This has been a recurring thing for me. A lot of what I’m trying to do with my life is architect information in a way that is useful, pleasurable, lasting.
There are lots of ways to rephrase this, reframe this. Coming up with the idea for a solution is relatively easy, implementing it is hard. When writing a novel, coming up with ideas for characters, settings, plot etc is relatively easy, but actually structuring the novel into paragraphs and chapters is hard. Until you actually sit down to write a novel, it’s not obvious how difficult it is to write even a mediocre novel.
I’ve decided that this tweet deserves a blogpost of its own, because it’s an idea I want to continue exploring and developing.
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Sometimes when I say “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time”, the reality of it is closer to “I’ve held on to this idea-lattice for a long time, and the ways in which it has degraded in my mind have revealed things to me.”
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I think one of the core challenges for me when it comes to information architecture is to create things that are memorable. To make something memorable it has to be remarkable in some way. it has to trigger some thought, some memory, some emotion. Otherwise it fades.
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A person trying to solve an interesting info architecture challenge will likely have visible “imperfections” in their thinking
Unsolicited criticism of their thinking without consideration of their intent is a disservice that can actually throw them off.
A person trying to do productive, creative thinking in public ideaspace then will, past a certain point, have to architect filters for processing unproductive feedback. I’ve seen good people give up on playing- which is everyone’s loss- because it’s just not fun to have to do this.
Alternatively you have to make sure your thinking is perfect before you can play, which is not fun either.
Or you have to make alts, which is actually an extremely underrated and undervalued solution to this general problem. It’s a little bit more effort, but it goes a long way.
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Figuring out what to do is relatively easy, behaviour architecture is hard.
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I’ve been working on my second book, INTROSPECT, and it’s been a slog. I’ve been agonising over it for a long time. When I talk about it with people, they often give me well-intentioned suggestions along the lines of, “why don’t you get an editor?” And I have a reason why I haven’t. I think a good editor can help you improve your information architecture if you have a clear sense of what the book is supposed to be about. And they can maybe even help you clarify that, if they’re really good. But I think ultimately there’s a final gap between the author and the editor. The author knows something about the book that the editor doesn’t, that the editor cannot.
A fantastic editor might be able to use their superior experience, insight and intuition to help guide the author towards what that might be, but you can’t really know in advance if the editor you’re going to work with is so excellent. Statistically, it’s pretty unlikely, unless maybe you get a personal referral from someone you respect and admire, who tells you that that editor has done such a magical act of transmutation in the past.
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Rearchitecting is hard, even when you’re trying to reorganize around a simpler, better principle. We resist change even when the end-result of change is likely relief – because the process of change is painful.
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(27mar2022) I’ve been ruminating on a hypothetical holy grail of information architecture for years and years now and every 3-6 months or so I have some new epiphany that feels like it’ll change everything, and it kinda does but not as much as I originally hoped
I’ve talked about a few critical things before – bricks/spreadsheets as the densest way to display information – the importance of desire paths – “magic phrases” – passwords, really, but that word has come to become associated with a very specific login, so need a diff word
For some period of time I was painfully fixated on trying to represent my entire twitter corpus, I even unintentionally sent a couple of earnest devs down that hellhole, none have returned lol sorry friends I realize now that’s a mistakenly needy frame. You can’t eat the sun
Writing a book was tremendously clarifying for me re: thinking about information architecture in general we are trying to build mind cities we cannot represent everything perfectly everywhere and we shouldn’t force it rather the thing is to be artful in graceful degradation
also a big part of trying to make this work is that you have to solve not just for the nail but also for the hand we have to account for human limitations of working memory, perception, etc digital tools are generally bad at this. Twitter 280char limit is a remarkable exception. (hammer: tool should fit the user)
phrases like “user centric” and “human centric” etc now sound like meaningless buzzwords, which is annoying, because when I think about the 5-10% of my corpus that’s most effective, most powerful, most used, valuable, etc, it’s stuff that interfaces with people in a natural way. (I like to say people-shaped.)
also while i’m currently sifting thru notes I feel like an annoying thing about digital notes is that they don’t really have an intuitive “weight”, like a google doc or a blogpost with 2 strings of text outwardly looks the same as one with 100 pages. IRL this is much clearer
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To be continued.