Category: Interviews

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Daniel H. Pink: 9-to-5ers Anthem

Daniel H. Pink has been exploring the way we work for over a decade now. From Free Agent Nation (Warner Books, 2001) to A Whole New Mind (Riverhead, 2005), he’s been unearthing the intricacies of the working world from the abstract to the concrete. His latest book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko (Riverhead, 2008), is a career guide written in the Japanese graphic-novel style of manga (a trailer for which is embedded below). As the world of work continues to get more and more confusing, we need all the help we can get.

Roy Christopher: Your work has made an interesting shift from the nomothetic to the idiographic, from the working trends of the masses to the career of the individual. Has this been an intentional change in focus?

Daniel Pink: A little bit. I’ve tried to write all my books from the perspective of the individual. As I write, I really think about an individual reader going through the pages and trying to glean some information and guidance. The big change with Johnny B. is that I decide to do a pure narrative — and, of course, I decided to tell that story in the picture-based form that is manga.

RC: Tell me about Johnny Bunko, “the first American business manga.” Where’d you get the idea to present your business writing through the Japanese graphic novel format?

Johnny BunkoDP: It was a bunch of factors. I spent a couple of months last year in Japan studying the manga industry. One of the things I discovered that manga is ubiquitous in Japan — 22% of all printed material is in comics — in part because it’s a form that’s for adults as well as
kids. In any Japanese bookstore, you can find manga to help you manage your time, learn about Japanese history, find a mate, etc. But as popular as manga has become in the U.S., we still don’t have that genre of manga for adults. What’s more, when it comes to career
information, people today get their tactical information online — what keywords to include in a résumé, info about what a company does, etc. What they want from a book is what they can’t get from Google: strategic, big picture advice. That’s why I’ve organized this book around the six broad principles about satisfaction and impact at work that I wish I’d known 25 years ago.

A Whole New MindRC: A Whole New Mind goes a long way to reconciling the brain-hemisphere bias we’ve all been trained to accept. The book is definitely full of solid insights, but did you ever feel like you were reaching a bit?

DP: No. If anything, people have told me that I went overboard in the book repeating that both hemispheres — or, more accurately, both left-brain and right-brain style thinking — are important.

RC: There seem to be two sides to the whole-mind concept: one is an opening up to new ideas and influences so that one doesn’t become stale, and the other is a narrowing of stimuli just so one can get one’s work done. How do we find a balance in this?

DP: That’s one of the most central questions of personal productivity. And there’s no simple answer. It seems like it’s less about balance than about being able to toggle back and forth between those two modes. The key, of course, is figuring out when to shift. I have a tough time with that myself.

RC: I’ve been primarily freelancing for most of the last decade. Looking back, how prescient were your ideas in Free Agent Nation?

DP: I let others decide the prescience. What I see is that this form of working has become more prevalent and more socially acceptable. And perhaps more interesting, Corporate America itself is becoming more free agent-like. Job tenures are shorter; companies hire people without extending any expectation that new hires will be there for a long time. Organizations are extending much greater flexibility over time and work style. And, of course, they’re shifting responsibility like health care and pensions to the individual. In some sense, whether we’re getting a 1099 or a W-2, we’re all free agents now.

——

Here is the trailer for Daniel Pink’s Johnny Bunko (runtime: 1:46):

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Amy Cohen: Bloomin’ Late

Amy CohenAmy Cohen’s memoir, The Late Bloomer’s Revolution (Hyperion, 2007) is chock full of tales of woe and hilarity — losing a great job, a bad break-up, a bad face rash, bad dates, a dying mother, a distant father, worse dates, and the feeling of constantly having to prove that you’re okay, even though you don’t have what everyone else your age does. But Amy’s such a beautiful, funny, smart, young woman, it’s difficult to believe she didn’t make it all up. Continue reading “Amy Cohen: Bloomin’ Late”

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Adam Gnade: Loose Lips Sink Ships

Adam Gnade Adam Gnade is a rebel and a vagabond, a walking, talking, song-writing, book-writing, modern-day George Hayduke. His “talking songs” have taken him all over the world — virtually and actually — but his focus is good ol’ America. Though he’s found home all over the map, he currently resides in Portland, Oregon, where he says, “the air smells good.” Adam has several records out, a book coming out, and more of both on the way — if he’s not sinking poaching ships soon. Continue reading “Adam Gnade: Loose Lips Sink Ships”

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Simon Reynolds: Erase and Start It Again

Simon ReynoldsSimon Reynolds writes about music like a cross between a die-hard fan and an open-headed academic, sitting him decidedly on the fence between the pit and the podium. From this spot, he’s able to write both enthusiastically and critically. His books, Bring the Noise (faber & faber, 2007), Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (Penguin, 2006), and Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (Routledge, 1999), cover the major movements of the of underground music over the past thirty years and provide a crash course in the underpinnings of today’s mix of repurposed technology and styles, recycled beats and sounds, and the attitudes and energy driving it all.

Fellow traveler and Disinformation Editor Alex Burns joined me in asking Simon a few questions about his books, his writing, and what’s coming up next.

Alex Burns: What prompted you to make the rise-fall arc of John Lydon and Public Image Ltd’s “careering” central to Rip It Up And Start Again? What lessons could emerging artists learn from how PIL handled its contract negotiations with Virgin Records and the “fault lines” between Lydon, Jah Wobble, and Keith Levene?

Simon Reynolds: PiL were probably my favourite postpunk band, certainly the one that had the most impact on me. But beyond the personal inclination, it just seemed to be objectively the key narrative in terms of explaining how punk turned into postpunk, and then how postpunk eventually fell into disarray. You had the central figure of the era, Johnny Rotten, the punk saviour, the man everyone was looking towards, completely confounding expectations and going on this total art trip with PiL. You had all the incredibly influential rhetoric that Lydon, Wobble and Levene put out there about rock being dead and “obsolete”, rock as something that should be “cancelled”, “a disease” is one word they used to describe it. And PiL’s diagnosis of punk’s failure on a musical level, that it had been the last gasp of traditional rock. A lot of people followed Lydon’s lead. But the saga of how it all went wrong for PiL is classic, because the irony is that this band opposed to all things “rock” were undone by all the archetypal rock’n’roll bullshit of drugs, ego, money disputes, mismanagement (they didn’t have one, basically… indeed they could probably have used a proper manager, but Lydon had been scared off that because of his experiences with Malcolm McLaren). It would make a great VH1 Behind the Music story, actually. They also came unstuck in a way that was emblematic of postpunk in general, which is reaching a kind of dead end with experimentation and deconstruction, with their third album Flowers of Romance. That came out just at the point at which postpunk turned to new pop, the more optimistic and accessible music of Orange Juice, ABC, etc etc.

In terms of the contract, I’m not sure they actually had that great arrangement with Virgin. A manager would have been handy in that respect. I think they were indulged by Virgin, given lots of studio time, but then again Virgin probably charged them for using the Manor and the other top of the line studios. Virgin supported Lydon because they could see he was obviously the most important front man to come out of Britain since Bowie. But they also tried to persuade him to reform the Pistols at one point: Branson played him the demos by the Professionals, the band that Paul Cook and Steve Jones formed, and said “isn’t this great Johnny? How about reforming the band?”. There was a hope that he would revert to doing more accessible music and become a superstar. Which is what Lydon actually tried to do eventually, but still under the PiL brand.

AB: You wrote about the “dark side of paranoid psychology”, “totalitarian undercurrent,” and “music as a means to an end” of Throbbing Gristle and Genesis P-Orridge’s first mission. How significant is Throbbing Gristle’s re-emergence and what new alienations could this new mission evoke?

SR: I’m not sure what it signifies beyond the fact that the band members felt like doing it and that at this point in history the climate for them doing that is more welcoming than it has been for a while. Also, they are probably keen to reaffirm their place in history, which is totally understandable. I was a bit surprised how little impact their return to the scene had– I thought it would be a much bigger deal, if only because it’s such a great story for magazines. But I guess this sometimes happens, especially when a band has been so groundbreaking, they suffer a little bit when they return to a music world that they’ve changed. Because everyone’s like, big deal. I thought the album was really good myself.

AB: Your analysis of music and political subcultures highlights a “lifecycle” (i.e., experimentation, discovery, a golden or “heroic” age, entropy, and reemergence or revival). What can other analysts and critics learn from this approach? What are the possibilities and limits of a “lifecycle” model?

SR: It’s hardly an original way of looking at cultural movements! But if it is a cliché, it’s one of those “cliché because it’s true” situations I think. In my experience, music genres or scenes seem to coalesce out this long-ish period of germination, disparate things gradually come together; there’s some kind of spark or flash-over moment when it all converges and reaches fruition, the momentum gets going, the sound evolves and quite quickly reaches maturity; after this “prime” period, things start disintegrating, the center will not hold, all kinds of tangents and offshoot genres split away while a purist faction try to freeze the sound at what they consider is the golden moment. All the energy ebbs away leaving a lot of people feeling disillusioned and burned ‘cos they believed so fiercely in it. Then the sound or scene is filed away in the archives where it might be excavated by some future generation.

In some ways the emergent phase in the most interesting phase, because often what’s going on around the proto-scene is a period of general disparateness and entropy, no clear direction in music culture. And those periods often are actually quite rich, especially when you look back at them with hindsight, and you wonder what the people trying to launch the new thing were complaining about! Like with punk: it took about five years to get off the ground, people like Lester Bangs were using the term “punk” to signify te need for some kind of pomposity-removing revolution, the people reclaiming rock from the bloated superstar elite, he was doing that from about 1970 onwards; there were various false starts, like with the Stooges, or pub rock in the UK. Then finally it all takes off with Patti Smith, Ramones, then the Pistols and Clash. But you look at the early Seventies music scene that they were so fed up with, and it seems–compared to now–jam-packed with exciting things. All quite disparate maybe, but still… what on earth were they so depressed for? But it’s also interesting to look at the emergent phase of the movement-to-be, all the lost bands like the Electric Eels in Cleveland, proto-punk outfits here there and everywhere that are isolated and at odds with the general tenor of things, bands that could either be ahead of their time or behind-of-their-time, it’s not at all clear. And gradually they all find each other, and BOOM!.

Roy Christopher: Your brand of para-academia puts you on the fence between journalist and scholar. Do you find this vantage point to be more of a boon or a burden?

SR: I can’t write from any other place! Well, that’s not quite true: I can and have done more standard music writing. I do quite a lot of fairly straightforward record reviewing, and have in the past done newspaper-type profiles and reporting, still do it now and then. But the mode that I naturally fall into, if left to my own devices, is somewhere between theory and journalism. I find it a good place to be in terms of the work produced, because pure academic work doesn’t have much place for enthusiasm, or for a flamboyant prose style. And there’s all that slog to do with footnotes and talking about your methodology and your theoretical framework, all that protocol. Academic work on music also suffers from its slow turnaround, it always seems to be dealing with stuff that’s from years and years ago. I like the rapid-response nature of journalism. On the other hand, I like to have an extra dimension or two to work with than just the basic consumer guidance level of responding to a record or profiling a band. Larger resonances to do with society or culture beyond music.

So I would say definitely it’s a boon in terms of the work produced, as discrete pieces of writing. In terms of work on the macro level of a career, I think the scope for doing this kind of theory-informed music writing has definitely shrunk significantly. Theory is much less of a cool or sexy thing than it was in the 1980s when I started. But it’s also to do with shrinking space, smaller word-counts, and the decline of spaces like the alternative weekly in America and the weekly music press in Britain. Those were havens for pretentious music writing, but with the exceptions of art magazines and places like the Wire, most music magazines and newspapers now seem to have an orientation toward the layperson. You can’t assume too much esoteric knowledge of music. But above all, it’s the shrinking of space that’s key. If a review or piece is being pared to essentials, the first thing that goes is the extraneous theory, the references to thinkers outside the world of pop music.

Personally I haven’t felt this as a source of anguish that much, because I’ve gradually lost interest in doing the critically theory-infused approach, through not finding much in that world very exciting in the last ten years or so. There was a time when going into St Mark’s Books in downtown New York, or its London equivalents like Compendium, would get my pulse racing with excitement. But not for a long while. So you won’t find too many name-drops of philosophers in my writing these days. I still have my favourites, but they’re old ones, and for whatever reason they seem to have less applicability to the music I like. I also feel like I’ve reached the point where I’m on my own trip, as a thinker about music; I don’t need to fuel up on other bodies of thought so much.

RC: What are you working on next?

SR: I just finished an expanded/updated version of Energy Flash (a.k.a. Generation Ecstasy), with stuff on the last decade of electronic dance culture, and that is due out in early 2008, timed for the 10th anniversary of the book and the 20th anniversary of rave. Right now I’m about to embark on the companion volume to Rip It Up and Start Again, which will include interview transcripts, essays, and a discography-with-commentary dealing with all the esoteric postpunk music I couldn’t cover in the original book. That should be out in 2009. I’m also drawing up plans for my next book proper, but for now I’ll have to keep that under wraps.

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Interview about Follow for Now in DIG BMX Magazine

DIG #58

Brian Tunney conducted the following brief interview with me regarding Follow for Now for Issue 58 (May/June, 2007) of DIG BMX Magazine. Thanks, Brian.

Roy Christopher is a Seattle-based man about town that’s been on the BMX scene for as long as anyone’s bothered to count at this point. We first featured Roy in issue 48 of Dig, discussing his interview-based website frontwheeldrive.com in the “Do You Compute?” section. Since then, Roy’s split his time between Seattle and Alabama, taking time along the way to compile an anthology of interviews he’s collected over the years, and self-publishing his work in the recently released book Follow for Now. The book compiles interviews with luminary and challenging personalities from all walks of life, including musicians, artists, and cultural theorists. And Roy was nice enough to rush me some answers to some wise ass questions about the book. Take some time off from the message boards and read on… Continue reading “Interview about Follow for Now in DIG BMX Magazine”

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El-P: Wake Up. Time to Die.

I’m a child of the 80s when, as emcee/producer/label-owner El-Producto puts it, every Hip-hop record that came out was that new sound, that next shit. As you all know, I’m still a huge Hip-hop fan, but those new styles just don’t drop that often, much less with every new release. Now typically someone hits it big with a style and others scramble to sound the same. Not so with El-P. His musical M.O. is from that previous era where you had to innovate or you fell off, and biting was not allowed or tolerated under any circumstances.

El-P

Also reared on 80s music and culture, El’s apocalyptic boom-bap bounces between the frenetic cut-and-paste of the early Bomb Squad and the off-world synths and sounds of The Art of Noise — perhaps taking its initial cues from a collision of Nation of Millions and In Visible Silence. From there, only one thing is guaranteed: The drums will be bangin’. All other bets are hedged.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that the drums on his new record, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, are bangin’, but the guests along for the ride might surprise some people. In the mix are friends and fellow travelers Trent Reznor, Chan Marshall, members of TV on the Radio, The Mars Volta, and Yo La Tengo, as well as Def Jux fam Aesop Rock and Cage with cuts by the mighty Mr. Dibbs and DJ Big Wiz (Special, special shouts to Wiz: Our thoughts are with you, brother.). Don’t let the names overwhelm you though. This is El’s record from jump to stop.

It’s been four years since we’ve gotten an El-P LP proper, but to be fair, El has been busy behind the boards producing and remixing for the likes of Del the Funky Homosapien, Prefuse73, TV on the Radio, Nine Inch Nails, Slow Suicide Stimulus, and fellow Def Jukies Cage Kennylz, Mr. Lif, S.A. Smash, and others. Oh sure, there was his future-jazz Blue Series Continuum record, High Water (Thirsty Ear, 2004), which, along with the Blue Series Continuum crew of Matthew Shipp, Guillermo E. Brown, William Parker, Daniel Carter, Steve Swell, and Roy Campbell, featured his dad Harry Keys on one song. Then there was the eclectic, but consistent compilation Collecting the Kid (Def Jux, 2004), which brought together stray pieces from his soundtrack work on the graff flick Bomb the System (Palm Pictures, 2002) with unreleased tracks from his group with Camu Tao, Central Services, among other odds and ends. Aside from a few guest appearances (El has shared tracks with fellow wordsmiths Aesop Rock, The Weathermen, Del, Ghostface Killah, C-Rayz Walz, and Cage), El’s fingers have been on the knobs, keys, and buttons — as opposed to the mic — since 2002.

Production credits notwithstanding, El-P is a monster of an emcee. His presence, power, and lyrical prowess on the mic are unmatched. Where other lyricists just bring their next release, he brings the fucking State of the Union. He’s Rick Deckard to all of the microphone Replicants out looking for life-extension. There’s a reason their lifespans are limited, and El-P proves it in spades.

Admittedly, I’m more of a fan than a critic, and more of a nerd than a thug, but those tensions are evident in El-P as well. He lives and loves Hip-hop, but will quickly call bullshit on wackness. He’s also smart as fuck and loves science fiction, but won’t hesitate to bust you in your shit.

From his days in the germinal 90s Hip-hop crew, Company Flow, to his current assault on the ears of the jaded, El-Producto is always bringing it rough and rugged. The future is now.

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Roy Christopher: You’re approaching Hip-hop from a different angle than anyone else. What’s your take on what you’re bringing to it that makes that difference?

El-Producto: Originality… Style… I don’t delude myself into thinking that this shit sounds like all the other Hip-hop out there. Basically, I pride myself on the fact that it doesn’t, but it all comes from a Brooklyn kid who grew up on all the classics, and all of those things are just layered in it. Honestly, if I had to think about it, I’d say I’m bringing some decently-needed style to the whole picture. I think that’s the cornerstone of my whole shit and that’s why I always look at it as raw Hip-hop because that to me is the ultimate purpose.

I grew up learning about Hip-hop from writers, break dancers, and really being involved in the culture and the whole shit was about style and having your own twist on it. If you come out sounding like what everyone else is sounding like then you’re a toy. So, I filled in from a lot of the traditional shit that I grew up on and the era that I came up in, and underneath it all, underneath the trippy sound is my Ced G influence and my Scott La Rock influence and my Bomb Squad influence. When different cats listen to the record, whatever their background is, a lot of them pick out different things from it. People who are familiar with that and grew up listening to the same stuff I did have an easier time hearing that.

RC: It’s like you’ve said before about that era, whenever a new record came out that was the new shit, the new sound.

EP: Yeah, and somewhere along the line people have grown into this malaise that they’ve applied to themselves philosophically, and I think it’s just that they’ve stopped being moved by music. I think it’s an excuse for people to justify the fact that they’ve stopped craving to be thrilled. I think it’s cynical, and I can’t be cynical in my approach to music. I have to always be throwing myself down a flight of stairs hoping that at the bottom of the stairs is what I’m looking for. I don’t have that thing in me that tells me to preserve myself and to stop going where I feel I want to go and what I want to hear. I don’t have that thing in me that tells me that there’s a rule to apply to making a great record — a part from a few things: The drums have to bang. That’s the number one, and for what it’s worth, I think I’ve got that part down.

RC: No doubt. Ryan Kidwell once said that playing it safe is not interesting.

EP: Yeah, you start to wonder who you’re playing it safe for. The same people who would have you play it safe are the same people who don’t want to hear it when you do. The audience and the critical community don’t enter into my creative process because I feel like I’m a pretty good representation of a music fan. So, I just go where I have to go. The thing about it is that I know who I am. I was born and raised in New York City and grew up on some ill B-boy shit, and so this is me. Everything that emanates from me is an extension of that — it’s built in. I believe in reference, but I don’t believe in imitation. I don’t hold on to too much nostalgia because I don’t have to.

El-P: I'll Sleep When You're DeadRC: Word. You have a lot of guests on this record. Where others just pile ’em on to see who they can fuck with and what names they can get on their record, your guest spots make sense. How much chance was involved in who showed up on the record and how much was fully planned?

EP: It was a combination of elements. If you write down all of the names who appear even in the most minor way on the record it looks like it could be some crazy collaboration-style record. The reaction I’m getting from people when they listen to it is that they couldn’t necessarily tell who was on the record. Most of the time it’s me making songs and trying to come up with some idea and at any given time I might feel that someone that I know or that I’m cool with or in contact with or who’s in my circle — friends or peers — I hear their voice somewhere and think that they might be able to add to it, and that’s usually when I reach out. The idea is there first, the music is there first, and what I’m trying to do is there first. On this record there was nothing that I did that was created specifically for anyone else to come on, except the song with Cage because we sat down and wrote it together, and the song with Aesop, but that’s just on some family rap shit. With all the other guys, I had talked to some of them about the idea — to have the Mars Volta guys, Trent, and Cat Power — about the possibility of me including them. Just so that they would be open if I heard it. And it happened that I really did feel that there were moments that would work with them, and I tried to do it tastefully. I tried to make it so it wasn’t some heavy-handed rock-rap style thing.

RC: I got the advance and there’s no information about who’s on what song, and I couldn’t tell at first, except for Cage and Aes ’cause I know those guys.

EP: Well, you can tell that there are certain parts where it’s probably not me. [laughs]

RC: Yeah, but the overall experience is that it’s your fucking record.

EP: Well, good ’cause that was important to me. That’s what it was about. This has to be my record. There are moments where there are other voices, but it’s almost like I’m sampling. I’m sampling from experience and putting it in at the right time. I think one of the mistakes you can make when you have access to work with some of the guys that you admire is the temptation to use them as much as possible, and that just wasn’t what is was about for me.

RC: It was fun to read about your progress while working on the record. What prompted your doing the blog?

EP: It was kind of a spontaneous thing. I was sitting around and happened to be looking at different sites on the internet and started bouncing around on some of the random blogs. I started to realize that the majority of these things — really all of them, as different as they all seem to be — they’re really all critical blogs. You know, a guy who listens to some music, maybe recommends some of it, and maybe hates some of it. Or film or whatever, but all connected to the critical community, and it doesn’t seem like it’s connected to the creative community yet — at all. Is there another use for this? It’s just a medium that you write things on, why is everyone writing the same things?

So, I just signed up to get my own blog. I’ve seen how much fans enjoy the interaction being let in to a degree on MySpace, message boards, things like that where you can communicate to a degree, but even that is kinda cold. When artists attempt to communicate directly with them on message boards it comes off a little wack because you’re always floating in like some sort of other entity, saying things, and then running away. I figured fuck it, why not create an artist’s view of the artistic process and let it be public. It will let people in a little bit and see how they dig it. Something that was attached to the creative process as opposed to a critical process or the sum result of gathering up a bunch of people’s art and saying something about it. I didn’t know how people would respond to it, but the response was crazy. It was overwhelming, and I kinda feel bad that I stopped doing it, but I’m not a blogger. I’m an artist.

Maybe I’ll start it up again. It’ll stick around. I was really shocked how much people were into it, but it’s kinda like if I were to stumble upon one of my favorite artist’s collection of notebooks, all their scribblings and little pictures they’d cut out and put in there, all of that great shit that goes on when artists are in that mode. It’s always fun to me. It’s always ill to see those things, and I’ll even flip through my friend’s stuff just because it’s interesting to me.

That was the only reason. It wasn’t any grand plan. It was just kind of an idea. It just seemed like a natural thing. I’m surprised more people haven’t done it.

RC: Me too, and you and Dibbs had a lot of fun with it, and so did all of us who were reading it.

EP: I think we’ll probably start it up again for the tour.

RC: I was going to ask you about that next. Who are you going out with first?

EP: We’re working on it right now. On the main tour it looks like I’m going to be rolling out with Hangar 18 as my opening act. Anyone who hasn’t seen Hangar 18 perform should definitely come out.

RC: Definitely. They stayed with me the last time they came out here. Those are my boys.

EP: Oh, word. No doubt. No doubt.

Basically, I’m just trying to go out there with a tight crew of cats and put together a cool set with interesting set design, interesting lighting, and do something a little bit different than what we normally do.

RC: I’m a big Alexander Calder fan, so ever since seeing the bird in the art on Fantastic Damage, I’ve wanted to hear the Calder story.

EP: The details are a little hazy, but basically the story goes that my mother in the 70s — late 70s perhaps, maybe 78 or 79 — worked with him. She was working in advertising back then, and she worked with him on some project. She was a big fan of his, and she asked him to draw something for her baby, and I was maybe one or two, maybe three, I don’t know. He drew this bird for me on this toy wooden airplane that she had bought for me. It’s just something that’s always been around all my life.

The bird in question.My mother and my father back in the day were highly into art. They were kinda scenesters. They hung out with Robert Crumb. They were into all of that and they were big fans of Calder. So I’ve had this thing lying around all my life, it’s just always been there. It’s maybe one thing I still have from my childhood — this drawing on this toy airplane drawn in pencil by this fucking legendary guy. It started to represent me for myself. It’s the oldest thing that someone had drawn for me. The more I learned about who he was as I got older the more interesting it was to me as opposed to being just this thing that I had, but it’s old, it’s in pencil, it’s on wood, and it’s fading and eventually it’s probably not going to be visible anymore. I figured I’d put it on my body somewhere. I figure if I’m ever super poor I can always lop off my arm, put it in formaldehyde, and auction it off [laughs]. So, it’s just become a representation of who I am. It’s just been there all my life and it’s symbolism that doesn’t represent anything else except my life. I like to think of it as some ancient archetypal symbol that represents me.

RC: Is there anything I didn’t bring up that I didn’t talk about here?

EP: It’s on you. I’m not chomping at the bit! [laughs]

RC: Well, don’t wait another four years to give us another record.

EP: No doubt.

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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.

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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”