reflections on 2003 and resolutions for 2004

Looking back

This time last year, Boxes and Arrows published a few predictions. We promised that at the end of 2003 we would take a look back and see how insightful these predictions were. As expected, many of these predictions were ahead of their time and I expect that it may a couple more years before these come to pass. Here are a few of those predictions and their outcome:

Dan Brown predicted:

The number of books specifically on information architecture (a la Polar Bear and Blueprints, et al) will double. B&A: Well, they didn't exactly double. An Amazon search reveals 14 books with Information Architecture as a phrase in the title with only four coming out in 2003. On the other hand, we know that many usability, information design and design books that are relevant also came out in 2003 so collectively there are a lot of good resources available. There will be at least one course on information architecture in every major university in the world. B&A: Mmm, how to check this one out. There are a lot of new courses in IA showing up in universities around the world. However, finding consistency in curriculum or even in the type of department offering the class, cerificate, degree is hit or miss at best. We still have some work to do here.

Earl Morrough predicted:

I predict that in 2003 the subject of the emerging profession of information architecture will be picked up and reported on by at least one of the major television news networks. The report will include clips from an interview with either Christina Wodtke, Peter Morville, or Louis Rosenfeld. B&A: Well, maybe this year.

Jeff Lash predicted:

2003 will be the year of wireless. Wireless networks in homes, businesses, and public and common spaces will be increasingly popular, and cheaper service plans for mobile phones and PDAs will drive the development of usable and useful wireless-based applications. B&A: Close. We are getting there. I think 2004 will actually see the cheaper prices and free common spaces. Where folks dabbled in 2003, 2004 will see wireless become commonplace.

Christina Wodtke predicted:

"Findability" will begin to be part of the business vocabulary along with "usability" and "understandability," but not until the end of 2003, where it will be mentioned in a magazine such as CIO or Fast Company. B&A: Well, I couldn't find, findability mentioned anywhere except here and Peter Morville's site. But CIO has a couple of articles, from the latter half of the year, about using audience to drive website design. Sounds like UCD to me.

And Dan Saffer successfully predicted:

Several IAs will get drunk in Portland. B&A: I think he hit the nail on the head there. Any predictions for Austin? Here are the rest of last year's predictions. Boxes and Arrows invites you to add more of your own and comment on the success or failure of these to come to pass.

Looking forward

To ring in the new year Boxes and Arrows asked our staff and members of the IA, UX, and Design community to share some of their professional resolutions. We have seen this community grow, fracture, and come together as we all share common goals. And I think our collective resolutions reflect our continued growth and search for excellence in our work.

Brenda Janish:

I resolve to spend less time worrying about educating people about what I do, and more time DOING what I do—designing websites people can use. And—if I'm lucky—designing websites that contribute to the general good.

Liz Danzico:

Whether inside or outside of work, I've fallen into an accidental pattern of using certain tools to avoid voice communication. I communicate with colleagues in the next cube via email. I keep up with family members through instant messenger. I have to depend on friends' blogs to know where they are. As an information architect, my job is to communicate ideas. Whether the communication takes place between my client and me or between my team and an outside vendor, how I communicate those ideas is important not only in content but in format. For 2004, I intend to communicate directly: I will use the telephone more and without hesitation; I will approach people's desks unabashedly and without warning. I will depend on the typed word only when these more direct forms are not available.

Erin Malone:

Continue to practice work-life balance and put my external community efforts into initiatives that will really make a difference—like AIFIA and Boxes and Arrows. Write more.

Nick Finck:

Well, I have made a new year resolution to start extending my efforts within and outside of my own publication. Part of this is joining up with Boxes and Arrows as a web developer. The other part is going things streamlined in my publication internally so I can invest more time into writing and contributing to other sites and publications. Another part of this is just getting more in-touch with other individuals within the web community as a whole. Individuals from various backgrounds such as IA, publishing, UX, usability, accessibility, web programming and more. These are people who I already know and talk with from time to time. I am hoping that this year I can get to know these people even better and build more open communication between all of us as professionals. As far as IA techniques, I can say that I hope to implement a new taxonomy for my publication within the year. It's actually something I have been meaning to do for a long time but haven't been able to gain enough momentum to make it really happen. Along with this I plan to implement several other IA related strategies that will help improve the findability, usability and user experience of my publication.

Marko Hurst:

My mantra in life is "balance in everything." In my now 8 year career I've worked for nearly every sized company from myself—several thousand, worked on projects that have lasted a few days—2 1/2 years, worked with too many technologies to remember, and played the role of nearly every person in a web development cycle from designer-developer, PM-business owner, and of course an IA. Other than for myself I have never been a "technical" architect. So, in keeping w/ my mantra I feel the one of the greatest assets I bring to projects as an IA is my well-rounded skill-set. I feel that having been in everyone's shoes has allows me a special insight to their cares and concerns, which in turn I can take into account and "translate" to others. So, this year my resolution is to understand System Architecture & Design. And let's not get crazy now, I don't plan on selling myself as a Technical Architect by any means. The same as I do not claim to be a Developer because I can code a few JSPs or create a JDBC connection. The point is to simply to become familiar enough with another integral part of the web development cycle.

Jenifer Tidwell:

In our next design cycle, I'm going to try to keep a “design notebook” for the project. It would be, in a sense, a collective memory for the design team. From the inception of the project through the final touches, I want to keep track of design decisions made, the reasons for those decisions, all design documents, and “paths not taken”—alternative designs, features we want to implement but don't have time for, etc. Why? First, our design documents tend to be scattered in different places. We'd like them pulled together into one place so we can all have easy access to them. Second, our product release cycles are long—over a year in many cases—and we always end up asking ourselves questions like, "Why did we decide to do X? Did we ever consider Y? There was a good reason not to do Z, but what on earth was it?" Third, it gives us something to look back over at the end of the project; we can use it to evaluate our process, and help decision-makers "connect the dots" between our high-level goals and the features our team actually delivers. I've never done this before, and I've never heard of it being done. It just seems like a good solution to the problems our project teams have had!

Lou Rosenfeld:

My resolution is to write a book on enterprise IA. :-)

Keith Instone:

I resolve to actually read B&A this year! “Too damn busy working” is not a valid excuse anymore. [We like to hear that, Keith, and we'll be checking our IP Address logs to see if you follow through…just kidding. —Editors]

Julianne Bowman:

Finding ways of using captology in interactive marketing that are useful and engaging to the user as well as smart for the marketer. Convincing marketers to harvest customer profile data over the course of several user visits, thus creating several “value-exchanges” for the user instead of one big, alienating registration form. To continue trying to focus my clients on the big usability changes that really matter. They are so focused on piddling quick wins it can be difficult to get them to see the wood for the trees. To use Visio's new XML output facility a lot. And finally,

Cynthia Hoffa:

I think, like me, many IAs are still stranded on the lower end of Maslow's pyramid of needs. Therefore my short list might look modest, but it encompasses the primary things we fight to conquer in our quest for “self-actualization.” Don't sweat the small stuff. Demonstrate how I add value. Extricate myself from crazy delivery cycles. ••••• Good words to live by. I invite you, dear readers, to add your resolutions to the list and wish everyone a prosperous and effective 2004.

Planning your future

Erin Malone — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 21:11:02 GMT

“It's not the plan that is important, it's the planning.”

—Graeme Edwards

I have been thinking a lot about career growth lately, and as a manager, have been generally concerned with making sure there are growth opportunities for my staff, regardless of their level or the point they are at in their career. This often means rearranging teams so that a staff member might be stretched to grow in a new skill—as a designer, as a mentor and leader, or just in a new domain (i.e., moving from a music product to a mail product). In addition, I am always looking for networking, conference, and classroom opportunities that would benefit not only me, but my staff as well. But not everyone has a manager that is concerned about her career growth, and there are even times when day-to-day work concerns are a priority and career growth needs are far in the back of my mind. As a matter of fact, for most of my career, I never had anyone watching out for me. For the first part of my career, I don't even think I thought much about my long-term career. I just seemed to happen into new opportunities that taught me new skills and kept me growing and challenged. But there was no plan, no goal other than to stay challenged. The point is, in the big picture, no one is going to look after your career for you, but you. A few years ago, a manager of mine gave me the assignment to work on a five-year career plan. I had never created a career plan before (not even to plot out goals for the coming year), so I was completely unprepared for how and why I should do this. Luckily, she shared her own plan as a guide, but I still agonized through the exercise. Over time I have become aware of how important this was for me to do. Looking and assessing where I was at the time, really thinking about what I wanted to be doing in the future, gave me the tools to make the right decisions to make things happen. After I was done, I realized that most of what I put down for a five-year plan could be done in a year. But it took writing it down to see that and to make it happen. This also was a good tool for working with my boss to craft training and work opportunities for me to meet my goals. I also made sure that these goals included life and personal goals as well as career goals. The older I get the more I realize that these are intertwined and success in one space brings success to others. Work/Life balance matters. In an effort to make this anecdote meaningful to you, I’d like to share the steps and some resources I used to help me prepare my five-year goals.

The Template:

Your Name
Today's Date This is important as you reflect back on this document. This will become a touchstone for your growth and a reminder of who you were as you look back at what was important to you in this point in time.
3–6 Months
- Start small.
- Think about short-term goals that are easily achieved but will also help move you towards the longer-term goals.
- Include some tangible goals (i.e., ship a product that I acted as lead designer for).
6–12 Months
- Start thinking bigger here—this is planning for a year out.
- What new skills do you want to learn?
- What new ideas do you want to share with others?
- What changes do you want to make? Put them down here along with the steps needed to take to make them happen.
Beyond 12 Months
- Capture specific plans that you know may take more than a year to get to or accomplish. For me, it was to work on my Dr. Leslie book. I discussed the idea with a writing partner 3 years ago, but it is only now coming to fruition with an actual proposal in hand and a potential publisher.
- Be realistic but not afraid to reach. Visualize success in areas you may have little control over. Don’t be afraid to write down a desired goal that may be a stretch.
Longer-term Goals
- This is the area to think out for the next 3–5 years, including life beyond the company or situation you are currently in. For me, I listed “teaching again” as a goal. This reminds me that I want to do this and I need to make certain decisions and changes in order to make it happen.
  
  If I decide at a later time, that I don’t really want to do this, I should remove it off the plan.
Opportunities to Explore at Your Company
- List all the training and coaching opportunities relevant and currently available at your company.
- Note relationships that need to be cultivated at your company in order to meet success. Note: This obviously may not apply if you are an independent consultant. Think about other opportunities that might be available through professional associations and networking instead.
Skills to Develop
- Project what skills you need to develop to reach the goals you listed in the first part of this exercise.
- What other skills do you need, besides the ones you have now, to attain your goal? Since I am a manager and this is the area in which I have been growing, I listed things such as Confidence and Effectiveness—along with ideas on how to master these more intangible skills. Over the last couple of years, I have purposely put myself into situations to gain confidence—especially when giving presentations. Think about starting slow and building on your successes. In addition, I also listed skills of associated/allied roles that I would like to learn in order to make myself a more well-rounded and effective manager in my company.
What I Care About in a Work Environment
- This may seem frivolous or not important to the task at hand, but it serves to remind you of the values you need to share with the company you work for. As you grow or the company changes this can help guide you when you need to make a change.
Personal Goals
- Don't forget the personal goals that you need to weave into your life. It never hurts to write these down as a reminder of work/life balance and of the things that are really important to you as a person.

You can use the finished plan as a tool when working on performance goals with your boss. Letting her know what you want out of the job is as important as your manager being clear on what is expected of you. Reminding her regularly of your goals is also important, as we tend to fall into patterns of behavior that may not be best for our long-term career plans. I pull my career plan out periodically to check off what I have accomplished, and have begun adding to the long-term section. I see how I have grown and what areas I still need to work on in order to reach the goals I have set. I can also see that some things that were important to me three years ago are no longer important, and that there are new areas of growth I am cultivating. The point of this exercise is to come up with a realistic plan within the framework of your interests and career path. The list should be visited regularly and modified as you reach goals or when goals are no longer important to you. The plan should help you shape a vision towards reaching a future destination and remind you that success does not happen by chance.

Creating a Career Plan
http://www.lmabayarea.org/pdf/LMA Career Planning.pdf Sugarcrest.com. This PDF from a career training firm offers some good exercise questions to answer about your values, strengths and current situation. A nice companion to the template detailed in this article.

Mission Statements: Why You Might Want One

Erin Malone — Thu, 06 May 2004 20:39:14 GMT

I recently started a new job. The group I manage is new and all the people on my team have recently been transferred into this group. Additionally, each person has spent a lot of time in the recent past working on individual, solitary projects, and has not regularly been part of a collaborative team. Coming into a new company is difficult. Joining a newly-formed team can be even harder. Not only are you new, but the group dynamics are new as well. This is exciting and scary at the same time. There is no shared history or knowledge base to draw from in terms of how people will work together or be successful. On the other hand, the slate is clean and there are fewer possibilities of being compared to what was done on the past. In an attempt to bring this group together quickly and create a sense of shared purpose, I decided that we needed to develop a mission statement for the team. This is important for a couple of reasons. One, it taps into the "shared vision" (see Christina's article) mentality and it creates a statement for the rest of the department and company to understand what you are all about. Because the group is new, what we do is still somewhat undefined, and through several conversations with peers and other design staff, I came to realize that the perception of our purpose and place in the overall organization was varied. Writing a mission statement for a team or department is a challenge. (Shoot, itï¿½s hard to write one for yourself!) But it is a great exercise to go through. Most companies have mission statements, as do many large organizations--they can be equally useful for small teams. The mission statement is deceptively simple-looking. It's important to try to distill the essence of your message of what you are about down to two or three sentences. The mission statement should tell the story of your ideals. The challenge lies in not to getting caught up in the "we are so great" type of language. To create my team's mission, I decided that one of the best methods to bring this team together was a group brainstorm. Together we would try to distill the core attributes that speak to the values and goals of this team. To use the mission both as an internal team building tool and external message that the team believes in, it is important to do this exercise as a team. The conversations and brainstorming and contradicting and negotiations over what is important and what isnï¿½t is key to ensuring a shared sense of purpose. I approached the session with three questions to the team:

"What are we doing now?" (What has each individual person been responsible for and how does that fit into this new group?)
"What should we be doing?" (Trying to think big and capture the sense or purpose and longer term vision.)
"What are we not?" (What misconceptions are out there that we need to dispel as far as the role of the group in the organization?)

More formally, these questions translate into:

Who we are.
What we do.
What we stand for.
Why we do it.

A working session was spent discussing these questions and a whiteboard of lists created. From this raw material, I sat down and tried to draft a coherent mission statement. The statement is about three sentences long and touches upon these key points. I sent the draft out for review and feedback from the team, and went through several rounds of revisions based on their comments. About halfway through the process, I realized that part of the mission was too specific. So I pulled out a few key phrases and used them to create a set of goals, and specific objectives toward reaching those goals. By pulling the more specific, tangible information out, the mission statement became a high-level, inspiring statement of what this team is, wants to be, and should be responsible for. It is something we can believe in, that expresses our ideals. The mission also sets the stage for the long-term development and growth of the team. Through the mission statement, we are able to reach ahead and put a stake in the ground about higher-level strategic opportunities the team will aspire to. The mission, together with the goals and objectives that evolved out of the brainstorming session, satisfies the tangible aspect of what we do now as well as the loftier, more strategic aspirations of the team that establish what we stand for and why we do the work we do. It's a good start, and the team and I will be sharing and evangelizing the message to the rest of the organization over the coming weeks.

Erin Malone, editor in chief for Boxes and Arrows, is currently Director of Design, Platform group at Yahoo! Her team is currently responsible for developing tools, brand guidelines, cross-network research and a knowledge management system for Yahoo! Design Standards and Best Practices for the entire User Experience group.

Redesign Submissions Closed

Erin Malone — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 22:33:05 GMT

REDESIGN UPDATE Submissions are closed and we are no longer accepting entries. Thanks to all the folks who worked hard to submit a new visual vision for Boxes and Arrows and for all the great questions and discussion about the redesign. Our final confirmed judges panel: Hillman Curtis, Katherine Jones, Andrei Herasimchuk, John Rhodes, Lou Rosenfeld, Nathan Shedroff, and Jared Spool. We received over thirty entries from more than five countries. Christina Wodtke and Erin Malone will be spending the next two and half weeks reviewing each entry individually and prepping the entries for our judges. Judging will begin the first week or so of September (specific date to be determined based on various travel schedules) and we will announce the winner and post the top 5 runner-ups on the site the end of September / beginning of October. The first prize winner will receive a set of professional books from the fine publishers at PeachPit Press and (this just in) software from Adobe (exact titles and platform tbd)!