The Informed Life

Erin Malone is the Chair of the Interaction Design BFA Program at the California College of the Arts. In this conversation, we focus on Erin’s long trajectory with design pattern libraries, including her recent work with the Anti-Defamation League developing tools and best practices to fight online hate.

Show notes

• Erin Malone (LinkedIn)
• @emalone (Twitter)
• Interaction Design Program at the California College of the Arts
• Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
• ADL’s Social Pattern Library
• Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience, Second Edition by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone
• IA Conference
• Yahoo! Design Pattern Library (archive.org)
• Irene Au
• Christina Wodtke
• Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design, Third Edition by Jennifer Tidwell
• A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander
• An Event Apart
• Nathan Curtis
• EightShapes
• Brad Frost
• Atomic Design by Brad Frost
• Material Design
• Dave Sifry
• Creative Commons

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Natalie Marie Dunbar is a senior manager of content design at Walmart. She’s the author of From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice. In this conversation, we discuss content strategy, how it might differ from information architecture, and how to stand up a content strategy practice.

Natalie has asked me to let you know that rosenfeldmedia.com has a promo code for The Informed Life listeners. The code is INFORMEDLIFESTS, and it’s good for 20% off the purchase of any Rosenfeld Media book until December 31, 2022.

Show notes

• Natalie Marie Dunbar (LinkedIn)
• theliterati (Twitter)
• theliterati (Instagram)
• From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practiceby Natalie Marie Dunbar
• Walmart
• Information Architecture: An Emerging 21st Century Profession, by Earl Morrogh
• Louis Rosenfeld
• Kristina Halvorson
• Content Strategy for the Web, 2nd Edition by Kristina Halvorson
• World IA Day
• Why You Need Two Types of Content Strategist by Ann Rockley
• Marie Kondo
• OKR
• Why Buildings Stand Up: The Strength of Architecture by Mario Salvadori
• Barnali Banerji (LinkedIn)
• The Web Content Strategist’s Bible: The Complete Guide To A New And Lucrative Career For Writers Of All Kinds by Richard Sheffield
• Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide by Kevin Nichols

Disclosure: I received Natalie’s book for free as a previous Rosenfeld Media/Two Waves author.

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

Howard Rheingold is an eminent author, maker, and educator. His work has explored and defined key aspects of digital culture, including the use of computers as tools for mind augmentation, virtual communities, and social media literacy. 

In this conversation, we discuss computers as extensions for our minds, Douglas Engelbart’s unfinished revolution, basic literacies for interacting in information environments, and the resurgence of Tools for Thought.

Photo by Joi Ito (CC BY 2.0)

Show notes

• Howard Rheingold (rheingold.com)
• Howard’s Patreon
• Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by Howard Rheingold
• The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier by Howard Rheingold
• Net Smart: How to Thrive Online by Howard Rheingold
• HotWired
• Whole Earth Catalog
• Institute for the Future
• Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
• Steve Jobs
• Bill Gates
• Douglas Engelbart
• John von Neumann
• Alan Turing
• George Boole
• Charles Babbage
• Alan Kay
• Mother of All Demos (Wikipedia)
• Stanford Research Institute
• Sam Wineburg
• Roam Research
• Obsidian
• DEVONthink
• The Brain
• Jerry Michalski
• Jerry’s Brain
• Render(); Tools for Thinking conference
• Brian Eno
• Scenius, or Communal Genius by Kevin Kelly

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

Lorenzo Bernaschina is the developer of Gems Notes, a note-taking tool that uses artificial intelligence to find relationships between ideas. In this conversation, we talk about smart note-taking and how technology might be used to extend rather than replace human intelligence.

Update 2022-08-14: This episode was edited at the guest’s request.

Show notes

• Lorenzo’s personal website
• Lorenzo Bernaschina (LinkedIn)
• @ittaboba on Twitter
• Gems Notes
• Roam Research
• Obsidian
• my mind
• Zettelkasten
• Niklas Luhmann
• Alan Kay
• Douglas Engelbart
• Steve Jobs

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

Steve Portigal is a consultant who helps organizations build more mature user research practices. He’s the author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. He’s also the host of the Dollar to Donuts podcast about research leadership. In this conversation, we discuss the skills required for conducting successful interviews with users.

Show notes

• Steve Portigal (portigal.com)
• Steve Portigal (linkedin.com)
• Portigal Consulting
• Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights by Steve Portigal
• Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories by Steve Portigal
• Dollars to Donuts podcast
• Dale Carnegie
• Dunning-Kruger effect

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

This is a special episode of The Informed Life: it’s the first recorded in person, while Daniel and I attended and taught at UX Lisbon in May of 2022. Fittingly, it’s an experiment: a freeform, less produced conversation about how we converse. In some cases, this results in less context than you may expect. In particular, you’ll hear references to the names of other speakers at the conference. I’ve included links to their profiles in the show notes.

• Daniel Stillman
• The Conversation Factory podcast
• Good Talk: How to Design Conversations That Matter by Daniel Stillman
• The Nine Elements of Transformative Facilitation by Daniel Stillman (includes a diagram of Daniel’s conversation operating system)
• UX Lisbon conference
• Bernadette Irizarry (UX Lisbon)
• Matt LeMay (UX Lisbon)
• Natalie Nixon (UX Lisbon)
• Katie Swindler (UX Lisbon)
• Scott Kubie (UX Lisbon)
• One Page/One Hour
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
• Abby Covert
• Dave Gray
• Philip McKenzie
• Leland Maschmeyer
• What is the Negotiation Institute? (harvard.edu)
• Ladies Get Paid
• Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan
• Carl Collins
• Swissmiss (Tina Roth Eisenberg)
• Daniel Mezick
• Richard Saul Wurman
• Andy Polaine
• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• Viktor Frankl
• Joe Rogan

Mike Rohde is a designer, teacher, and illustrator — but you’re more likely familiar with his work in sketchnoting. Mike is the author of The Sketchnote Handbook, which popularized the practice, and the founder of the Sketchnote Army, a showcase of sketchnoters and their work. He’s been described as “one of the leaders of the visual thinking revolution.” In this conversation, we discuss how Mike’s approach to visual note-taking has influenced his work.

Show notes

• Mike Rohde
• rohdesign.com
• The Rohdesign Dispatch (Mike’s newsletter)
• Mike Rohde on LinkedIn
• @rohdesign on Instagram
• @rohdesign on Twitter
• The Sketchnote Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Visual Note Taking by Mike Rohde
• The Sketchnote Workbook: Advanced Techniques for Taking Visual Notes You Can Use Anywhere by Mike Rohde
• The Sketchnote Army
• The Sketchnote Army podcast
• Adobe PageMill
• Liminal Thinking: Create the Change You Want by Changing the Way You Think by Dave Gray
• Bullet Journal
• Ryder Carroll
• Ulysses
• Markdown
• Zettelkasten
• The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking by Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (PDF)

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Kat King is an information architect who’s “interested in information and how we figure things out.” She replied to one of my Twitter threads about note-taking, and I was intrigued by her approach. I recently saw Kat give a thoughtful presentation at the IA Conference and wanted to find out how she uses notes to learn and teach. So, this conversation focuses on note-taking as a means of learning.

Show notes

• Kat King
• @katalogofchaos on Twitter
• University of Michigan
• The Information Architecture Conference
• Cornell Notes
• Moleskine
• LEUCHTTURM1917
• The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul
• The Informed Life episode 74: Annie Murphy Paul on The Extended Mind
• The Informed Life episode 69: Karl Fast on Interactionism, part 1
• The Informed Life episode 70: Karl Fast on Interactionism, part 2

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Sam Ladner is a sociologist, UX researcher, and student of productivity and the nature of work. She’s been a researcher at Amazon and Microsoft, and is currently Senior Principal Researcher at Workday. Sam is the author of two books on research, Practical Ethnography and Mixed Methods. In this conversation, we discuss sociology and ethnography in the context of organizations and how to manage the knowledge generated by research.

Show notes

• Sam Ladner
• Sam Ladner on LinkedIn
• Workday
• The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighborhood by David Simon and Edward Burns
• Mixed Methods: A short guide to applied mixed methods research by Sam Ladner
• Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in the Private Sector by Sam Ladner
• Ethnographic Practice and Industry Conference (EPIC)
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Clifford Geertz
• Mise en place
• Amazon Kindle
• Overdrive
• Libby
• Notion
• Mendeley
• Pocket
• Readwise
• Satisficing
• Herbert Simon
• Thick description

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Austin Govella is a user experience design lead at Avanade, a global professional services company. He’s the author of Collaborative Product Design and co-author of the second edition of Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web. In this conversation, we focus on Austin’s note-taking system and its relation to his work in UX design and information architecture.

Show notes

• Austin Govella
• Avanade
• Collaborative Product Design by Austin Govella
• Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web by Christina Wodtke and Austin Govella
• Microsoft SharePoint
• Adobe Experience Manager
• Salesforce
• Philip Johnson
• Obsidian
• Zettelkasten
• Medium
• Personal knowledge management (PKM)
• Work and Meta-work by Jorge Arango
• Roam Research
• Notion
• Visual Studio Code
• Macromedia HomeSite
• Logseq
• Reflect app
• Subconscious
• DEVONthink
• OneNote

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