Today on Radio Johnny Jeff Parks chats with Thomas Vander Wal who helped found the Information Architecture Institute; the peer-written webzine Boxes and Arrows; and who also coined the term “folksonomy”. They talk about where we’ve been in the design community and how we need to start asking better questions that focus on what we don’t know, rather than arguing over the merits of the tools that now comprise our respective disciplines.

Listen to the show

Show Time: 56 minutes 09 seconds

Quotes

The end user was the person applying the tag to it not the person who was publishing it and that individual stood out. So the tag, the object, and the individual were its own nice little triad… I threw “folksonomy” out there because it was general folks who were doing the work of taxonomists.

In most organizations people are not comfortable sharing with everybody. They want to share with their peers and people they know and who they have a social comfort with…the best phrase about what they say is “I don’t want to be the company idiot”…so you need these essentially walled gardens with permeable walls.

We always create information overload and then we create the technologies to adapt, filter, aggregate and then preen that information so the information looks better and we can create a better decision.

Coming at it from “what it is that we don’t know”, [rather] than “what we do know”, is a much better approach!

Summary

Thomas Vander Wal discusses the early days of Information Architecture and Interaction Design and how we’ve gotten to a point where we need to start to re-evaluate our focus as a design community. We need to be moving away from conversations about the merits of the tools that make up our disciplines and focus instead on asking better questions.

Thomas believes that we need to be focusing our attention more on learning from other processes rather than getting locked into titles. These can limit our ability to provide value beyond what the business community commonly believes comprises an Information Architect or Interaction Designer.

Show Notes

Knowledge Navigator video from 1987
Matt Web at Reboot Scope – Design and contributing to culture; ourselves as individuals and the big picture; taking action.
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
VizThink Discussion with Daniel Rose and other Designers: Using Design Visuals To Communicate Ideas

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