sokohl.com

[Much of what follows comes from comments I made on Lou's blog in response to his post about the IA Summit...thought they made sense here, too.]

The IA Summit is once again gone. There’s always a sense of letdown the week after. With nine Summits under my belt, I’ve committed a bunch, a bunch of time, money, brain cells, and liver panels to this wacky assemblage of information architects, user interface designers, librarians, user experience architects, interaction designers, project managers, and other rabble-rousers.

Energy always occurs at different levels…and this year was no exception. I’ll leave it to others to do a full roundup. Suffice it to say, where last year’s controversy (such as it was) was JJG’s challenge to the IA crowd, this year’s seems to come from one of the founders of the Summit. Here’re my comments on the future of the Summit.

1. Format & Place: I don’t think we want to go to a single track for a multi-day event, because we’d either have to raise the prices exorbitantly or hold huge, impersonal sessions. On the other hand, I do remember the first summits’ model of aiport hotels where folks could come in on Friday, summit all day Saturday & half of Sunday, and then leave. By Summit 3 in Baltimore, there were the beginnings of movement to go to “more fun locations where people would enjoy the venue.” Maybe we need to return to the airports and their focus on just the Summit?

2. Speakers Paying for the Summit As you, Livia, and others have heard me say, I feel it’s unconscionable to make speakers pay for registration. Folks who speak are, more often than not, professionals who take a lot of their own time to create their presentations, travel at their own expense, and stand on the podium, imparting whatever wisdom they might have.

3. Rockstar Speakers A corollary to this point is the question of invited speakers. I found it a bit insulting that some speakers’ talk proposals were rejected (yes, I’m one of those) to make room for invited speakers, several of whom had no proposal on what they’re speak about. I’d recommend that invited people must meet the same deadlines of submissions as open submissions. Anyone who doesn’t meet the deadlines gets uninvited. On the spot. Rockstars draw, but perhaps we should hold them to a certain rigor, if for no other reason than to provide leadership for less-experienced members of our community.

4. Time Is On My Side: It’s also been said before, but people need 30 minutes between sessions *of networking time*, over and above any travel time to sessions. We’ve said many times that a key reason people come to these events is to meet and chat and learn from people in smaller engagements.

5. I Can’t HEAR You! As a detail, I’d like to see the luncheon topic tables somehow occur in a separate room, so that the white noise doesn’t drown out conversation…or have smaller-diameter tables. Again, this is a logistics detail.

Like Richard Dalton, I’ve been to 9 Summits (I missed Portland & Austin). I plan to come next year, as they say, Lord willin’ & the creek don’t rise. But I think this discussion is quite helpful to enable ASIS&T and its supporters to reflect on measures of success and improvement

…raise up both yer hands.

Marketing is important to business. Marketing allows a business to achieve its goals by reaching out to people.
Yet Marketing also screws the ppoch too, too many times. Case in point: IttyBiz takes Marketing to task.

Sometimes evil lurks in the links of man.

By now you’ve heard that the Museum of Modern Art in New York has, er, acquired the @ symbol. Not a sculpture of the symbol, not a patent on the symbol, not a specific visual representation of or specification of the symbol.

MoMA claims to have “acquired” the symbol itself.

To describe/define their approach, Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, writes

The acquisition of @ takes one more step. It relies on the assumption that physical possession of an object as a requirement for an acquisition is no longer necessary, and therefore it sets curators free to tag the world and acknowledge things that “cannot be had”—because they are too big (buildings, Boeing 747’s, satellites), or because they are in the air and belong to everybody and to no one, like the @—as art objects befitting MoMA’s collection. The same criteria of quality, relevance, and overall excellence shared by all objects in MoMA’s collection also apply to these entities.

Post-post-modernist this may be, but it strikes me as a bit of emperor’s new clothes. I take a bit of exception at their use of “object”—isn’t physicality a requirement to acquisition of objects? “Object of affection” still implies something physical in most cases.

Yass, yass, I know…exceptions abound. And MoMA is playing here, of course. They are playing with language, they are playing with politics, they are playing with their own field (of museumology, as it were). I appreciate that modern art as a construct must, by definition, reinvent itself (does anyone feel weird saying that Rand and Wright and Neutra are “modern”?). At some point, one can go too far.

Ultimately, “acquisition” is probably the wrong word here. Perhaps “appropriation” is better?

Next month, the 11th Information Architecture Summit takes place, this time in Phoenix, AZ.

I’ve not gone to all of the summits…but darn near all of them. I was there in Boston in 2000 at the Logan Airport Hilton, back when the American Society of Information Science (before the Technology addition) first came up with the idea that there was something out there called “information architecture” that folks were dealing with. From the publication of Richard Saul Wurman’s Information Architects and Lou Rosenfeld & Peter Morville’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, a buzzword grew in its approach to structure, classification, organization, and findability of (mostly) Web-based experiences.

I remember that first summit fondly, if for the reasons that I was excited about being an HCI consultant with IconMedialab in Hamburg. I remember the first Five Minute Madness, where Peter Merholz grappled with the core disagreements that had been bubbling under all weekend. I remember Dick Hill working like a maniac to make things happen. I remember the insights from people like Christina Wodtke and Noel Franus and Eric Reiss on the perqs and pitfalls of being independent–how prescient they were! And I remember seeing the Neville Brothers in Cambridge, capping my first (but certainly not last) trip to Boston.

So much has changed since then, not only in the IA Summit world but also in the greater IA and UX world. Yet this summit continues to bring relevance, education, and connection that’s so critical to our community.

Flying for the first time in ages, I’d forgotten a bit just how bad this experience is.

Yes, it’s amazing tha I can get from my house to Kansas City in around 9-ish hours (20 minutes to the airport, 10 minutes from parking to the terminal, an hour before flight time, an hour and a half to Atlanta, three and a half hour layover, two hours to KC, 15 minutes to pick up the rental, and 30 minutes to the hotel=9.75 hours.).

But the experience is such a simulacrum of what is was. Too bad.

Listening to Gypsy Roots at Ashland Coffee & Tea, I’m struck by how a musical mashup works so well. The band does a great, seamless blend of Roma riffs and Parisian insouciance running headlong into the blues. It’s a new experience out of older origins.

Mr. Zimmerman sure had it right.

It seems that every time I turn around, I’m looking at my blog and its paucity of content. Such is the life of an internal employee.

Now, however, might just be the time to move on out there. The field of user experience is–controversies over just what it is notwithstanding–more mainstream than ever before. In 2002 I started Sokohl & Associates, but the dotCom crash back then erased any chance of strong success. So I worked on it part time, choosing to do stints with the Federal Reserve, DigitalNet/BAE, Keane, and then most recently PracticeWorks. A mix of innie and outie UX work in some form or another, these positions also helped me hone skills, thoughts, and crafts.

No doubt our current economy presents challenges…heck, challenges just to stay solvent. As companies reduce their forces, as it were, the work still remains, for the most part. So perhaps now is the time. Perhaps I need to change with the times.

it’s a weird feeling to be transitioning from one situation to another. More on that, but the effect on digital experiences seems to be one of delightful disjunct.

I’ll probably return to this them on occasion, but I find a lot of inspiration to what we do in physical architecture.

I recently found out that a classmate from high school is a guru in the architecture world: Tim Culvahouse. On the front page he’s got a great quotation:

Architecture designs situations, not just buildings; and situations, as any psychologist knows, are the most powerful determinants of behavior: more powerful than personality, habit, education, character, genetic makeup, more powerful than anything.

Indeed. You could paraphrase this in our world as

Experience architecture designs situations, not just applications; and situations, as any psychologist knows, are the most powerful determinants of behavior: more powerful than personality, habit, education, character, genetic makeup, more powerful than anything.

Also, a neat page from his site talks about the physical and spatial (isn’t that the same?) nature of New Orleans. Nice to see focused yet small ruminations on a theme. We should do more in the UX world.