connecting*the*dots

The cluetrain: Doc Searls reporting Terry Heaton essay-ing Gordon Borrell

I’m An American

At one time in my life, I would even say that I was blindly proud and patriotic.

I grew up watching The Lone Ranger and John Wayne movies on WOR re-runs on Saturday afternoons. My neighborhood was full of sprawling lawns and happy families. The American dream, right?

Well, eventually I grew up, realizing that things aren’t always what they seem to be.

Over the years, I’ve become exposed to a cross-section of people with varied backgrounds, perspectives and experiences. These breadcrumbs of my travels — mixed in with my own experiences — have made me realize the truth of what being a citizen of this most powerful nation entails:

The benefits of our common goodness, as well as the baggage of our wrongful intent, is what we must continue to evolve towards enlightenment, otherwise, such power can go unchecked.

Historically, American’s dedication to the creation of democratic institutions, producing innovative life-altering government and laws, as well as products, services, medicines, the internet; all have been inspirations to other nations on the face of this planet.

Unfortunately, the DNA of our mafia-style history of murder, slavery and unchecked capitalism has seeped into most of these democratic institutions, whether it be through industrial lobbyists, foreign policy or corporate conglomerates and deregulation.

9/11 changed a lot for me.

I was living in Park Slope, Brooklyn on September 11, 2001. After the attack, my outwardly-facing patriotism far exceeded my formative peek. I shopped for hours, in sold-out stores, looking for a flag to place in my father’s car window. I mean, those were my neighbors, my countrymen that perished in a blink of an eye or worse, over hours leading up to a leap out of a 85th storey window.

But during the months leading up to the Iraq Occupation, my perspective of this nation — more specifically, this administration — went straight into the shitter. My belief in our government and our constitutional processes came to a screeching halt.

I pulled a 180.

The Flip

There’s a reason my blog has its current palette and why I refuse to buy any more blue or red clothes. It’s that sickly, deep with me. Our country hasn’t been a democracy since the end of WWII. Our leaders are heading into the 50th year of a post-WWII plan to create a New World Order.

• Why do you think the Third World can’t evolve out of its poverty ridden, corrupt, AIDS infested, pushover status?
• Why do you think we continue to run rough-shot in Latin America?
• Why do you think we invaded Vietnam?
• Why do you think we’re in Iraq?

A Conversation From “Network”

Arthur Jensen: [to Howard] They say I can sell anything; I’d like to try to sell something to you.

Arthur Jensen: It is the international system of currency which determines the vitality of life on this planet. THAT is the natural order of things today. THAT is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And YOU WILL ATONE. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America, and democracy. There is no America; there is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

Arthur Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it. Is that clear? You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal? That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance. You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations; there are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems; one vast, interwoven, interacting, multivaried, multinational dominion of dollars.

Arthur Jensen: The world is a business, Mr. Beale; it has been since man crawled out of the slime. Our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality - one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock - all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangelic.

Howard Beale: Why me?

Arthur Jensen: Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

Howard Beale: I have seen the face of God.

Arthur Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.

Any of that sound familiar? Up until the past few weeks, I had my doubts that we’d *ever* regain the potential of our great Republic… And then Patrick Fitzgerald finally spoke… And then the Democrats grew a pair. Something happened to me…

I became somewhat optimistic again.

This is my current mental model regarding the state of our nation. We’re pragmatically moving in the right direction.

• The blogosphere is holding corruption accountable
• The mainstream media is beginning to do their jobs
• Discourse is rampant
• Indictments are being served
• Technologists are decentralizing media more and more with each passing day

We’re slowly moving towards democracy, slowly moving towards our common Republic… but we still need to take it up a notch.

• We need to remove ourselves from Iraq
• We need to start developing progressive solutions to our issues of poverty, education, health care and foreign policy
• We need to create alternate forms of fuel
• We need to feel comfortable in that uneasy role of rapid change and evolution
• We need to hold the hands of corporate America in order to break down the old business models of the 20th century, and help instill collaborative, open business models that leverage the best aspects of capitalism, the best aspects of innovation, the best aspects of humanity
• We need to become global citizens

We need to be we, indivisible to the utmost degree.

I’m really trying to walk this walk… hard. Are you?

Until we’re all there, I’ll continue rooting for the Jets and the Suns, eating Pumpkin Pie and Broccoli and washing it down with an OJ and Lime juice smoothie. Why you ask?

Because I’m an American.

So it’s Friday night and I find myself cruising around the web after a night out and a tooth brushing away before a night in. In my travels, I landed on JJG’s blog and subsequently stumbled into his Ajax essay on the Adaptive site. I’ve got to admit something; before tonight, I’ve never read one iota about Ajax. The only real conversation I’ve had on the topic was a recent conversation with a client-side developer pal and after reading Jesse’s well defined description of the approach and the benefits. My initial reaction was pretty much, "well, duh!"

I don’t say that to offend Jesse, nor downplay the great client-side work anyone is doing right now, it’s just that I’ve been immersed in online application design for years now and have always tried to communicate these types of solutions to developers. I say "these types of solutions" lightly, as I’m primarily a designer, not a developer, so from my perspective these communication calls have been screaming to be stiched together for a while now. All said, I refuse to rake engineers over the coals. We’re here now.

Jesse spoke to the difficulties of designing online applications due to the technical workarounds which have been historically necessary to successfully support innovative interface behavior. While I agree with the level of difficulty, I disagree with the approach to design, for while practicing interaction design, I don’t model persona scenarios based on technological constraints. As David Fore of Cooper exhorts, the period of scenario modeling should be a period of making magic. That’s how innovation occurs while supporting user needs. I’d much rather engage an engineer in a position to support a brilliant solution than bland, useless features/interface behaviors. So first, come up with the right behaviors, then encourage technology to make it come to life.

Okay, that could come off as a bit pushy, unrealistic and non-tech savvy. One has to understand the constraints of the media when designing for it right? Sure. But not at the cost of potentially handcuffing a more useful experience by limiting possibilities. So how can one design for the user, while considering possibilities of Ajax?

While at Ameritrade, when the opportunity to start the UX Group came my way, I was lucky to be able to convince management to include our relatively small client-side development team in the mix. That brief organizational commitment created a huge opportunity for me to espouse innovation and collaboration across both designers and developers. I didn’t know how long the group structure would last, so I instantly switched up working from the level of context scenarios and began to approach the issue holistically.

We must have used the phrase "push the browser until it pushes back" more times in our weekly staff meetings than "war against terror" has been used in the White House over the past few years. Come hell or highwater, our (paying) client behaviors needed to be supported in our online applications, so in turn, I refused to limit us to any narrow definitions of client-side technology. Thankfully, my CSD guys (and gal) latched onto my mantra with vigor and did the heavy lifting to evolve our conversations into their domain (code), while myself and the IxD’s returned to the iteration of modeling user needs into interface behavior. Did they use the Ajax approach per se? No, but they pretty much pushed the browser until their SOP—which supported the design team’s further pursuit of forward thinking behavioral patterns—is now reflected in some of the latest Ajax app behaviors, such as Gmail. Business as usual of design and development at Ameritrade started to evolve.

Were the solutions as soundly executed across the board as the current Google attempts in leveraging the Ajax approach? I’d have to say no again, as we were performing Ajax-type workarounds on the fly. But the mere fact that the team addressed dynamic interface scenarios on a case-by-case basis, with dynamic executions on the presentation layer, led our marketing group to center their next campaign around the slogan, "Welcome to the 21st Century. Now trade like it." The ripple
effect of the progressive experience design was contained, as it only applied to the authenticated, Apex trading platform, but Barrons seemed to notice it by giving us a 4 star rating (up from 2.5 stars the previous year).

A switch to a complete Ajax approach at Ameritrade today would entail a short period of refactoring, but would make the current authenticated interface move from "singing" to "harmonizing."

As long as the IT politicians and system managers keep their paws out of coding philosophy, Ajax should mark the sweet spot of the golden age of presenting complex scenario relationships as simplified behavioral experience in the browser. Elegance in action. Personally speaking, I just never want to hear "that’s not feasible" again when proposing the design for such a dynamic solution.

Remember Belushi’s reaction to the insipid acuistic guitar love song in Animal House? Exactly.

The gist of the recent AIfIA debate centers around the proactive rock stars of the information architecture profession who have been defining the field for the past few years. And you know you hate them on one level or another.

C’mon, they’re librarians!

They’re the same people that shushed us in middle-school and watched over us in detention. They’ve no sense of humor about the title Moby Dick and would rather sort books than get a ray of sunlight. Now, while we work away on projects of all types—trying to hone our overall interactive skills and live a balanced life, their dreams of librarian stardom have kicked in… hard.

The little IA theory has gained so much traction over the past two years, any conversation of Big IA has lost it’s validity backstage within the community; Information architecture has become a discrete entity, separated from interaction design, UI design and information design.

Sure, it’s part natural evolution, but doesn’t anyone remember the time frame of this transformation? It began take hold about six months prior to the great consultancy collapse of 2001. During the La Jolla IA convention, I spent time listening to a woman from (now defunct) Scient going on and on about how interaction design comes into play when you work on a web application and information architecture when you work on a web site and sometimes… you need both on one project.

Sure, that makes sense in the rigid definition we’ve assigned such skills and titles, but in reality it made more dollars and cents than anything else.

Most consultancies billed out IA’s and ID’s at a rate of over $250 per hour at the time. The bloated industry was calling for specialists, and our Rock Stars (management included) were more than willing and able to provide it… for a fee. Now the ultimate venue, the MSG of IA, has supposedly arrived in the form of AIfIA.

With the industry all but collapsing on itself over the past two years, some things have become apparent, with the most visible being that the true need for such specificity is rare.

Just look at some of the specific IA shops that have since shut their doors. Big IA or User Experience Designers (UX) are needed now more than ever (in this economic climate).

So why is it that Mr. and Mrs. Crabtree haven’t yet emerged from the sorting room and observed the big picture?

To me, it seems that they might be so enthralled with the information architecture moniker, that they would rather lead the IA troops into the business world overly prepared to created a bottom up, contextually navigated, collaborative filtered on-line realm when the outside world is nowhere near ready.

It’s like bringing a canon to a fist fight; you’ll probably be knocked out before you can load your 100lb charge.

Creating a UX foundation, working top-down, if you’d like, detailing the specific roles once the real ROI goal — user/client experience — is defined, might make more sense than pushing IA as the end-all-be-all, but hey, I’m just a 9-5 working IA/ID/UX garage band guitarist… what do I know?

My career as an IA started with a lecture from Moses himself.

Richard Saul Wurman came to the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1998 to give a presentation on the past, present and future of information architecture. After the lecture, me and my newly acquainted crew from Organic-NY headed back to the office with a passionate drive to better our work in the interactive space.

I mention this because I find it extremely interesting to see Wurman’s vision of IA evolving before our very eyes. Yes, Wurman did proclaim that (paraphrasing):

"A new breed of workers called information architects would take on the challenge of handling the tsunami of information crashing upon our shores."

But Wurman himself was, and still is, much more than what our community has tried so desperately to establish over the past few years as the definition of ‘information architect’ proper (i.e. one who improves search/findability, through labeling, categorization, thesauri development; a librarian extraordinaire).

Wurman envisioned information architecture as a design solution in the information age; an intrinsic quality of the design process itself. Sure, that can be translated into the library science model of IA that we accept now, but is that definition due to the evolution of the work or to the ‘leadership’ of our community?

It’s not an easy question to answer, but a valid one to ask none the less.

So what will be the agenda of AIfIA moving forward concerning the role/responsibilities of IA’s in the workplace? How will IA be positioned regarding return on investment? Where will the line be drawn in reference to IA’s estranged cousins (UX and the ID’s)? Should there really be one professional stance as IA/ID graduate programs come to fruition?

If Wurman really is the father of IA, as Christina suggested by quoting him, let’s respect his vision (pre-internet/hyperlink), build upon our evolution and seriously think about the future of our profession. I do hope AIfIA provides an open and collaborative think tank and doesn’t turn into Derek’s worst nightmare.