The Informed Life

Nate Davis is an independent information architecture consultant and a longtime contributor to the global IA community. In this conversation, we discuss his ideas about IA sub-disciplines that influence the construction of digital user interfaces.

Show notes

• Nathaniel Davis - LinkedIn
• Methodbrain
• Four Information Architecture Disciplines Every Team Should Consider When Building Digital User Interfaces by Nate Davis
• GPT-4 - Wikipedia

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Karl Voit describes himself as “a life hacker trying to make deliberate decisions on every aspect of life.” Among these are the tools he uses to manage his personal information. In particular, Karl is an avid user of Org Mode in Emacs, which is the focus of this conversation.

Show notes

• public voit - Homepage of Karl Voit
• Karl Voit on Mastodon (@[email protected])
• Filofax - Wikipedia
• Franklin Planner - Wikipedia
• LaTeX - A document preparation system
• Emacs - Wikipedia
• Emacs Lisp - Wikipedia
• Org-mode - Wikipedia
• Daring Fireball: Markdown
• GitHub
• Orgzly - Notes & To-Do Lists
• Syncthing
• abo-abo/hydra: make Emacs bindings that stick around
• public voit — How to Use This Blog Efficiently
• novoid/lazyblorg: Blogging with Org-mode for very lazy people

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• Karl Fast - LinkedIn
• The Informed Life episode 69 - Karl Fast on Interactionism, part 1
• The Informed Life episode 70 — Karl Fast on Interactionism, part 2
• Be Useful — Arnold Schwarzenegger on 7 Tools for Life, Thinking Big, Building Resilience, Processing Grief, and More (#696) - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
• War and Peace - Wikipedia
• Obsidian
• God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn
• Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity by Edward Tenner
• To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of DeathTo Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of DeathTo Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O’Connell
• The Bodybuilders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human by Adam Piore
• No-dig gardening - Wikipedia
• Mise en place - Wikipedia
• Everything in Its Place: The Power of Mise-En-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind by Dan Charnas
• Readwise
• Slow Reading in a Hurried Age by David Mikics
• Fight Club (1999) - IMDb
• Build a Personal Knowledge Garden (Karl and Jorge's workshop)–  use discount code TILPKG before October 30, 2023 for 20% off the regular price

Jenae Cohn is the Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at UC Berkeley. Along with Michael Greer, Jenae recently published Design for Learning, a book about how to teach better using technology, and what online teachers and instructors can learn from UX designers.

Show notes

• Jenae Cohn
• Jenae Cohn, PhD - LinkedIn
• Design for Learning: User Experience in Online Teaching and Learning by Jenae Cohn and Michael Greer
• Center for Teaching & Learning - UC Berkeley
• California College of the Arts
• Learning management system - Wikipedia
• Richard Saul Wurman - Wikipedia

Disclosure: Rosenfeld Media provided a copy of Jenae’s book for review.

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Sönke Ahrens is an independent researcher and coach. He is best known as the author of How to Take Smart Notes, a popular book on the zettelkasten method of note-taking. In this conversation, we discuss the role of notes in thinking and learning, with a focus on zettelkasten-inspired note-taking.

Show notes

• Sönke Ahrens
• How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens
• Niklas Luhmann - Wikipedia
• Bielefeld University
• Zettelkasten - Wikipedia
• Luhmann’s digitized zettelkasten
• Personal wiki - Wikipedia
• The Informed Life episode 74: Annie Murphy Paul on The Extended Mind

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Chiara Ogan is a former UX designer and information architect. She recently left that career to become a mental health therapist. Chiara’s background is in library science, and in this conversation, we discuss how she organizes her personal book collection — which she just did in preparation for this major life change.

Show notes

• Chiara Ogan
• Chiara (Berlingo Fox) Ogan - LinkedIn
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-scale Web Sites by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville
• Billy bookcases
• Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become by Peter Morville
• Dewey Decimal Classification - Wikipedia
• S. R. Ranganathan - Wikipedia
• Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt by David McCullough

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Alex Wright is the Head of User Experience at Google News. He’s also an author, and his most recent book, Informatica, is the second edition of Glut, his deep history of the information age. In this conversation, we discuss the history of information technologies and why learning about it matters to people who work in tech.

Show notes

• Alex Wright
• Alex Wright (@alexgrantwright) / X
• Alex Wright - LinkedIn
• Informatica: Mastering Information through the Ages by Alex Wright
• Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright
• Paul Otlet - Wikipedia
• S. R. Ranganathan - Wikipedia
• Charles Ammi Cutter - Wikipedia
• Melvil Dewey - Wikipedia
• Anthony Panizzi - Wikipedia
• Universal Decimal Classification - Wikipedia
• Vannevar Bush - Wikipedia
• The Printing Press as an Agent of Change by Elizabeth Eisenstein book
• The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook by Niall Ferguson
• Carl Linnaeus - Wikipedia
• Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon - Wikipedia
• Betamax - Wikipedia
• Walkman - Wikipedia
• Apple II - Wikipedia
• The Futures Cone, use and history – The Voroscope
• Institute for the Future
• Claude Shannon - Wikipedia

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Aidan Helfant is a college student who’s using personal knowledge management (PKM) to improve his learning. He’s also sharing his methods and tools to help other college students succeed. In this conversation, we unpack Aidan’s approach to note-taking for learning.

Show notes

• Aidan Helfant
• Aidan Helfant - YouTube
• Aidan’s newsletter
• Aidan’s blog
• Aidan Helfant (@AidanHelfant) / Twitter
• Ali Abdaal
• Building a Second Brain
• The PARA Method: The Simple System for Organizing Your Digital Life in Seconds
• Linking Your Thinking
• League of Legends
• Stardew Valley - Wikipedia
• Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse
• Cornell University
• Obsidian
• How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens
• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• Google Workspace
• Notion
• Tinderbox: The Tool For Notes

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Maggie Appleton is a product designer at Ought, an AI research lab that’s working on ways to scale open-ended thinking with machine learning. She’s also an advocate of sharing personal knowledge online. She publishes one of the best digital gardens I’ve seen, located at maggieappleton.com. In this conversation, we discuss the what, why, and how of digital gardening.

Show notes

• Maggie Appleton
• Maggie Appleton on Twitter
• Ought
• [Metaphors We Live](https://amzn.to/43q0eEj) By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
• The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI by Maggie Appleton
• Goffman’s Theory of Performance of the Self
• Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Adam D. Barnhart
• Clifford Geertz - Britannica
• Substack
• Work with the garage door up by Andy Matuschak
• Niklas Luhmann - Wikipedia
• ChatGPT
• Nicole van der Hoeven on Obsidian – The Informed Life
• Obsidian
• Hacker News

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Bob Kasenchak is a taxonomist and information architect at Factor. This is the second of two episodes with Bob that focus on what information architects can learn from music. The first conversation, which you can find in episode 116, focused on the structure of music itself. Today’s conversation focuses on how we can make music more findable — but there are insights here for anyone working with any type of information, not just music.

Show notes

• Bob Kasenchak - LinkedIn
• Bob Kasenchak (@taxobob) - Twitter
• Factor
• Google Images
• Shazam - Music Discovery, Charts & Song Lyrics
• Salt-N-Pepa - Wikipedia
• Maiden Voyage (Herbie Hancock album) - Wikipedia
• Prince (musician) - Wikipedia
• Peter Gabriel - Wikipedia
• Music Classical - Apple
• IDAGIO
• Apple acquires classical music streaming service Primephonic - Apple
• Grammarly

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