The Informed Life

Dan Brown is the co-founder of UX design studio EightShapes. He’s also the author of Communicating Design, Designing Together, and Practical Design Discovery. In this conversation, we focus on Dan’s Information Architecture Lenses, a set of cards that help designers interrogate IA decisions.

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Show notes

• Dan Brown
• Dan Brown on LinkedIn
• @brownorama on Twitter
• @ialenses on Twitter
• EightShapes
• EightShapes’s YouTube channel
• Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Dan Brown
• Designing Together: The collaboration and conflict management handbook for creative professionals by Dan Brown
• Practical Design Discovery by Dan Brown
• Information Architecture Lenses: Perspectives on Structure by Dan Brown
•  Information Architecture Lenses card deck
• A Lens A Day YouTube series
• A Lens A Day podcast
• Tree testing
• Card sorting
• Oblique Strategies
• I Ching
• Nathan Curtis
• James Melzer
• Karen McGrane
• The Information Architecture Conference

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

Hans Krueger is co-founder of the international design consultancy MetaDesign. He also co-founded another design consultancy, FutureDraft, where we worked together for several years. In this conversation, we discuss Hans’s trajectory and how ancient teachings have helped him better understand his emotions.

Show notes

• Hans Krueger (LinkedIn)
• Now Partners
• Erik Spiekermann
• Uli Mayer-Johanssen
• MetaDesign
• Arnaud Maitland
• Nyingma school of Buddhism
• FutureDraft
• Walter Link
• The Cycle of Emotions - A guide to influencing reality by Jessica Fan
• Longchenpa
•  Kindly Bent to Ease Us – Part One: Mind by Longchenpa
•  Kindly Bent to Ease Us - Part Two: Meditation by Longchenpa
•  Kindly Bent to Ease Us - Part Three: Wonderment by Longchenpa

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

Annie Murphy Paul is an acclaimed science writer. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, Slate, Time magazine, The Best American Science Writing, and other publications.

Our conversation focuses on the subject of her latest book, The Extended Mind, which is about how human cognition relies on our bodies, other people, and the material world. I loved this book and was thrilled to ask Annie about how this line of thinking plays out in the context of our heavily digitized lives.

Show notes

• Annie Murphy Paul
• @anniemurphypaul on Twitter
• The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul
• The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves by Annie Murphy Paul
• Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives by Annie Murphy Paul
• Book Notes: “The Extended Mind” by Jorge Arango
•  Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
• Andy Clark
• David Chalmers
• Carol Dweck
• Apple Watch
• Interoception
• Robert Caro
• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro
• Miro
• Mural

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

Patrick Tanguay is a self-described "generalist, synthesist, and curator of eclectic ideas." His weekly newsletter, Sentiers, surfaces deep posts about highly relevant topics and provides insightful commentary and ideas. In this conversation, we discuss the tools and methods that enable his curation and sharing process.

Show notes

• @inervenu on Twitter
• About Patrick
• The Alpine Review
• Sentiers
• RSS
• Instapaper
• INFORMA(C)TION newsletter
• MailChimp
• Pinboard
• Delicious
• WordPress
• Eleventy
• Readwise
• Obsidian
• Pocket
•  What is a static site generator? (Cloudflare)
• DuckDuckGo
• rsync
• cron
• Bear
• Markdown
• The Informed Life episode 54: Kourosh Dini on DEVONthink
• DEVONthink
• Keep It
• EagleFiler
• Grant for the Web
• GitHub

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

Nathan Shedroff is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and a colleague at the California College of the Arts, where we both teach in the graduate interaction design program. Nathan has worked for a long time on driving innovation and sustainability through design. This conversation focuses on his latest project: Foodicons, which is creating a shared, open-source, and royalty-free iconographic language of food.

Show notes

• Nathan Shedroff
• @nathanshedroff on Twitter
• California College of the Arts MDES
• Design is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable by Nathan Shedroff
• Foodicons
• Green Brown Blue
• The Lexicon
• The Noun Project Foodicons collection
• Evapotranspiration
• Information Architects by Richard Saul Wurman
• Multimedia Demystified

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

Sunni Brown is a social entrepreneur who uses visual literacy, design thinking, and visual facilitation to solve complex problems. She's the author of The Doodle Revolution and co-author of Gamestorming.

In this conversation, we discuss Sunni's current area of focus, which uses Zen Buddhism and design thinking to help individuals craft a more fulfilling and engaged life.

Show notes

• Sunni Brown
• Deep Self Design
• Sunni on Twitter
• Sunni on LinkedIn
• Sunni on Instagram
• Sunni on Facebook
• The Doodle Revolution: Unlock the Power to Think Differently by Sunni Brown
• Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo
• Dave Mastronardi (LinkedIn)
• What is a multipotentialite?
•  The Nexialist approach: Van Vogt and the idea that ‘specialisation is for insects’
• Sōtō Zen
• Zendō
• Reality distortion field
• _Liminal Thinking: Create the Change You Want by Changing the Way You Think_ by Dave Gray
•  In defense of the visual alphabet by Dave Gray
• Design personas
• Kate Rutter (LinkedIn)
• Brené Brown
• Sesshin
•  Double diamond diagram

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Karl Fast is an independent scholar, information architect, and futurist. He's the co-author of Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding. This is the second half of a two-part conversation about interaction and embodiment. If you haven't done so already, please listen to part 1 before listening to this episode.

Show notes

• @karlfast on Twitter
•  Karl Fast on LinkedIn
• Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding by Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast
• Bruce Alexander
• The Rat Park experiments
•  Bill Verplank's diagram of interaction
• Epigenetics
• About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, 4th Ed by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, avid Cronin, and Christopher Noessel
• Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky
• The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian (Bonus: Jorge's book notes)
•  The paperclip maximizer problem
• Punctuated equilibrium

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

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

Karl Fast is an independent scholar, information architect, and futurist. He's the co-author of Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding alongside Stephen Anderson, who was featured in  episode 39 of the show. In this conversation, Karl tells us about what interaction designers can learn from cognitive science. We had a lot to discuss, so this episode is the first of two on the subject.

Show notes

• @karlfast on Twitter
•  Karl Fast on LinkedIn
• Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding by Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• Stroop effect
•  The Extended Mind by Andy Clark and David Chalmers
• Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension by Andy Clark
• HCI Remixed: Essays on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community, edited by Thomas Erickson and David W. McDonald
• On Distinguishing Epistemic From Pragmatic Action by David Kirsch and Paul Maglio (pdf)
• The Intelligent Use of Space by David Kirsch
• Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think by Susan Goldin-Meadow
• Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes In The Age Of The Machine by Don Norman
• The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition by Don Norman
• Hans Moravec

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

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

In this conversation, we discuss Career Architecture, the focus of her current coaching work and subject of her upcoming book.

Listen to the show

 Download episode 68

Show notes

• MagsHanley.com
• Mags Hanley on LinkedIn
• Seth Godin
• BBC
• Career Architecture by Mags Hanley (preorder)

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

No guest in this episode. Instead, I answer listener questions. If you have a question you'd like me to address on the show, please email me at [email protected] or tweet to @informed_life.

Listen to the show

 Download episode 67

Show notes

• The Informed Life episode 17: Rachel Price on Improvisation
•  The Informed Life episode 65: Sarah Barrett on Architectural Scale
• A brief history of information architecture (pdf) by Peter Morville
• Information Architects by Richard Saul Wurman
• David Macaulay
• Alexander Tsiaras
• Why Software is Eating the World by Marc Andreessen (WSJ paywall)
• Dave Gray
• The Information Architecture Institute
• How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert
• Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango
• The Information Architecture Conference
• World IA Day
• Information Architects Facebook group
• UX Design Information Architecture LinkedIn group
• Mags Hanley's Information Architecture Masterclasses
•  Jorge Arango's Information Architecture Essentials workshop

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