The Informavore's Dilemma

The Omnivore's Dilemma is among the most provocative books I've read. It's fascinating to follow Michael Pollan on his quest to discover the origins of our food, and disturbing to witness the chemistry and cruelty of industrial farming.

An extended visit to Polyface Farm serves as the high point, providing an inspiring glimpse into the genius of Joel Salatin's information intensive approach to perennial polyculture. Here's an excerpt:

When a livestock farmer is willing to "practice complexity" - to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to - he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn't designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health.

To learn more, you can read No Bar Code or buy the book. And, you can find nearby farms using LocalHarvest or a Slow Food source in your community. That is, if you really want to know, because this topic often invokes the Informavore's Dilemma, also known as Mooers' Law:

An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.

Michael Pollan offers us a simple choice between ignorance and information, and to select the latter leads us to a difficult choice between action, guilt, and denial. No wonder people don't read books anymore!

Amazing Grace and Sicko

Last night I watched Sicko, Michael Moore's funny, disturbing, sad, important movie about the corrupt US healthcare system.

The facts which even CNN agrees are mostly accurate include:

• There are nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance.
• 18,000 Americans will die this year simply because they're uninsured.
• The US spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product on healthcare than any other country (nearly $7,000 per person).
• The US is ranked #37 as a health system by the WHO.
• The British, Canadians, and French all live longer than we do.
• There are four times as many health care lobbyists as there are members of Congress.

It's that final fact that makes hope hard. How do the people and their leaders find and trust the right information in such an environment? I'm not sure, but I'm glad Larry Lessig will be actively seeking a solution despite knowing the odds:

I do this with no illusions. I am 99.9% confident that the problem I turn to will continue to exist when this 10 year term is over. But the certainty of failure is sometimes a reason to try. That's true in this case.

I find that inspiring. I'm reminded of remembering Amazing Grace and Chuck after the fall of the wall. As grace reminds us, sometimes the lost are found.

Remix the Polar Bear

During my visit to Barcelona, I invited my workshop participants to define a strategy or approach to information architecture that is uniquely Spanish.

Jordi Sánchez rose to the challenge with a couple of covers, one of which I've selected for the remixpolarbear collection on Flickr (for now, try here).

This all started with the infamous cow talk in which Peter Bogaards, the man behind InfoDesign, described a European information architecture strategy.

Jorge Arango picked up the torch during our retreat in Chile with his ant cover, a symbol for social information architecture and the value(s) of deep context.

Which brings us back to Barcelona with questions. What is the meaning of the Picasso polar bear? What is the Spanish strategy? Is it the art of branding? And, which country will be next?

Feel free to upload your version to Flickr, tag it with remixpolarbear (for now, see here) and explain your country's unique contribution to information architecture strategy and practice. Just don't tell the folks at O'Reilly. Thanks!

Strange Connections

My amazing translator, Noriyo Asano, informed me today that the Japanese edition of Ambient Findability is headed into its fifth printing in just over a year.

Library Camp NYC looks like a great unconference.

According to Brad, John Wilson is running a guerilla campaign to find himself. Seth thinks it's silly. Easy for him to say.

Remix the O'Reilly animals with QOOP. We love our polar bear mugs!

IA Retreat in Chile

Thanks to our intrepid leader, Javier Velasco, the IA Retreat in Santa Cruz, Chile was a tremendous success. The people were warm, smart, interesting, fun, and very knowledgeable about information architecture and user experience. The Pisco Sours weren't bad either.

If you couldn't be there, you can read a nice overview by Jorge Arango, view the photos and presentations, and even watch the movie. Podcasts from the subsequent Encounter will be posted soon.

The Hyperlinked Society

I'm looking forward to participating in The Hyperlinked Society. I'm inspired (and awed) by my fellow panelists, and the program looks delicious:

Most internet users know hyperlinks as highlighted words on a web page that take them to certain other sites. But hyperlinks today are quite complex forms of instant connection: for example, tags, API mashups, and RSS feeds. Moreover, media convergence has led to increased instant linking among desktop computers, cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players, digital video recorders, and even billboards.

Through these activities and far more, links are becoming the basic forces that relate creative works to one another. Links nominate what ideas and actors have the right to be heard and with what priority. Various stakeholders in society recognize the political and economic value of these connections. Governments, corporations, non-profits and individual media users often work to digitally privilege certain ideas over others.

Do links encourage people to see beyond their personal situations and know the broad world in diverse ways? Or, instead, do links encourage people to drill into their own territories and not learn about social concerns that seem irrelevant to their personal interests? What roles do economic and political considerations play in creating links that nudge people in one or the other direction?

We need cross-disciplinary thinking to address these contentious questions, and so our panels include renowned news, entertainment and marketing executives, information architects, bloggers, cartographers, audience analysts, and communication researchers. Audience participation will be enthusiastically encouraged.

Unfortunately, I have no clue what I'm going to say. That's where you come in. How would you address these topics? What questions aren't being asked? Who isn't being included? And what should I read to get ready? Thanks!

BlogPulse

Bruce Sterling has begun a Web Semantics Watch.

And thanks to BlogPulse, all of us can play along.

Japanese Lemurs

Noriyo Asano has a difficult job. She's translating Ambient Findability into Japanese, a task made particularly tricky by the way I play with the English language. Here are some of the phrases Noriyo has questioned:

Technology has entered the shadow lands of Lost and Found, and we ain't seen nothin' yet.

One man's paradise is another man's oblivion.

I'll bet it's easy and fun, in a disturbing sort of way, like shooting fish in a barrel.

Documents enable us to stand on the shoulders of giants. Information is heady stuff indeed.

Translation is inevitably a lossy process, but hopefully by collaborating we can do better than Google's automagic translation of Noriyo's blog. You've gotta love the Rosenfeld Media post!

Anyway, I'll soon find out what got lost in translation, because thanks to Toshikazu Shinohara of Sociomedia, I'm headed to Tokyo in April for the 2006 Design IT conference and the Spring of the Japanese lemur.

European Information Architecture

It sounds like the first European IA Summit was a big success. Though I'm still waiting to hear back on the symbolic meaning of the cow, I enjoyed reading Peter Bogaards' articulation of an IA Strategy for Europe. Here's an excerpt:

A second important strength of European IAs relates to the vivid and mixed multilingual and multicultural landscape they live in. European IAs understand more than others that language and culture significantly determine the perception of the world and how perceptions are based upon vast belief and value systems. For example, IAs from Europe know that whatever classification system is used - from simple to complex, from controlled vocabularies through taxonomies/thesauri to ontologies - underneath there are many biases. What George Lakoff has proven in his classic 'Women, Fire and Dangerous Things', many European IAs understand by nature.

Especially for globally branded companies, their deep understanding of the meaning and value of language and culture can contribute to a successful internationalization and globalization of an online presence. And not in the last place, a sensitivity to the multilingual and multicultural aspects makes European IAs important players and leaders of multidisciplinary teams.

Whenever clients ask me for advice about internationalization and globalization, this is basically what I tell them. Hire a European!

Strange Connections

For those of us who value the ability to choose our news, it's worth checking out The Tower from Consumers Union (Disclosure: CU is a former client).

The Interaction Design Association recently incorporated as a member-supported, non-profit organization. Congrats!

You Are Here

Welcome to findability.org: the next generation. In case you haven't noticed, it's a borg. I mean, it's a blog. Yes, after years of quiet resistance, I've succumbed to the call of the blogosphere. I've been assimilated.

In blogging, my most transparent and prosaic goal is to promote my new book, Ambient Findability. I've poured blood, sweat, and tears into this strange text, so I won't be shy about inviting folks to read it.

That said, I'm hoping this blog will go beyond the book. As my classification scheme hints, I'll be writing about authority, business, culture, design, search, ubicomp, etc. And let's not forget the oft-maligned category of miscellaneous. I very much reserve the right to write about seemingly random topics.

So, if you want the original findability, it's there but not here. And if you like this new place, please come again, or better yet, leave a piece of yourself behind.