Author: Roy Christopher

Posted on

Erik Davis on Follow for Now

The following blurb appeared on Erik Davis’ blog yesterday (Thanks, Erik!):

“Roy Christopher is the supersharp, humble, and very friendly guy who runs the website frontwheeldrive.com, which has long been one of my favorite spots online to feel the technoculture’s intellectual pulse — which in Christopher’s case is primarily sensed through dialogue. The thirtysomething Christopher has a rich background — skateboards, BMX, zines, hip hop, Communication Theory degree from San Diego State (which is brimming with SF writers, by the way) — and all this (or something else, perhaps an alien implant) has given him an acute zeitgeist radar. The heart of frontwheeldrive is scores and scores of on-target, and generally succinct interviews — usually conducted by Roy, but also by folks like Mark Dery and Paul Miller. Now, after what seemed like eons, Christopher has collected a mess of these resonant chats and encased them in Gutenberg form. The book Follow for Now is like a crisp and substantial remix of the major memes of the last decade or so.” Continue reading “Erik Davis on Follow for Now”

Posted on

Peter Morville: Information in Formation

Peter MorvilleSince its original publication in 1998, Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web — a.k.a. “the polar bear book” — has been the standard text and handbook for information architects. The recently released third edition has been updated and expanded to include the user-driven aspects of Web 2.0 (It covers so much in fact that it could almost be called “the bi-polar bear book”). It also includes Morville’s latest kick, “ambient findability,” the latter of which is also the topic of his latest book of the same name.

I asked my friend, colleague, and fellow IA Ryan Lane to help me ask Morville a few questions about his books, the future of information architecture, and IA tools.

Roy Christopher and Ryan Lane: When your first information architecture book came out it was one of only a few books available on the topic. Today there is a sea of growing publications making it harder, even for the well-read IA, to keep up. What are your thoughts about this growth? What topics would you like to see that aren’t being written about yet?

Peter Morville: It has been really exciting to witness and participate in the growth of the IA field, but you’re absolutely right about the overwhelming volume of articles, books, reports, and podcasts. Despite being behind in my reading, I’m already looking forward to a couple of upcoming books: Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger and Alignment Diagrams by Indi Young. I am surprised we haven’t seen a book written from the perspective of an “innie” about the evaluation, evolution, and continuous improvement of an enterprise information architecture. That’s a book I’d like to read.

RC and RL: There seems to be a constant struggle for an IA with new social and community technology that give the organization and taxonomy in the user’s hands. Some of these systems work really well, some do not. What is the best way for IAs to strike a balance between a well thought-out organization and user-generated structure?

PM: For every success story (e.g., Flickr, de.licio.us, Wikipedia) there are countless Web 2.0 failures. The information architecture is an important element, but unless the overall product or experience is exceptional (and well-publicized), the belief that if we build some of it, they will build the rest will prove unfounded. I’ve had the opportunity to work on a couple of Web 2.0 projects, and in both cases there was a natural, elegant bridge between tagging and taxonomy. So I don’t think that striking a balance between traditional and user-generated structures is the hard part.

RL: When are IAs going to be more involved with meta-architecture and web standards?

PM: I know some technical information architects such as Margaret Hanley (formerly of Argus Associates and the BBC) who feel very strongly that IAs should be more involved in XML and Web Standards. I agree. IAs can bring greater insight about users and information seeking behaviors to the development of more useful tools and standards. But that’s not an area that plays to my strengths, so I won’t be leading the charge.

RL: I use Visio a lot due to the fact that we work with Microsoft on a regular basis. I dislike Visio for more reasons than I could possibly list here (my preferences are OmniGraffle and InDesign). What tools are IAs using these days? What are the latest trends in IA software that you have seen? There seems to be a vacuum in the space of IA and taxonomy-specific tools.

PM: I was using Visio long before Microsoft acquired the company, and I’ll probably still be using it long after Google acquires Microsoft. Seriously, I’m a faithful Visio user and haven’t fooled around with the competition. Beyond diagramming, IAs rely on a variety of tools for prototyping, content management, analytics, thesaurus management, and more. We ran a survey last year that produced a nice list of the most popular software products. A couple of tools worth mentioning are Mind Canvas and Intuitect since both were developed by IAs for IAs.

RC: Can you briefly explain your concept of “ambient findability”? From folksonomies to wayfinding, it seems to extend IA into new, less-concrete areas.

PM: My latest book, Ambient Findability, describes an emerging world, at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet, in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. My goals in writing it included stretching IA and going beyond IA. It’s a conceptual, big picture book, so (in my opinion) it’s less practical but more interesting than the polar bear book.

RC: Is there anything else that you would like to talk about? What’s next for you?

PM: I’m working on a large IA project with the American Psychological Association and traveling to speak at conferences. I was in Norway recently and am off to Australia next month. My goal is to keep myself busy, so I’m never tempted to write any more books.

Posted on

Follow for Now: Now Available!

Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes is now available from followfornow.com. Copies have arrived in the warehouse (my garage) and are awaiting padded envelopes.

“This book is an exotic plant with roots sucking nutrients from the skulls of the most interesting people on the planet. Prepare to be pollinated.”
— Mark Frauenfelder, co-founder of boingboing.net

Spanning over seven years, Follow for Now includes interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, Douglas Rushkoff, DJ Spooky, Philip K. Dick, Aesop Rock, Erik Davis, Howard Bloom, David X. Cohen, Richard Saul Wurman, N. Katherine Hayles, Manuel De Landa, Rudy Rucker, Milemarker, Steve Aylett, Doug Stanhope, Paul Roberts, Shepard Fairey, Tod Swank, dälek, Eric Zimmerman, Steven Johnson, Mark Dery, Howard Rheingold, Brenda Laurel, Terence McKenna, and many, many more.

“Roy Christopher has one of those distinctive voices that pops up every once in a while, an intelligent voice that hasn’t been domesticated by the academic machine, an engaging voice that hasn’t been prostituted by the infotainment complex. He’s been tracking down the situations, people, and ideas that he thinks matter. I’m glad to see him get this all down in a book, and I’m not alone.”
— Peter Lunenfeld, author of User: InfoTechnoDemo

Follow for NowPublished through my own Well-Red Bear imprint, Follow for Now is an eclectic, independently-minded snapshot of the intellectual landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

For more information, see here.

This is a limited-edition publication, so order yours today to make sure you get your copy. It includes an extensive bibliography and a full index, and weighs in at nearly 400 pages.

Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered the book: Your copy is on its way.

And thank all of you for your continued support,

-royc.

-Roy Christopher

Posted on

Avoiding Affordances: Unusability Engineering

With all of the semi-recent focus on usability, I’ve noticed a growing countermovement that doesn’t get near as much attention: unusability. I’m talking here about deliberately designing something so that it’s not usable, not the much-maligned negligence of design that renders things unusable.

“Bum-proof” benchFor example, there are several bus bench designs that allow sitting while waiting for the arrival of mass transit, yet prevent the bench from being used as a bed. Most of these designs involve armrests or ridges in the seat to prevent one from lying prone across the bench, but my favorite is the backless, round-top bench: The seat is shaped like half of a cylinder and allows one to sit (albeit not a luxuriously comfortable place to park yourself). Without your feet on the ground though, you’re not likely to stay on top. Therefore, there’s no napping on this bench. In one of his books on L.A. (City of Quartz, Vintage, 1990), Mike Davis calls them “bum-proof benches.”

The manipulation of the perceived affordances of objects and surfaces is another great example. Donald Norman discusses a few of these in his book Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles (Addison-Wesley, 1992). Chairs and tables offer surfaces that are affordances for the support of weight. That is, a table affords support. If you have a glass counter on which you don’t want anything placed, it should be slanted. If it’s flat, it gives the perception of affording weight placed on top (and often ends up cracked).

The handrails around hotel balconies are typically rounded or beveled in such a way as to prevent the setting down of a beverage. This is to keep one from setting a beer bottle on the rail then drunkenly or excitedly knocking it off onto passers-by, cars, or just the ground below. This is not a design flaw. It is an engineered unusability.

Skate-blocked ledgeIn the past ten years or so architects and urban landscapers have made or retrofitted handrails and ledges to make them unusable for skateboarding. Large knobs welded onto metal handrails or blocks bolted to ledges keep skateboarders from using these surfaces as props or obstacles for their maneuvers. Again, these are not mistakes, but designed — if even often clumsily or not exactly aesthetically — for preventing a certain use.

There are many other examples, but it just struck me that the flipside of usability (in its deliberate form) doesn’t get much attention. Be on the lookout for things designed to prevent their use.

Posted on

The Visionary State by Erik Davis, Hollow Earth by David Standish, and Igniting a Revolution by Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella, II

California just might have more religious diversity than any other California-sized region on earth. Interestingly enough, it’s also quite the visible diversity. From the Vendetta Society Old Temple in San Francisco to the San Diego Temple (the latter of which’s proximity to I-5 causes locals to jokingly refer to the “separation of church and interstate”), The Visionary State (Chronicle Books) seeks them out and exposes them.

The Visionary StateErik Davis, who’s been studying mysticism and religion all of his life and who was born and raised in California, treats each faith with balanced keel and elegant prose. Meanwhile, Michael Rauner proves that Davis isn’t making this stuff up (as Rebecca Solnit points out on the back cover) with stunning full-color photos — 164 of them — of all of California’s unique locales of worship. The Visionary State (website) is a big, beautiful book for anyone interested in the Left Coast’s varieties of religious experience, the architecture thereof, or just California itself.

Hollow EarthFiguratively digging deeper, David Standish has unearthed the oddest belief systems on — or in, rather — our planet. Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth’s Surface (Da Capo) is a weird journey underground. Sir Edmond Halley (yep, the same one the comet’s named after) first said that the earth might be hollow and host to life below it’s surface, but the idea has spread and evolved ever since. Standish documents the history of these often-hilarious ideas with both ample wit and abundant detail.

Igniting a RevolutionNot living inside the earth, but defending it at any cost, that’s what Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (AK Press) is all about. Steven Best (who some may be familiar with from his books on postmodernism with Doug Kellner) and Anthony J. Nocella, II edited this massive volume of essays regarding the inability — or refusal — of environmental policy to keep up with the depletion of the earth’s natural resources. Perhaps more importantly, Igniting a Revolution is about how many pissed-off activists, scholars, and intellectuals are taking the earth’s defense into their own hands. As sassy as it is smart, and as exciting as it is extensive, this collection is enough to turn any hater into a Hayduke.

Posted on

An Inconvenient Youth

It seems that youth is no longer wasted on the young. In recent years, many social scientists (as well as Jay-Z) have claimed that thirty is the new twenty. Whereas one at twenty used to be considered an adult, now one at twenty is relatively still a child. So, what makes an adult these days? Are there any rites of passage in Western culture in the twenty-first century?

You can make your very own poisonous, despicable man.
Begin by keeping him a boy for as long as you can,
And when the voice in his head says that everything’s wrong,
Let him think we’d be convinced but only with the right song.
— Cex, “The Wayback Machine”

I first heard it expressed that forty was the new thirty a few years ago just after two of my colleagues had broken the forty-mark. The further encroachment of youth on adulthood (or vice versa, depending on which way you want to view it) is seemingly evident everywhere. From movies, to videogames, to music, we are not aging — culturally — the way our parents have. “Adults” in their thirties unashamedly play and discuss videogames, obsessively. The theme itself is apparent in pop culture (See recent cinematic hits like The Forty-Year-Old Virgin or The Last Kiss, for examples). As the main character in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club so directly put it, “I’m a thirty-year-old boy.”

I am often asked if I am comfortable with my age, and I must say that I am more comfortable at thirty-six than I was at twenty-six, but if thirty is the new twenty, then Jay-Z and I are both twenty-six. He claimed last album to have graduated from throwback jerseys to button-ups (because he was “thirty-plus”), but I don’t even own a pair of dress shoes, much less a suit. We might not know what makes the man, but it sure ain’t the clothes.

Sure, all of my friends (most of whom, it must be noted, are younger than I am) are getting married, buying houses, having kids (or at least talking about it), etc., but the old rites of passage (e.g., marriage, childbirth, etc.) do not adults make. Perhaps they never did, but the illusion was strong, and now there seems to be no one consciously interested in maintaining that illusion. We need new rules or no rules. Right now there’s a rupture in our cultural development that begins in the late-teens and continues often into the early forties.

Sometimes I feel like adult. Sometimes I don’t.

Posted on

Recurring Themes, Part Three: The Paradox of Exposure

I read somewhere a long time ago that most people die within a couple of miles of their homes.

A few months ago, I helped a friend do some work on his new house. We were painting, and hanging gutters, so we were up on ladders for much of the day. Now, my friend does this kind of work for a living, so he’s on a ladder quite often. I can’t remember the last time I was on a ladder. That day, I was probably more likely to fall and injure myself since I was the least experienced on a ladder, but on any other day, he’s more likely to fall from a ladder and get hurt (because I’m less likely to be on a ladder at all). Continue reading “Recurring Themes, Part Three: The Paradox of Exposure”

Posted on

Headroom for Heidegger: Three New Books

“…which may have also very well been the reason for Martin Heidegger’s mistake, now that one stops to think about it.
Which is to say that very possibly Martin Heidegger was busily writing one of his books through all of that time.
Very possibly the book he was so busily writing was one of the very books in the carton in the basement of this house, in fact, which only goes to show how astonishingly small the world can be.”
— from Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson

Martin Heidegger has one of those bodies of work that leaves its dent evident on anyone familiar. He did much of his thinking and writing in a three-room hut he built on the edge of the Black Forest. Continue reading “Headroom for Heidegger: Three New Books”

Posted on

Sadat X: My Protocol is Know-it-all

Sadat XSadat X is a certified Hip-hop legend. The God has been blessing mics since Hip-hop’s so-called “heyday” with the group Brand Nubian (one of the first groups to bring 5% knowledge to the masses), and he’s still doing his thing (a little bid isn’t going to slow him down). His first solo outing, Wild Cowboys (Elektra, 1996), proved he could hold his own, Experience & Education (Female Fun, 2005) showed he had grown and matured as a man and as an emcee, and his latest, Black October (Female Fun/Riverside Drive, 2006), might just be his most consistent, personal, and important record to date. Continue reading “Sadat X: My Protocol is Know-it-all”

Posted on

Pranks 2, Applicant, and And Your Point Is?

Twenty years later, Vale Vale and Company finally return to the land of pranksters with Pranks 2 (RE/Search). These interviews, mostly done by V. Vale himself, illustrate just how deep pranks run in our current cultural milieu — and how far they’ve spread since the last volume (RE/Search #11: Pranks). From the spread of culture jamming and parody to the mainstays of satire and social commentary, pranksterism is standard fare. Heck, just the mainstreaming of the lyrical spoof, which has nearly put Weird Al Yankovic out of business, is proof enough. All of this makes it that much more difficult to shake things up with a good prank. Well, the time has come for the O.G.’s and the current reigning few to get their due. Continue reading “Pranks 2, Applicant, and And Your Point Is?”