« I was just wondering | main | I have nothing to say »
Peter Morville's new Social Network Analysis is a pretty sweet essay on the social network Peter used to learn about social networks. And check out those cool diagrams!
Meanwhile Jesse continues his recon. I'm even more uneasy about this entry, but I want to see how it all plays out before jumping to any conclutions about the essay. Facinating to watch it unroll.
The real mystery is how these people write a book and all these essays. And they've got spouses. It's all I can do to work, write the book and keep my husband feeling like a husband and not a couch-warmer dinner-maker.
Anyhow, my sentence of the week is "Design has consequences"
I can't think of a sentence that is more acknowledged as true and most often acted as if it were false in our industry.
Not at this moment, anyhow.
Wow. I have to say, as one of the apparently few who came to IA from content creation (I used to be a tech writer), Jesse's words ring very true to me. The problem is, how do you define and codify "the creative process". By doing so, do you stifle and maybe kill it?
I've always seen IA as very analogous to the work I did as a tech writer. Both are concerned with organization of information, and Jesse's claim that the editor's (or writer's) experience and professional judgement are essential to the process matches my own experience. However, he seems to be recasting the IA's role completely as the empath/editor, which I'm not sure I agree with. When I was writing, one of the things we always discussed was how we could expose drafts of our manuals to the final audience so we could get feedback and make them better. Most of the time, our management shot the idea down, but it was always something we wanted and asked for. That seems analogous to the idea of user testing and research findings in IA. It seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
That still leaves us with the problem of describing the creative process part of IA in a more expressive manner than "then a miracle occurs"....
"I've always sympathised with Brian Eno's theory, that if you were a mechanic you'd want to know what to look for under the hood if the car seized up. I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality."
I heart Alan Moore. I think his American Gothic arc in Sawamp Thing is brilliant, and it's now out in reprints.