The Informed Life

My guest today is my friend Lou Rosenfeld. Besides publishing books — including my own Living in Information — Lou and his team at Rosenfeld Media organize and manage industry conferences. In this episode, we talk about how they transitioned the recent Advancing Research conference from an in-person to a fully virtual event.

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Show notes

• Louis Rosenfeld
• Rosenfeld Media
•  @louisrosenfeld on Twitter
•  The Informed Life Episode 1: Louis Rosenfeld on Managing
• Advancing Research 2020 Conference
• Some lessons learned from producing a virtual conference by Louis Rosenfeld
• Zoom Video Webinars
• Vimeo
• Cheryl Platz
• Abby Covert
• Steve Portigal
• Natalie Hanson
• Mailchimp
• Mural
• Slack
• The Brady Bunch title screen
• Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places by Jorge Arango
• Hopin
• IxDA Berlin
• The User’s Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love by Donna Lichaw
• Meld Studios
• Enterprise Experience Conference 2020
• DesignOps Summit
• Doctor’s Note (Andy Polaine’s newsletter)
• Power of Ten (Andy Polaine’s podcast)
• Informa(c)tion (Jorge Arango’s newsletter)

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

My guest today is Matt Nish-Lapidus. Matt is an artist, musician, researcher, designer, and educator based in Toronto. Besides creating art and music, and doing design work, Matt also teaches at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. In this conversation, we discuss the role of art in our evolving technological and cultural environments.

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Show notes

• Matt Nish-Lapidus (emenel.com)
• Matt on Instagram
• Matt on Twitter
• University of Toronto
• New media art
• SFMoMA
• MoMA (New York)
• Tate Modern
• Nam June Paik
• Theodore Adorno
• The Anthropocene
•  New Materialism
• Jane Bennett
• The Walt Disney Company
• Marvel
• Impressionism
• CARFAC
• David Rokeby
• Pietà by Michelangelo Buonarroti
• Jenny Holzer
• New Tendencies
• Soft Thoughts
• må

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

My guest today is Ren Pope. Ren is a Principal at Info-Do, which offers data, information, and knowledge architecture consulting. He’s worked in these domains for the last 25 years or so, and has also taught colleagues how to do these things through workshops and presentations. In this episode, we focus on why organizations need to know about and develop ontologies.

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Show notes

• Info-Do
• Ren Pope on LinkedIn
• Ren Pope on SlideShare
• Cigna
• The Information Architecture Conference (previously The Information Architecture Summit)
• Jessica DuVerneay on LinkedIn
• Ontology
• Taxonomy
• Hyponymy and hypernymy
• Sentence diagram
• Card sorting
• Mind map
• TheBrain
• Objectoria

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

My guest today is my friend Abby Covert, also known as Abby the IA. Abby is a Senior Information Architect at Etsy. She wrote the book How to Make Sense of Any Mess, a wonderful primer on information architecture, and co-founded World IA Day. She’s also taught graduate design students and curated global conferences about design. She’s done many of these things remotely over the last decade, which makes her a great guide for how to collaborate in our new reality.

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Show notes

• Abby the IA (Abby Covert’s website)
• Etsy
• How To Make Sense of Any Mess, by Abby Covert
• World Information Architecture Day
• Fax machines
• Melbourne, Florida
• Rosenfeld Media
• Advancing Research Conference
• School of Visual Arts
• Photo of Abby’s home setup
• DesignOps Summit
• The Museum of the Moving Image
• Louis Rosenfeld
• Zoom
• Zoom Webinar
• Slack
• Cheryl Platz
• Mural
•  Steinberg UR12
• Herman Miller chairs
• Opening sequence of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

My guest today is Aynne Valencia. Aynne is my colleague at the California College of the Arts, where she is the former Chair of the undergraduate interaction design program. In addition to teaching at CCA, she is also the Director of Design at San Francisco Digital Services, which designs digital experiences for the citizens of San Francisco and the city employees that serve them. In this conversation, we discuss the differences and similarities between the private, civic, and education sectors and the cadences of these domains.

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Show notes

• Aynne’s website
• Aynne on Twitter
• Microsoft
• AKQA
• R/GA
• Fjord
•  Cisco buys MOTO Development Group to beef up consumer design chops (Engadget)
• General Assembly
• San Francisco State University
• California College of the Arts
• San Francisco Digital Services
• GOV.UK
• McDonald’s
• Microsoft Productivity Future Vision video (2011)
• Microsoft Courier concept video (2009)
• Microsoft Surface Duo

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

My guest today is Nicholas Paul Brysiewicz, the director of development of the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, CA. The Foundation was created to foster long-term thinking, and in this conversation, Nick and I talk about how a broader time perspective can help us understand difficult times and lay the groundwork for a better future.

A note about context: We recorded this conversation in early March of 2020, before the coronavirus had been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization and a national emergency by the U.S. government. I’m certain our tone would’ve been more somber if we were talking about this subject closer to the date of publication. Still, I find that adopting a broader perspective helps me make more level-headed decisions, especially during difficult times. Finally, please heed the advice of medical experts and avoid social places like The Interval for the time being.

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Show notes

• The Long Now Foundation
• The 10,000 Year Clock
• The Rosetta Project
• Revive & Restore
• Long Bets
• The Interval, San Francisco, CA
• Seminars About Long-term Thinking
• U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
• World Health Organization (WHO)
• Elon Musk
• Qasem Soleimani
• Herodotus
• The Greco-Persian Wars
• The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories
• The Republic of Plato, translated by Allan Bloom
• Professor Elizabeth Vandiver, Ph.D.
• The Great Courses
•  Herodotus: The Father of History
• Ian McKellen
• The Odyssey audiobook, narrated by Ian McKellen
• Game of Thrones

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

My guest today is Christian Crumlish. Christian has led product and design teams in organizations ranging from startups to large tech companies. In this conversation, we delve into the relationship between digital product management and information architecture, and how we might be more empowered as users of these systems.

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Show notes

• Christian Crumlish (mediajunkie.com)
• Dungeons and Dragons
• Paladin
• Yahoo!
• Design in Product Slack community
• Richard Saul Wurman
• Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture by Andrew Hinton
• Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences by Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati
• Reframing Information Architecture by Andrea Resmini (Editor)
• Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango
• Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places by Jorge Arango
• Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, Second Edition by Marty Cagan
• Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That Matters by Ryan Singer
• Basecamp
• Objectives and key results (OKRs)
• Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs by John Doerr
• Amazon Kindle
• Matte Scheinker
• Airtable
• Asana
• Tinderbox
• The Informed Life Episode 6: Beck Tench on Tinderbox
• Notion
• Wikis
• From UX to Product (Christian’s video series in the UIE All You Can Learn Library)
• The Information Architecture Conference
• Web Directions Product

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

My guest today is Maria Giudice. Maria founded Hot Studio, a design consultancy that was acquired by Facebook in 2013. After leaving Facebook, she served as VP of Design at Autodesk. In this conversation, Maria reveals how she found her purpose, and shares with us the exciting next stage of her career.

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Show notes

• Maria Giudice on LinkedIn
• Maria Giudice on Facebook
• Hot Studio
• Richard Saul Wurman
• Information Architects by Richard Saul Wurman
• Cooper Union
• Fortran
• Massimo Vignelli
• The yellow pages
• CCA
• Cartography
• Macintosh IIci
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Illustrator
• Times New Roman
• Helvetica
• Mosaic web browser
• Netscape
• Frank Frazetta
• Italic script
• The Speedball Textbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Pen and Brush Lettering by Joanne Fink
• Autodesk
• Clement Mok
• The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks
• Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design by Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland
• Rise of the DEO posts in Medium

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

My guest today is Peter Merholz. Peter is one of the co-founders of the pioneering UX design consultancy Adaptive Path, now part of Capital One. After leaving Adaptive Path, he has structured and led design teams in various organizations. Peter and his co-author, Kristin Skinner, wrote Org Design for Design Orgs, the book on how to organize design teams. In this episode, we discuss how the structure of organizations influences their customer’s experiences.

Listen to the full conversation

 https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/the-informed-life-episode-28-peter-merholz-2.mp3

Show notes

• PeterMerholz.com
• @peterme on Twitter
• Adaptive Path
• Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner
•  Liftoff: Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You by Chris Avore and Russ Unger
•  The Informed Life Episode 22: Andrea Mignolo on Designerly Ways of Being
• IDEO
• Tim Brown
•  The Double Diamond
• Conway’s Law
• Organization in the Way: How Decentralization Hobbles the User Experience by Peter Merholz
• MacGuffin
• Shopify
• Forrester Research
• Kristin Skinner

My guest today is Cyd Harrell. Cyd is a product, service design, and user research leader focused on the civic and government space. In this conversation, we discuss the differences between designing for civic and commercial projects and what it takes to design respectful systems that stand the test of time.

Listen to the full conversation

 https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/the-informed-life-episode-27-cyd-harrell-1.mp3

Show notes

• Cyd Harrell on Twitter
• Center for Civic Design
• Code for America
• 18F
• California Courts
• CanUX
• UX for Institutions (Cyd’s design deck from CanUX 2019)
• A sketchnote of Cyd’s presentation by Eva-Lotta Lamm
• The Constitution of the United States
• Tim O’Reilly
• Jorge’s pace layer diagram
• Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places by Jorge Arango
• Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Keep Growing and Learning by Stewart Brand
• How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built by Stewart Brand
•  L.A. libraries will stop collecting late fees for overdue books and other materials (Los Angeles Times)
• Asimov’s Laws of Robotics