INFORMA(C)TION No. 80:

(Re)emergence

The 2021 IA Conference (formerly IA Summit) is upon us. Workshops start tomorrow (I’m facilitating two of them), and main sessions kick off on April 28.

This year’s theme is emergence. The Conference’s website describes it thus:

Now is the time to (re)emerge.

We have a unique opportunity to ascend from the destruction, fear, and uncertainty of 2020 and forge a new vision for our community. Working together, we can emerge stronger, better, and more open-minded—but the prospect is risky. And success is not guaranteed.

The “we” alludes to a community that has convened yearly since 2000. I became involved then, online-only at first. In 2005, I finally attended an “in person” IA Summit. Moving to real-world interactions marked a major shift in my engagement with my community of practice.

Summits traditionally close with an open mic session. At the end of that 2005 conference, I announced publicly I’d found my tribe. I’ve been at every Summit/Conference since (with one exception, when my first daughter was born) and heard many other “first-timers” tearfully express the same sentiment.

You experience a strong sense of camaraderie when you’ve “found the others” — i.e., people who are passionate about the same fringe-y, yet important, subjects you are, after years of toiling alone in the wilderness — and discover they’re nice folks to boot.

The “nice folks” bit matters. It’s easy to identify fellow travelers online, but it’s hard to get to know them as people, the way you can when you share a meal or a drink — especially if it happens far from home, in a venue you’ve all sacrificed to attend.

Convening periodically in physical space is a filtering mechanism: only community members who care deeply make the effort year after year. People come and go, drawn by the evolving discussion, but it's the core cohort that keeps the show going. That cohort evolves too, and I'm aware of few communities as welcoming as the one that drives the IAC.

This year — the second in a row — extraordinary circumstances require that we meet online-only. I’ll be there, of course, and I’m grateful to everyone who has donated long hours to make this year's Conference possible. (The IAC is a volunteer-driven event.)

As implied by the Conference's theme statement, this is a challenging time. Success isn’t guaranteed. But this year’s online gathering is an opportunity to keep our ongoing commitment to each other — and more than that, learn new ways of interacting. We may yet emerge stronger.

Perhaps next year, we can once again set aside ordinary life for a few days to share a meal and a drink and talk about information architecture. For now, online will do. If you haven’t done so already, please register to participate in the 2021 IA Conference. I look forward to seeing you there.

Also worth your attention

• What can we add here? A series of experiments suggests people prefer adding (rather than subtracting) elements when solving problems. I'll consider this the next time I'm faced with a major decision: what if I remove x? (H/t César A. Hidalgo)
   
• The Journal of Information Architecture. Andrea Resmini announcing the re-launching of the Journal: “The new course that starts with this issue will push for a contemporary take on information architecture and offer critical reflections on the state of the field”
   
• Emergent structures: A Twitter thread by Gordon Brander. “Once a hierarchy emerges, it reifies itself.”
   
• Websites are not living rooms. Sarah R. Barrett kicks off a promising new series of posts: “While there is a lot that IA can learn from actual architecture or city planning, websites aren’t buildings or cities, and they don’t have to work like them. Instead, they should be designed according to the same principles that people’s brains expect from physical experiences.”
   
• Framing problems. Daniel Stillman on abstraction ladders as a framing device: “A why without a how creates big-picture ideas that are just castles in the air. A how without a why has no soul.”
   
• Systems thinking for a better future. Genevieve Bell traces the intertwingled emergence of AI, cybernetics, and the internet: “... we need to make a different kind of story about the future. One that focuses not just on the technologies, but on the systems in which these technologies will reside.”
   
• Design leaders as teachers. Microsoft's Albert Shum: “Design-in-tech leaders are great at sharing a vision and bringing a team together to deliver success, but we are not trained or expected to teach.”
   
• Business acumen for designers. Ryan Anderson on resolving the (apparent) tension between working in for-profit business and “academic” design.
   
• How I manage my ‘thinking’ time. In the first of a series of posts about how I get things done, I share some of my tips and techniques for making more quality thinking time.
   
• Tic-tac-toe solution space. An amazing poster Dubberly Design offering “a compound visualization of all its solutions— every legal game move and the connections between them in a single artifact.”
   
• Brain pong. Two design implications of recent advances in brain implant software control interfaces.
   
• Whistled languages. How a small community is keeping their culture going through a tough time — “like poetry, whistling does not need to be useful in order to be special and beautiful.”
   

Episode 59 of The Informed Life podcast features a conversation with consultant and author Matt LeMay. Matt is a co-founder and partner at Sudden Compass and author of Agile for Everybody and Product Management in Practice, both for O'Reilly. In this conversation, Matt shares with us One Page / One Hour, his pledge to make project collaboration more agile.

The Informed Life episode 59: Matt LeMay on One Page / One Hour

Parting thought

Resilience emerges out of a system’s ability to endure and bounce back from stress, like a jelly that wobbles on a plate without losing its form or a spider’s web that survives a storm.

— Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics

Thanks for reading!

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