Podcast appearances and mentions of karl fast

Jorge Arango is an Information architect, author, and educator, and he's written a new book, Duly Noted, about the age-old practice of notetaking. If you're like me, you've been taking notes since your school days. Back then, we used notebooks, a Trapper Keeper, and sticky notes – anything that could help us ace a test, remember important tidbits, and consolidate ideas. Notes are an extension of the mind. But it was always a headache to organize them, synthesize them, and recall them at the right time. Enter the digital age – which tried to improve on the humble art of notetaking, but apps like Notes and Stickies tried to replicate digitally what we were using in the real world. Newer apps like Obsidian let go of real-world metaphors by utilizing three principles: shorter notes, connecting your notes, and nurturing your notes to build a knowledge garden that will serve you for the rest of your life. If you bring value to the world through your thinking, you have the responsibility to look after your thinking apparatus. Duly Noted will augment, magnify, and extend your capacity to think well. Externalizing your mental processes is one of the most powerful means we have to think better. If used well, the humble note will help you be a better thinker and a more effective human. What you'll learn from this episode: - A history of notetaking tools - Why notetaking is a personal endeavor - How digital notetaking tools have evolved - About Jorge's new book and how, upon reading it, you just might become a better thinker and increase your effectiveness Quick Reference Guide [0:00:12] Introduction of Jorge and his books [0:01:18] Introduction of Jorge's new book on taking notes and creating a knowledge garden, Duly Noted [0:09:47] Books that will make you a better knowledge worker [0:14:14] Design in Product Conference [0:15:35] Managing knowledge with computers [0:26:03] Knowledge as a garden [0:28:09] On tools for nurturing a knowledge garden [0:33:08] How Jorge uses AI with Obsidian [0:36:37] Jorge's gift for listeners Resources and links from today's episode: Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango https://www.amazon.com/Information-Architecture-Beyond-Louis-Rosenfeld/dp/1491911689 Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places by Jorge Arango https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/living-in-information/ Duly Noted by Jorge Arango https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/duly-noted-extend-your-mind-through-connected-notes/ O'Reilly's book Mind Hacks by Tom Stafford https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mind-hacks/0596007795/ Tools for Thought by Howard Rheingold www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/ Design in Product Conference, November 29 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/design-in-product/ Roam Research https://roamresearch.com/ Obsidian https://obsidian.md/ The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul https://anniemurphypaul.com/books/the-extended-mind/ Figure it Out: Getting from Information to Understanding by Karl Fast and Stephen Anderson https://www.amazon.com/Figure-Out-Getting-Information-Understanding-ebook/dp/B085412Q1X Build a PKG (Personal Knowledge Garden) Workshop https://buildapkg.com

Karl Fast is an independent scholar, information architect, and futurist. He's the co-author with Stephen Anderson of Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding. Karl is one of the most avid readers I know, and in this conversation, we compare our reading practices. We discussed this subject in preparation for a personal knowledge management workshop we will teach later this year.Show notesKarl Fast - LinkedInThe Informed Life episode 69 - Karl Fast on Interactionism, part 1The Informed Life episode 70 — Karl Fast on Interactionism, part 2Be Useful — Arnold Schwarzenegger on 7 Tools for Life, Thinking Big, Building Resilience, Processing Grief, and More (#696) - The Blog of Author Tim FerrissWar and Peace - WikipediaObsidianGod, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'GieblynOur Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity by Edward TennerTo Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of DeathTo Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of DeathTo Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'ConnellThe Bodybuilders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human by Adam PioreNo-dig gardening - WikipediaMise en place - WikipediaEverything in Its Place: The Power of Mise-En-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind by Dan CharnasReadwiseSlow Reading in a Hurried Age by David MikicsFight Club (1999) - IMDbBuild a Personal Knowledge Garden (Karl and Jorge's workshop)–  use discount code TILPKG before October 30, 2023 for 20% off the regular priceShow notes include Amazon affiliate links. We get a small commission for purchases made through these links.If you're enjoying the show, please rate or review us in Apple's podcast directory:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-informed-life/id1450117117?itsct=podcast_box&itscg=30200

Kat King is an information architect who's “interested in information and how we figure things out.” She replied to one of my Twitter threads about note-taking, and I was intrigued by her approach. I recently saw Kat give a thoughtful presentation at the IA Conference and wanted to find out how she uses notes to learn and teach. So, this conversation focuses on note-taking as a means of learning.Show notesKat King@katalogofchaos on TwitterUniversity of MichiganThe Information Architecture ConferenceCornell NotesMoleskineLEUCHTTURM1917The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy PaulThe Informed Life episode 74: Annie Murphy Paul on The Extended MindThe Informed Life episode 69: Karl Fast on Interactionism, part 1The Informed Life episode 70: Karl Fast on Interactionism, part 2Show notes include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

In observance of the winter holidays, this episode doesn't feature a guest interview. Instead, I reflect on five themes that emerged in the diverse conversations we hosted on the podcast during 2021. I wish you and yours happy holidays! Cover photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash. If you're enjoying the show, please rate or review it in Apple's Podcasts directory: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-informed-life/id1450117117?itsct=podcast_box&itscg=30200 Show notes The Informed Life episode 53: Jason Ulaszek on Healing Social Rifts The Informed Life episode 54: Kourosh Dini on DEVONthink The Informed Life episode 55: Hà Phan on Product Leadership The Informed Life episode 56: Margot Bloomstein on Trust The Informed Life episode 57: Ben Mosior on Wardley Maps The Informed Life episode 58: Jesse James Garrett on Leadership and IA The Informed Life episode 59: Matt LeMay on One Page / One Hour The Informed Life episode 60: Kat Vellos on Friendship The Informed Life episode 61: Jeff Sussna on Customer Value Charting The Informed Life episode 63: Sophia Prater on Object Oriented UX The Informed Life episode 64: Sarah Barrett on Architectural Scale The Informed Life episode 66: Jim Kalbach on Jobs to Be Done The Informed Life episode 68: Mags Hanley on Career Architecture The Informed Life episode 69: Karl Fast on Interactionism, part 1 The Informed Life episode 70: Karl Fast on Interactionism, part 2 The Informed Life episode 71: Sunni Brown on Deep Self Design The Informed Life episode 73: Patrick Tanguay on Newsletter Curation The Informed Life episode 74: Annie Murphy Paul on The Extended Mind The Informed Life episode 75: Hans Krueger on the Cycle of Emotions The Informed Life episode 76: Dan Brown on IA Lenses Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Welcome to the informed life. In each episode of this show, we find out how people organize information to get things done. I am your host horsehair angle. Today, I don't have a guest on the show. Instead, I'm going to try something a little different. Rather than a conversation with a single guest, I'm going to do a review of some of the things that I heard during the course of the year. So, you'll be hearing from several of the folks who graciously agreed to be on the show. And the reason why I'm doing this is because I listen to a lot of interview-based podcasts. And while I find myself getting totally engrossed in each individual conversation, I often lose track of what I've heard before in prior conversations, and I have a hard time making sense of patterns that may be emerging. So, I thought that during this quiet time of year I might take some time out to do just that, to see if there are any themes or patterns that have stood out during the interviews i've done in the past 12 months. Of course, the guests on the show, didn't speak with each other. I don't want to imply that they're somehow in conversation or responding to each other's points. In fact, the only point that any of these conversations have in common was that I was a part of all of them. I'm also aware that when you take snippets of interviews out of context, It may change their meaning, especially when put next to other snippets from other conversations. And that's definitely not my intent. I'm not going to present these in the order in which they were recorded. In fact, I'm going to talk about these in no particular order. So, in this episode, I'm just going to edit these together and see if I can highlight some of these themes that seemed to have come up in more than one conversation. If you want to check out the full conversations, which I encourage you to do, I will include links to each episode in the show notes. Hopefully, this will prove useful to you if you choose to revisit the conversations we've had over the last year. So, now onto the themes. We recorded 25 conversations during 2021. And in revisiting them now, I've grouped them into five high-level themes. There are other ideas that have come up and there are different arrangements you could make, but these are five themes that stood out to me. The first theme, I'm calling, aligning our values with our actions. The second is about using intentional structures for self-development. The third is about practicing information architecture at scale. The fourth is highlighting tools and methods for visualizing systemic intent. And the fifth is about thinking beyond the brain. I'll unpack what these are about one by one and hopefully draw connections between them to try to bring some coherence to the conversations that we've been having throughout the year. Because I do think that there are things that connect them. Aligning our values with our actions Jorge: So now, let's dive into the first of these themes, which has to do with aligning our values with our actions. And this is one that came in this year, particularly strongly and with intent on my part because I was appalled by the January 6th insurrection in Washington, DC. This horrible event brought to life the degree to which there are deep social rifts in the U.S. And I I've been thinking about what designers can do so what can I do through my work to help make these things better. So I wanted to talk with folks who have been explicitly thinking about this stuff. And this led me to reach out to Jason Ulaszek, who has used design to help heal Rwandan society in the wake of the Rwandan genocide, which I think is obviously a much more extreme situation than the one that we're facing here in the U.S. Now, Jason is not originally from Rwanda, he's from the U.S., so I asked him if there's anything that we could learn from his experience that might help us in our society to start healing the rifts that divide us. And I was very intrigued by his answer; he talked about re-engaging with cultural values. And this is what he had to say: Jason Ulaszek: What was part of the Rwandans cultural value system well before the genocide against the Tutsi, and is now swung fully back -- and they're working hard to ensure that that's the case -- is a really strong sense of cultural values. What they've really tapped into -- and I think this is where it gets into design a bit -- is that they've tapped into ways to embody these cultural values inside of the experiences people have within education. Jorge: So there's an explicit attempt there to create structures — in that case, within the educational system — that help highlight the common social values that bind a people together. And in part the way that I understood it, at least the part of the idea there is to try to rebuild a sense of trust among parties. And we had another episode this year where we talked explicitly about building trust. And this was in episode 56, where I had a conversation with Margot Bloomstein about her book on the subject, which came out this year, called Trustworthy. And, as Margot put it in our conversation, a big part of building trust has to do with authenticity: with having our actions be grounded in a clear set of values and having them be aligned with those values. This is how Margot put it: Margot Bloomstein: You used the term "authenticity." And I think that that's a term that we throw around a lot; that's a term marketers love to throw around. Who wouldn't want to be authentic? And I always wonder, authentic to what? Do you know who you are? Know thy self first, and then you can determine, well, how do we align our actions with our values? Because that's how we measure authenticity: it's the distance between our actions and our words, all of that external stuff and our values. And I think for many organizations, they can jump into kind of the national conversation, into the international conversation, around many of those social issues and say, "Here's what we're doing. Here's why we support this. Here's what we're doing internally. And here's what we're doing externally to make this better for everyone." To put a stake in the ground. And they can do it building on that long-term, authentic investment in their values. Jorge: I love this idea of being more intentional about aligning our values and our actions as we seek to be more authentic. And of course Margot was talking here about doing that at the level of organizations, but it's also possible to do it at an individual level. And in my conversation with author Kat Vellos, we dug into that specifically in the context of her work. In nurturing friendships. And I asked Kat about how we might be more authentic in looking to create the structures that allow us to nurture friendships as we get older. And she highlighted the importance of being present. This is what she had to say about it. Kat Vellos: The more you immerse yourself in what is actually happening in that time that you're connecting with the other person, the more likely you are to feel the benefit. You know, when you're spending time sharing stories with a friend say, focus on their story, focus on them. Get curious. Ask followup questions and have that be the focus of your attention, rather than halfway listening and halfway being in your own head. Like, "do I feel less lonely right now? Do I feel less awkward right now?" Get out of that mental evaluation mode and get real immersed and real curious and interested in the other person. And that's actually when somebody feels heard. That's actually when somebody feels more connected is when you're really present and holding space with each other. Intentional structures for self-development Jorge: This idea of being more present was also an important part of our second theme, which has to do with creating intentional structures for self-development. I like to think of this almost as kind of an information architecture of the self. So, while it might seem on the surface like some of these conversations run a bit further a field from the subject of the show, I see them as being quite aligned in that we are creating conceptual structures that help us affect some kind of change. And in this second theme, the change has to do with internal transformation. We delved into this in a few conversations during the year. The first I will highlight is episode 71, where I interviewed Sunni Brown about her work in Deep Self Design, which is a practice rooted in Zen Buddhism and design thinking. And during this conversation, Sunni chastised me for allowing myself to let my devices keep me from being more present during a camping trip with my family. And I loved how Sunni talked about being more present. This is what she had to say: Sunni Brown: Camping, when it's like safe and beautiful... the point of it is to actually get you into a different state. To get your regulatory system in a different state so that you can enjoy your life and be present with your family and look at the sky and realize that you're part of... you are the sky, there's no difference between you and the sky, you just project that there is. And like, you know what I mean? So, you have to understand that that space is essential for your humanity and and make it a priority. And you can tell people, I mean, there's ways to approach it that are gentle on other people. So you can let people know, "I'm going to go dark for 72 hours. You should know that," Or, "I'm going to go dark, and then I'm going to have one hour where I look at stuff," you know? You have to design it for your life and what's actually available for you. Sometimes people have sick parents at home or sick kids or whatever, but you have to start to understand the benefit of it. Because I think most people think it's just like something they would lose. Like, they wouldn't get... something taken away from them. And I'm like, "no! It's something you're giving yourself that is priceless." And you get amazing ideas. Like your productivity goes up. So, I call it going slow to go fast. Actually I read this interesting Nietzsche quote, which I don't read Nietzsche a lot or anything, but like he said like great ideas are found when you're walking. And Steve Jobs was... Also, I'mnot obsessed with Steve Jobs, but he did a lot of walking meetings. So, If you are a productivity junkie, going slow helps you go fast. And it actually frees up a lot of stuck tension in the body and stuck ideas that you can't get through and it gives you solutions and ahas and insights. So there's huge rewards in it anyway, if you need it to be aligned with productivity. But it's like, dude, we're gonna die one day, Jorge. Like all of us! And the last thing I want to do is be like, "I spent my whole life on my iPhone!" That is like the worst thing that could happen. Jorge: So, we need to be more aware about what is going on with our systems, with our bodies — and we need to be present. And this was not the only conversation that I had that delved on similar subjects. In episode 75, I talked with my friend, Hans Krueger, who has also been influenced by Buddhism, on what he calls the cycle of emotions, which is a conceptual structure — a way of thinking about emotions and how emotions affect our behavior. Here's Hans: Hans Krueger: What surprisingly few people realize is that there is like a real system behind this thing, this whole emotional complex. How they work, how they interact with each other, what leads to what, what you can do to actually cultivate your own emotional state. A state that allows you to perceive as clearly as possible what is real, versus what you imagine is real. Jorge: There's an emerging theme here in the power of visualizing, might be one way to think about it, but at the very least naming these conceptual distinctions, becoming more aware of what is happening internally. And again, this might come across to some folks as not being relevant to information architecture at all. But I do think of these as conceptual structures where there are distinctions that we label and we establish relationships between those distinctions. And the structure helps us understand what we're doing so that we can act more skillfully, more mindfully. And at least one guest during the year talked about using such conceptual models, not just to help us personally, but to help us in our careers. In episode 68, Mags Hanley shared with us her work on career architecture, which is also the subject of her book, which was published after we talked. And Mags made the connection between the methods, processes and tools that we use as information architects and how we develop our careers. Mags Hanley: Career architecture is about how we can use the methods that we think about and we use as information architects or as UX professionals and apply that in a very systematic way into how we think about our careers. Practicing information architecture at scale Jorge: I like this idea of using information, architecture and user experience methods, practices, and tools for our own personal development. But we can also use them to develop our teams and to work at a different level of impact. I think of this as information architecture at scale, which is the next theme that emerged in the conversations that we had on the podcast over the year. Two that immediately come to mind, but I'm not going to highlight as much here, are the conversation with Jim Kalbach on jobs to be done, which, in addition to Jim's book, helped me clarify my own understanding of what jobs to be done are. And this is an important subject, one that designers and product managers need to be aware of. So, if you have heard the phrase, but are not entirely clear on what it means, I encourage you to check out my conversation with Jim. Another one is the conversation that I had recently with Dan Brown on information architecture lenses. And as that explained in that episode, the lenses are a set of cards, and now podcasts and YouTube videos, that aim to serve as a tool to help designers deal with architectural conundrums. So again, if you are into information architecture, and you haven't done so already. I encourage you to check out the conversation with Dan Brown. That said, there are a few episodes that I do want to call out here and bring to your attention. One is the conversation I had on episode 63 with Sophia Prater about her object oriented user experience framework. I see this as a way of formalizing conceptual models so they can be shared and discussed with other team members. This is how sophia described it during our conversation: Sophia Prater: OOUX is all about saying, "okay. If we know that our users think in objects and just human beings think in objects - not not just our developers - human beings think in objects, and to be able to gain understanding, you need to understand what the objects are in that system. And to understand what the objects are we need a certain level of consistency and recognizability to our objects." So as the designers of these environments, if we don't get really super clear on what our objects are, there's no way. There's just absolutely no way in hell that we're going to be able to translate that to our end users. We're just not! If we can't get it straight on our team and we can't get it straight among ourselves, then 1) that's going to create a lot of communication problems internally which is a problem that I hear all the time. We've got everybody on the team coming together. And some people, depending on what department you're in or what your role is, you've got the same object, the same thing being called two or three different things and different objects being called the same thing. And you're trying to design complex software. So just getting on the same page internally is going to be absolutely intrinsic to making sure that it's clear to your end users. Jorge: Another conversation that had to do with considering design at a different level of abstraction was in episode 64, where Sarah Barrett shared with us considerations about the architectural scale of the systems we design. I was particularly drawn to the way Sarah described how we should approach the intended effects of our work: Sarah Barrett: Occasionally, I get comments or people worrying that our information architecture isn't innovative enough that we're not doing anything surprising or introducing anything brand new. And I feel very strongly that your architecture is not the place to surprise people. Like, there are actual architects out there building very innovative homes that no one wants to live in. And I have no interest in doing that. I really want us to use the oldest, most standard, most expected way of doing things. I think the example of the grocery store is another great way here. There's a lot of benefit to not innovating in the layout of a grocery store. There probably is some benefit in innovating a little bit around the edges or in some details, but you gain a lot from making it legible and making it expected for people. And so, that one is really about... okay, given these things that we expect to have: we expect to have global navigation, we expect to have metadata on content, we expect to have titles and breadcrumbs... how do we unpack what each of those things is doing for us and make sure that between the suite of those elements we are using? Because you never use just one, you use lots of them together. Between all of those elements, we are presenting a coherent, complete view of the wayfinding people need. Jorge: It's one thing to create a coherent and complete system that allows people to find and understand things, and it's another to create the conditions that allow that system to evolve over time gracefully as conditions change but to retain that cohesiveness. And doing this requires that we understand that the things that we are designing are in fact systems and they are systems that will require stewardship over time. This implies that we need leadership. And that was the subject of episode 58, where I had a conversation with Jesse James Garrett about leadership and information architecture. This is part of what jesse said during that show. Jesse James Garrett: The way that I talk to folks about design leadership, who have come from a design background -that is to say they've been doing design work - is that leadership is just another design problem. And you're working with different materials and you're working toward different outcomes and you're having to follow different principles, but the task is the same task. It is a creative problem-solving task. It is a systems-thinking task, as a leader. So looking at the ways that you're already doing that systems-thinking, the ways in which you already doing that architecture for yourself in the work that you're already doing, and those will be your strengths. And those will be the pillars that you can lean on that are going to support your work as a leader going forward. They will evolve and they will not look like what they looked like when you were doing content inventories or task flows or whatever other artifacts you might've been working on as a designer. But the skill set that you're building is the same skill set. Jorge: The relationship between design and leadership, and how designers can use our tools, methods, practices, et cetera, to take on leadership roles, was also the subject of episode 55, which featured a conversation with hop-on about her own trajectory from design to product leadership. Hà Phan: I think the difficulty was between the role I have now, or the delta between the role I have now versus being a UX designer is that, you know, it's really a leadership role to basically provide the path to clarity. So when you have a vision, even as a seasoned UX designer, you're going to present forth this vision. And usually there's a thousand questions and a thousand steps before you get there, right? And usually you don't get there entirely. You know, you don't get to the vision entirely the way you had envisioned it. You're going to take turns, right? And I think in this role, what I get to do is that I get to enable the team to find that path to clarity, and to provide the milestones or the mission for each of the goals along the way. Jorge: This idea that leaders provide clarity and vision is very important. And it's one of the reasons why designers can make good leaders, because part of what designers do is clarify and help visualize abstract ideas. I keep saying that design is about making possibilities tangible: we take these vague notions, requirements, constraints, ill defined contexts, and we make things. And these things that we make can be validated somehow. We can put them in context and have them be used by the people that we intend to serve, to see whether things are working or not. And we create feedback loops where we make them incrementally better, better suited to meeting the needs of the people they serve. Visualizing systemic intent Jorge: And this idea of leadership as a role that clarifies and articulates a vision, brings us to the fourth theme that I noticed in going back over this year's episodes, which has to do with highlighting tools and methods for visualizing systemic intent. And by that, I mean different ways of mapping systems and making systems more tangible. Again, this idea of making the abstract more relatable. And we had several conversations along those lines. The first I'm going to highlight here is episode 59, in which Matt LeMay may shared with us One Page / One Hour, an approach he's developed to help teams articulate what they're making by working fast and iterating. So, rather than creating some kind of polished deck, the idea here is to articulate a vision really quickly so that you can spend less time upfront creating polished artifacts and spend more time iterating with stakeholders and other team members. Here's Matt describing how he came up with One Page / One Hour. Matt LeMay: I wrote up this pledge to my business partners saying I'm willing to forego the sense of individual accomplishment that comes from presenting finished and polished deliverables to my colleagues. I promise that I will spend no more than one page and one hour working on any deliverable - any document - before I bring it to the team. In other words, if I show up with five beautifully formatted pages or a one-page that took me 10 hours to create, I want you to hold me accountable to that. I want you to say, "man, why did you do this? We made a deal. We made a commitment to each other! We all know that if we actually want to deliver value, if we want to do valuable work, we need to collaborate earlier on. You can't go off onto your own and create this big thing, and then just want us to tell you how great it is!" Jorge: One Page / One Hour is about trying to articulate very quickly what we have in mind and sharing it so that we can start iterating on it. A few of the other conversations that we had during the year around visualizing systems and visualizing intent were about artifacts that are a little more elaborate. An example of this is Customer Value Charting, which Jeff Sussna shared with us in episode 61. Customer Value Charting, as Jeff explained, it is a tool to balance strategy and agility. And the purpose of creating that balance is to drive customer benefits, which are related to but not the same as business benefits. Jeff illustrated this by means of an example using a common service. Jeff Sussna: The benefit of the dry cleaner is that I can get my tuxedo cleaned in time to go to the formal event. It's not fundamentally about a cash register or a counter or even cleaning chemicals. And I mention that because a lot of the conversation I see around outcomes over outputs tends to actually talk about business outcomes. You know, revenue growth and customer retention, and time on site and business outcomes are great. I don't have any problem with them, but people tend to skip this step. We have a hypothesis that this feature will cause this change in customer behavior, which will lead to this business outcome or business impact. But it leaves open the question of, well, why is the customer changing their behavior? What is the benefit to them? Jorge: These are complex questions to take on for designers or for anyone, frankly. And it's helpful to hear about how folks are going about it. Customer Value Charting is one way of doing it. Another way of visualizing systems and visualizing things like customer needs in a systemic way was shared with us by Ben Mosiure in our conversation, which focused on Wardley maps. Ben Mosior: Wardley mapping is a visual way of representing systems: its users, its needs, its capabilities, its relationships between all those three things. And then it's also positioning those things in a way that helps their qualities become more apparent. So there's this thing that Simon Research called "Evolution." It's basically how do things evolve and get better or die under the pressures of supply demand competition, and what you get is like things start out new, uncertain, high risk, high failure, but with a high potential for future value. But then as they evolve, they get better. You know, someone's always like looking at these weird ideas and trying to make them better because capitalism basically suggest there's money to be made. So someone out there is going to try to make it better. And over time, if the idea is worth investing in, it will continue to get better, more known, more boring, more predictable, and the value of it will be more concrete. And eventually, if it evolves to a certain extent, it becomes an invisible part of our everyday lives. And so, Simon says, look, you want to represent the systems that we're a part of both in terms of their parts and relationships, but also in terms of how evolved each of those parts are. Because what that does is it sets you up to understand the implications of those qualities. New stuff is going to be high failure, old stuff that everybody understands, that's just part of everyday reality like power in the wall. It is going to be less surprising, it's going to be less failure. And so that means that depending on the context, depending on the part of the system we're looking at, we need to have a different way of approaching it. And I think that's the entire point. By making visual artifacts -- by talking about our systems visually -- we can come together, look at a specific part of it, appreciate its qualities, and then together determine what our collective intent is about that part of the system. Jorge: That's a great description of this idea that we can take these complex abstract ideas and make them tangible, make them manifest in the world, and as a result, make it possible for us to have conversations about them, to somehow change the state of things, to make things better. Thinking beyond the brain Jorge: And that brings us to the fifth and final theme that emerged over the year and that I want to emphasize here, which has to do with using tools and our environment to extend our cognitive system. So, in some way, when we are putting up stickies or diagrams or anything up on the wall, we are making it possible for us to share a cognitive space of sorts. And this is true, whether we're doing it with a note-taking app or stickies on a whiteboard. In taking stuff out of our heads and putting them out into the world, we can somehow extend our minds. And that's why I'm calling this fifth theme "thinking beyond the brain." Conversations about this theme came in two different flavors. On the one hand, we had folks who shared with us their thinking processes and tools. And on the other hand, we had a few conversations that were about thinking in this way itself and I'll say a little bit more about both of those. So, first with the thinking processes and tools. In episode 75, Patrick Tanguay shared with us, how he uses a combination of tools to write one of my favorite newsletters, Sentiers. And it's a setup that mirrors somewhat closely my own setup. Another great conversation about a particular tool was in episode 54, where Kourosh Dini told us about how he's using DEVONthink for building a personal knowledge management system. I was very excited to talk with Kourosh because he wrote a book that helped me use DEVONthink better. If you're unfamiliar with this tool and you are someone who needs to manage a lot of information, let's say if you're teaching or writing, it behooves you to give episode 54 a listen. As I mentioned, I also hosted a few discussions which were not about tools in particular, but a little more meta about how the mind itself works beyond the brain. I'll be frank with you, these were some of my favorite conversations during the year. One was with Annie Murphy Paul about her book, The Extended Mind. Annie's book is the clearest explanation I've read on the science behind the field of embodied cognition. It was one of my favorite reads of the year because it does a really good job at dispelling erroneous notions about how the brain works. And I think that this is a very important subject for designers to understand. Here's Annie. Annie Murphy Paul: I always like to say we're more like animals than we are like machines. You know, the brain is a biological organ. I mean, I know this is obvious, but we really can get very entranced in a way by this metaphor of "brain as computer." The brain is a biological organ that evolved to carry out tasks that are often very different from the tasks that we expect it to execute today. And so, our misunderstanding of what the brain is leads us, as you were saying, Jorge, to create these structures in society. In education and in the workplace, in our everyday lives, that really don't suit the reality of what the brain is. I mean, I'm thinking about how, for example, we expect ourselves to be productive. Whether that's in the workplace, or what we expect our students to do in school. You know, we often expect ourselves to sit still, don't move around, don't change the space where you're in. Don't talk to other people. Just sit there and kind of work until it's done. And that's how we expect ourselves to get serious thinking done. And that makes sense, if the brain is a computer, you know? You feed it information and it processes the information, then it spits out the answer in this very linear fashion. But that's not at all how the brain works. Because the brain is so exquisitely sensitive to context, and that context can be the way our bodies are feeling and how they're moving, that context can be literally where we are situated and what we see and what we experience around us, and that context can be the social context: whether we're with other people, whether we're talking to them, how those conversations are unfolding -- all those things have an incredibly powerful impact on how we think. And so, when we expect the brain to function like a computer, whether that's in the office or in the classroom, we're really underselling its actual powers -- its actual genius -- and we're cutting ourselves off from the wellsprings of our own intelligence, which is the fact that we are embodied creatures embedded in an environment and set in this network of relationships. So, it really... we're really kind of leaving a lot of potential intelligence on the table when we limit our idea of what the brain is in that way. Jorge: While this may seem like we are venturing a little far from the ostensible subject of the show, which is about how people organize information to get things done, there's two reasons why I think it's important for us to delve into this subject. One reason is that, if we are to properly organize information so that we can find things, understand things and so on, we have to understand how our minds work, because ultimately what we're doing is we are designing for minds. And the second reason is that in so doing — in organizing information, in creating these information environments — we are creating contexts of the sort that Annie was talking about there. Even if they are not physical contexts, they are contexts that influence how we understand things. The second conversation I had this year on this subject and which I want to highlight here is the conversation I had with my friend, Karl Fast over episodes 69 and 70. And as you might know, if you've been listening to the show for a while, that's the first time I've ever done a double header. In other words, that I've split a conversation between two episodes. And it's just because we had so much to talk about. And I don't think I can do that conversation justice by extracting just any one clip. But again, I do believe that this is an important subject for you to know about, so I encourage you to check out the whole thing. Closing Jorge: So there you have it, that's a very high level overview of some of the conversations that have stood out to me in the podcast over the last year. Now, obviously there were many more — I told you that we recorded 25 episodes — I don't want to in any way suggest that the other ones weren't as interesting. I just wanted to highlight the ones that I thought manifested some of these themes. And to recap them, the five themes are: aligning our values with our actions, using intentional structures for self-development, practicing information architecture at scale, tools and methods for visualizing systemic intent and then finally, thinking beyond the brain. These are subjects that I care about. And it's no accident that we end up having conversations about these things on the show. One of the interesting things about revisiting them now at the end of the year, is that I can start seeing threads that run through several of the themes. For example, the idea that we need to visualize abstract and complex systems, and that doing so allows us to have better conversations about them. That seems to be a thread that's running through various of these themes. It's true, whether we are talking about our own internal values or our career development, or whether we're talking about a service that we are looking to develop for our clients. And like I've said before, I think that designers — and particularly structurally- and systemically-minded designers, such as information architects — are particularly well-suited to visualize systems in this way. The other thread that I see running through all of this is the importance of considering the context that we are working with and working on, and not just the content of what we're designing. The things that we make are going to be experienced in some kind of environment, whether it's a physical environment or some kind of information environment. And the environment makes a big difference. We understand things in context. And part of what we do as information architects is establish those contexts. That's one of the reasons why I've been emphasizing these conversations about embodied cognition and the extended mind. Because science is making it increasingly clear that thinking happens, not just in our nervous systems, but in our bodies. And more to the point here, it happens out in the world. It happens in our environments and it happens in the tools that we interact with. And again, it's a system that is comprised by ourselves as actors, agents, but also the environments in which we're operating. And we can configure those environments in various ways to help us think better. And I think that this is an important frontier, so to speak, an important area of development for people who design structures of information, who create contexts through language and signs. I've loved the conversations that we've had on the show this year. And that is mostly due to the fact that the guests have been great. I am very grateful to everyone who has agreed to be on the show to have me interview them, to share their ideas, their work, their research, their experience with us. I also want to thank Sarah Clarkson, who I have not acknowledged in the show before. And I'm long overdue in doing that, but Sarah helps me edit the podcast. And her help has been invaluable in getting these shows out to you on time. And of course, I'm very grateful for you; for the fact that you are listening to this, that you have decided to make the show a part of your podcast listening. I would love to know whether there's anything that we can do to make things better. So, please drop by the informed.life, and leave us a note. But for now, I'll just tell you that I am planning to keep the show going. I have guests already lined up for next year. I'm excited about these conversations: having them and also being able to share them with you. So again, thank you. I wish you and yours happy holidays and I look forward to sharing more with you next year.

Karl Fast is an independent scholar, information architect, and futurist. He's the co-author of Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding. This is the second half of a two-part conversation about interaction and embodiment. If you haven't done so already, please listen to part 1 before listening to this episode. Show notes @karlfast on Twitter Karl Fast on LinkedIn Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding by Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast Bruce Alexander The Rat Park experiments Bill Verplank's diagram of interaction Epigenetics About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, 4th Ed by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, avid Cronin, and Christopher Noessel Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian (Bonus: Jorge's book notes) The paperclip maximizer problem Punctuated equilibrium Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Karl, welcome back to the show. Karl: Thanks for having me again! Jorge: Well, I could not help but want to talk with you again, since you mentioned wanting to discuss rats and heroin, and that just sounded too intriguing to me at the tail end of our last conversation. So, why don't we pick right back up there? What do you mean by rats on heroin? Rats and heroin Karl: So in the 1970s, there was a lot of concern about drug addiction in various parts of the society, especially in the US, and especially with the Vietnam War. And a lot of veterans — a lot of soldiers who were in Vietnam and who were exposed to heroin were… I think there was some estimate, something like 80 or 90% of all the soldiers who went over to Vietnam had used heroin at some point and had a serious… what we would now classify maybe as an addiction. I'm not sure if that number is correct. But there was this general widespread concern about this and what was going to happen when these people came back. I don't think that this particular study was motivated directly by that, but certainly this was in the air. And so, there was a Canadian psychologist named Bruce Alexander, and he was concerned about a lot of the studies that had been done around addiction and said, "well, these rats are stuck in like a small, cold cage, often socially isolated from all other rats. If I was in that kind of situation, maybe I'd like to take some heroin too!" So, he designed a study where he had a couple of different groups of rats. One group of rats, they were basically in the sort of normal lab cages that you would have. The other ones were in what are called "Rat Park." And you can actually look this up on Wikipedia. It's called, "The Rat Park Experiments." And they… they were like 200 times larger. There were about a dozen, 15 rats or so in there, both male and female. So, they had a completely different environment in which they were able to run around. They could play, there were all kinds of lovely things. There were things to keep them mentally stimulated. It was kind of like a rat heaven. And in both of these different groups, each of them, the rats were divided up into two different groups. There were rats that were given water to drink, and the other rats had a choice between water and water that was sweetened, but also laced with morphine. What they found basically was that when they were in rat park — in rat heaven — very few of them would consistently go and choose the morphine. But the ones that were in the cages almost always did the morphine. And there were several conclusions about this, but one interpretation was that social isolation was the major factor and that lack of socialization drove a lot of addiction. My understanding is that this is not… this has been criticized in a number of cases. But the broader one, the way that I've always interpreted this study, is that the role of the environment has a huge impact on stuff. And when it came to the veterans, when they came home, a surprisingly small percentage of veterans came back to the US after the war and continued with their heroin addiction. So, there are studies with rats, there are findings with the actual veterans. Embodiment and interaction Karl: And to me, this raises this question that relates to what we were talking about last week. We had this idea of embodiment. And the big idea with embodiment here is that the mind is not the same thing as the brain. Our bodies, our tools, the space around us — how we move and act in the world — this is all part of our cognitive system; that our brain might be in the head, but our mind is embodied. Our mind extends out into the world. So, the systems and the tools, the information we have… all the things that we design that are exterior to the body, those should also be understood as part of the mind. They're not just out there. And that brings us back to the other main thing we talked about last week was this question of interaction. How do we interact with the world? Why do we interact with the world? And we introduced that distinction between pragmatic and epistemic actions. And we gave that example of moving the bishop, where you pick up the bishop, and you move it and put your finger on it, but then you move it back. From a traditional perspective, we would say, "oh, you did two moves in the world. You've moved a piece, and then you pressed undo." But there's research, which says, "well, no, no, there's actually real reasons why you would want to do that." And the distinction is what they call pragmatic action and epistemic actions. And the idea of a pragmatic action is you're going to change the world in order to change the world. You want to bring about some change in the world. But an epistemic action is about changing the world to change your understanding of the world. To make thinking easier, or faster, or more reliable. So, we have these different ideas here. We have this idea that the environment plays a role in our mental wellbeing. The environment plays a role in our ability to think. The way we interact with the world is part of how we think, in many cases. And what we talked about was… we went through a number of different examples, but the big idea is this I think has major implications for the things that we design in a world where we have a lot of information. We have rich — increasingly rich — computational tools, powerful computational tools that don't just sit in a desk, that are being embedded into every part of our world. And that can sense and interact and respond back to us in more meaningful and interesting ways. Jorge: You mentioned in our previous conversation the opportunities inherent in the trajectories that we see in technology. Karl: Yeah. So, especially I think with AI, but that's an obvious one, right? Think about it this way: one of the things I argued last time is that we need to have a better conceptual toolkit when we're designing, when we're creating these different things. We need to think about how what we are making is not just out there, but is connected in a meaningful way to what our brains can do. So, we should think about certain definitions — certain words — and try to understand them and develop new concepts for how we talk about this. So, for example, let's start with some basic ones that I've already mentioned: action. I think of action is doing something. It's a thing, done, it's a gesture, it's a movement. And that is distinct from reaction — what happens in response to a situation, an event, to an action. But I use the word interaction to not mean action and then reaction. You can think about it that way in terms of the timeframe, but I tend to think of interaction as the action coupled with the reaction. So, you act in or on the world, that action combined with the response. Think about it as the difference between you can talk about, like, your coffee, and you can talk about the cream, but once you mix the two together, now they're bound together and that's different. So, we can think of them as separately, but we also need to learn to see them as connected together. Now, language can be a little slippery. And I know that in my writing and in my speaking here, I have probably used… I'm sure that I have used the word action when I really meant, by those definitions, interaction. I tend to use them synonymously. I talked about epistemic action. Really, I think it should be epistemic interaction, but it's a bit of a mouthful. But that's an example of definitions. Or another one would be "interactivity." This is a word that gets tossed around kind of loosely and casually, often as a synonym with interaction. I think it's best understood as a quality or attribute of an interaction. Some interactions are easy. Some are interactions are difficult. Sometimes easy is better. Not always, right? In learning, when interaction is too easy and quick — if learning is too easy — then the learning becomes shallow. You need a kind of certain friction. Or another example for interactivity: how difficult is it to articulate your intentions with a system? So, you can talk about a gap between what you intend to do and your ability to articulate it. And can we, through design, close that gap? When do we want to close that gap? So, you might have the same interaction. But the interactivity or certain dimensions of that interactivity could be very different. And there could be good and bad around that. Jorge: This brings to mind Bill Verplank diagram of interaction. I don't know if you're aware of that diagram. Karl: Refresh my memory. Jorge: Well, it's a feedback loop between the world and some actor. And the actor senses the world. Verplank labels it "feel." so, there's this sensing of the world. The actor, through sensing, knows and then does. So that's the other arrow. So, you sense, and you do. And this cycle of sensing and doing amounts to an interaction. And what I'm hearing you say is that… it's not a binary thing, but there's a gradient of interactions. So, some things are more interactive than others. Karl: Yes. And you know so that loop, that idea here… this is where I think embodiment is trying to say, "it's really complicated." It's a lot more complicated. It's a lot more nuanced than we have tended to describe it. You know, you take a class in cognitive psychology, you pick up a lot of different books around how the mind works, and you're going to see — sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly — a simple loop around perception, cognition, and action. Perception is input, right? Information from the world that is input into the brain. The brain takes that and does computation on that. And then from that, we act on the world. From the embodiment perspective, the simple and wrong way to think about that is that the cognition happens just in the head, right? Perception is input. Action is output. Cognition is what happens in the middle. And what embodiment is trying to say is, no. There is an element where that could be the case, and maybe often is the case. But it's certainly far from the entire story. We need to redraw that picture. Think of it as maybe a first order approximation of how the mind works. Now, we need to think about second and third order effects here. What are the other things that are going on here? And that's what things, like epistemic actions, point to. More broadly, it's very common in design for people to have taken a lot of classes and to have studied aspects of perception. All graphic and visual design, color theory, like layout… you know, all of this is about changing the perceptual inputs. Controlling the perceptual inputs. All the aestheticism that we have is about the perceptual inputs are largely about that. I'm much more interested in the other side of that, the interaction side of that loop. And how that is connected to the things that we create, and trying to unpack this in the light of what the science is telling us about embodiment. Jorge: Would it be fair to say that the emphasis then is on the touch-points between these artifacts that we perceive and the people who are perceiving them? Karl: Yes, and the way that those touch-points happen. And you know, the more I think about this… and I've been thinking about interaction for well over a decade. And you see this notion of interaction in so many different areas, in different fields. Like we just talked about it with the example of rats and heroin and this connection to the environment. Another one from biology is, we have that old idea of the debate between nature or nurture. And most of us today have gone, "oh, well, it's not about nature, it's not about nurture. It's nature and nurture, and some sort of balance between the two." But biologists don't believe that either. Not anymore. What a biologist would say is it's more about how the organism interacts with the environment. Evolution is an interactive process. An example related to that is genetics. In the mid-nineties, we had all this talk and this huge effort to decode the human genome, and the story that was told there was, "well, if we can just decode the human genome, then we'll be able to read the book of life," as though it was just information. And genes were presented to us as a deterministic thing. You have a gene, this tells you how tall you're going to be, this tells you what color your hair is going to be, it can determine intelligence, all of these things. But what we now know is that's really not what's going on. That is part of the story, but it's much more complex than that. And the big area in genetics is epigenetics. Epigenetics is how your behavior and your interaction with the environment shapes the way that the genes express themselves. So, maybe interaction will turn on a particular kind of gene, maybe it won't. It depends on how the environment that you're in really shapes this. This leads us actually back to rats. There are studies that go back to the 1950s about baby rats and how their mothers lick them. There are what are called "high licking mothers" and "low licking mothers." So, some rats get licked a lot when you're a baby, and some mothers will not lick their babies a lot. And they do this to calm the rat down. This changes the epigenetics: changes how the genes — especially around stress — and I believe it's cortisol, but other things — express themselves. So, a rat that gets licked a lot is going to be a much calmer rat. It will not get stressed as much. A rat that is not licked a lot, won't learn to do that. And so, it's genes will express themselves in a different way. And you might think, "well, it's great to be calm, not so great to be anxious." But then we come back to this problem of, well, what kind of environment is the rat in? If a rat is in a dangerous environment, it actually pays off, from an evolutionary perspective, to be anxious because you're going to be more alert to threats. So, you have this really much more complex, interesting trade-off. And interaction, to me, seems to drive all of this. The mother is licking the baby, that's interaction. The rat grows up to be in a particular environment — grows up in one environment, then maybe migrates to a different environment — that connection between the environment is interaction. All of this stuff again and again, we see interaction throughout everything. Think about another example, like programming. We talk about functions. And then we talk about objects. We talk about APIs… this, all the ways that programs interact with each other. We gave an example in our previous conversation about why people talk with their hands and the importance of gestures. It's not just a way of providing extra information to someone else. It also turns out that that physical movement has an inward-facing component that helps smooth our thoughts, or sort of like a cognitive grease. Epistemic actions. There's another example. We had the example of chess, which comes from a study about how people play Tetris. And the thing I'm trying to get at here is: I think interaction is fundamentally under-appreciated. We want to tell a story about the things. The things that we have. The objects, the artifacts, and the story that we want to tell might be about their perceptual qualities, their aesthetic properties, how beautiful something is, or the quality of which it is made. We might talk about its usability. We have various ways in which we talk about the objects. Or, from the cognitive side, we'll talk about what the brain is capable of. And I keep thinking from all the stuff that I see, this question of how we are interacting with those things: how we interact with things, how we interact with the environment, how we interact with other people. All of that seems to be really, really central. And my question has been, how do we come up with a better, richer — and from a design perspective — more useful way of talking about that? Interaction design Jorge: Most folks listening in will have heard of interaction design, and they probably associate it with things like the gestures and motions and… I've heard it described as though interaction deals with time. Whereas other disciplines deal with spatial relationships, interaction deals with time-based relationships. Karl: Well, and I know if you read, say_ About Face_, the interaction design book by Alan Cooper. He defines interaction design in terms of behavior. But for my reading of behavior, I think of it as the way you act or conduct yourself often, especially towards others, or towards things. And it tends to be more of a macro definition. It's a larger scale pattern. So, part of this is also a terminology question and looking at the things that we do at multiple levels. There's a nice paper by Cameron Seddick, who was my dissertation advisor actually many years ago, and he breaks interaction down roughly into, I think, four different levels. He talks about events. So, those are like the smallest-scale thing. This is something that actually changes and happens. An event would be like a click, a drag, pinch, scroll, tap, grab. Those types of things. An interaction is something more like filtering or rearranging or annotating. That is comprised of — depending on how things are designed — one or more different kinds of events. Then from there above that, we have different kinds of tasks. And above that, we have activities. And so at each stage, we get a level of behavior that is broader and more comprehensive, as opposed to being narrower. Activity theory, which is also another area which has strongly connected in many ways to embodiment, has a similar notion that interaction has multiple scales and dimensions. And also that things can move up and down, depending on our conscious level of control and experience. So, the classic example here would be learning to drive a car and especially learning how to drive say a manual transmission. When you first learn, you have to be very clear about, okay, I am pressing the clutch. I am moving the gear shift. But as you get more skilled and experienced with that, that goes from a low-level set of actions to something that's much broader. It's easier and it's more automatic. So, things can shift and change around. Again, we come back to this idea that… well, I'd say there are two reasons why I think interaction is not really as fully appreciated in design circles as it could be. Or maybe not appreciate is the right word… maybe a better phrase would be, talked about it in a way which allows us to fully leverage what interaction can do. And one reason I think for that is that it is complicated. It is nuanced. And I think the other major reason is that we have this idea from cognitive science that is baked in pretty deep about what is this relationship between the world, and perception, and the brain or the mind, and action. And we have tended to have a story from cognitive science, which is pretty simple: the one we talked about earlier, where perception provides information, the brain takes that and converts that information, which would then do mental computation. We call that thinking. And then action does the output. Perception, input. Action, output. And thinking happens in the brain. Embodiment is this big revolution in cognitive science, which is trying to really change that. But so much of the design world is based on traditional cognitive science from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Jorge: What I'm hearing there is that it's not just a mind acting in the world. It's a mind acting on the world, so that the act of sensing and tweaking the thing that you sense, in interacting with the world, you gain an understanding of the world. And that is part of what cognition is. Is that a fair read on it? Karl: I think so. The reason I talk about it as action and reaction combined, is because things run both ways simultaneously. And that always makes it much harder to grapple with. Barbara Tversky is a longtime researcher at Stanford and wrote a book a couple of years ago, called Mind in Motion, which summarizes her lifetime of research in this area. And it's very much a book about embodiment, and she talks about several laws of cognition. I don't remember all of them, but the first two I think might be illuminative for this conversation. Her first law is that benefits always have costs. There is a cost to thinking just in the head. There is a cost to acting in the world. But when there's a cost, there's also benefits. And when we think about interaction in this richer way of being action and reaction together, how we have this notion of the extended mind, and we think with and through the body and the world around us, what we're talking about is how we're shifting those cost-benefit trade-offs. Where the thinking happens is really important. A classic example here would be when you're, say, multiplying two numbers. Most of us can multiply two times eight in our heads and get 16. But very few of us can multiply 28 times 342 in our heads and get a good answer. So, we have moved the computation out into the world. We could do it on pencil and paper. We could do it with a slide rule. We could do it with an abacus. We could do it with a calculator. We could ask a voice assistant to do it, right? And so, where do we think about that unit of analysis? Do we think that the thinking is happening in the brain? Do we think that we've offloaded it out into the world? Or do we see the two things — what we have in the world, and what we have in our head — as combined, and see that as the cognitive system? "Interactionism" Jorge: You brought up in our last conversation this word "interactionism," which I sense is a call for people who design interactions to be more conscious of what it is that we're doing. And I'm wondering if you could unpack that term for folks. Karl: So, I've been grappling for a word here which describes this notion that we would look at the world through this lens of interaction. We would not see interaction as, "well, I've pulled up whatever my favorite design tool is, and I've got a pallet of widgets on the left-hand side and I can drag and drop, and those are the interactions." How do we begin to start seeing this as much more important? So, interactionism in this sense here is a word, which I…. You know if you look up "ism," it's both a good word and a bad word, right? We all live in isms. We live in capitalism. Or liberalism. Or conservatism. We have lots of different ways around that. But what it really means is a doctrine, a perspective, a philosophy about how we look at things. What we see and the system in which operate. And right now, I think a lot of times in design, we have certain isms that exist. Certainly if you come out of graphic design and visual design, historically, has really been a strong influence for user experience and design more broadly. And there, aestheticism is very strong. Out of other kinds of design, we often have a very strong idea of the object of the thing. Usability engineering, and ergonomics, and human factors gave us a different kind of ism around the usability. UX itself, I think, is an ism, right? It is the experience that matters. And so, information architecture and other areas, have like sort of an information-ism, that we are focused on the information. Or maybe we could use the word structure. So, the structure-ism or structuralism. Each of these words has positives and negatives. Each of them is loaded in different ways and have certain histories. Even the word interactionism has this. If you do a search for interactionism, you'll find that it actually has at least two major meanings historically. One comes out of philosophy, and philosophy of mind, going back all the way to René Descartes, who famously created the idea of mind-body dualism and said that there is the body and then the mind is somewhere else. And we have this mental space, which is not physical space, and that thinking happens… there's this interaction between these two spaces, this mental space and the body and the world. And that is one way that people talk about interactionism. Another one is a perspective in sociology, or it was called micro-sociology, that wants to look at and think about sociology entirely in terms of the interaction between individuals. So, interactionism actually already is a word in at least two major areas. I'm interested in it simply as this perspective or this lens in which we really see this and begin to elevate it to a more prominent role, rather than thinking of it as, "Oh, well, I had an interaction here, and I sprinkled on some interaction there." Or, "This interaction is very usable." Is it just philosophy? Jorge: This is not something that you are going to encounter in a palette of components in a development environment. Karl: Right. Yes. Jorge: It's more of a philosophical take on what it is that we're doing here. Karl: It is a philosophical take, but it's also a philosophical take based on the way that the science of mind has been evolving and the new evidence that we have. So, it's not purely philosophical. Jorge: I say that with the caveat that I think that when a lot of folks hear the word "philosophy," they turn off, right? They think, "well, this is not actionable." But I think of a philosophy as a way of understanding what it is that you're doing in the world. Karl: Yes. And I think that anyone who has paid attention to robotics and artificial intelligence over the last five or six years, has realized that one of the major problems that the field has had has been ignoring philosophy. I mean, artificial intelligence and robotics has really revived philosophy in many ways. But I just don't think it's actually sort of revived it, but it's made like all the people who are doing this philosophy of ethics is super important. Philosophy of mind is super important. I recently read a book by Brian Christian called The Alignment Problem. And it's all about this question of what's known in AI as, how do we align human objectives with robotic objectives? How do we make sure that robots don't go out of control? The infamous paperclip optimizer problem, right? And you can read this book in a number of ways, but one of the most important ones is all of these people in computer science and robotics and AI going, "whoa, philosophy! Really important! Not a waste of time." Deep, deep questions here that have completely changed the way that they have gone thinking about the technology and the assumptions that they have underneath it. Jorge: And what I'm hearing here is that as designers of information systems or interactive systems — if we dare use that label now — we have to develop the awareness that what we're making is not just a collection of things to interact with. In some ways, it is extensions of people's minds. And much like the folks who are working on AI and robotics are taking the time out to think about what they're doing in a broader light, that we should be doing the same. Is that a fair summary of what you're saying here? Karl: Yes, I think so. I would draw an analogy to another idea from biology — actually paleontology — of punctuated equilibrium. There was a question for a long time about how evolution happens and issues and questions with the fossil record because there seemed to be gaps in the fossil record and long periods of basically not much happens. And so, in the late sixties and early seventies, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge proposed a theory… what they called, "punctuated equilibrium." You can think of it as a curve. Think of a chart where you've got an X and Y axis, where you have a rise in an uptick. Time is along the bottom. Rate of evolutionary changes on the Y axis. And you have a rise, and then it tapers off, and it plateaus, and then it goes up again for another period of time. And then we have a period of where it plateaus, and then you have another period of change, and then it plateaus. So, evolutionary change is not a linear line. It's not this sort of straight line up at a steady rate. You have periods of intense change, and then you have periods of relatively little change. And I think that this is one way to look at how design has evolved. We had a period, I would argue, of very intense change through the late 90s and early 2000s with the advent of the web. You know, information architecture comes into its own, usability engineering becomes much more recognized and interaction design becomes a more widely recognized term. And user experience comes up and becomes more or less sort of this much more dominant term. But the early stages really are there, we have this period. And then I would say that we had a long period where… long being relative, I guess, but we had a number of years where things were more stable. Then what happens is we get mobile, right? And especially by say 2010, along with this mobile, I feel like we had large organizations especially, went and said, "you know, all of this work that people in UX do, this is really important, and we're going to stop hiring outside agencies and different groups to come in and consult and do this on a contract basis. We're going to start building UX teams." And we've seen, over the last 10 years, this massive growth in UX as an industry. We have people who go get a degree in graphic design, computer science, or whatever, and then they do a 12-week bootcamp in UX, and now they're a UX designer. We've been growing like this massive number of people in the field, and all of these people have been moving in-house. And so, we have this period of rapid change where we have a growth of the field, and we are having to integrate it into organizations where it's now a really important part of it. And so, when I look at this, we see this period of change. We've seen changes like this through technology. We had the PC revolution, then we had the web. And then we have mobile. Everyone in Silicon Valley is thinking about, well, what's the next iteration of this because this tends to happen in periods of 12 to 15 years. What's the next new major platform? And we can see this coming. We're going to have another period of intense change. And when I look at the trend lines, as opposed to the headlines, you can see some of them that. They seem fairly obvious: more and more information, more embedded computation, not just sitting on a desk or even in your pocket. We have pervasive sensors. We have intelligent response to what human beings are doing. The capacity for a greater and tighter connection between people and the digital world. We have more complex pattern matching. We are having machines now that — with robots and AI — they can do things at a scale that humans cannot do. Or an accuracy or a speed that they cannot do. If we think about these as being separate, out there, aside from human abilities, I think we're going to wind up missing a huge opportunity. I think design is going to be caught flat-footed. The book that Steven and I wrote is an early attempt, from a design perspective, strongly influenced by information architecture, but also coming from distributed cognition, to explore some of these ideas and do it in a way which could be helpful to designers. And so, we break the book up into several sections. We talked about associations. We talk about visual representations. We talk about interaction, and we talk about something called coordination. And then we look towards the future. And in each of these, we explore some of the science. We give lots of examples. But we also try to provide frameworks for people, conceptual tools so that people can look at these different areas and begin this process of building it up. We would not in any way think that this is a be all and end all, but we were consciously trying to provide people with a way to think about the problems that they have now and provide a way to think about them that is going to be more helpful in the future, given these trend lines. Closing Jorge: I already mentioned in the previous episode that it was one of my favorite reads of last year, and I strongly encourage folks to check out the book. And other than that, Karl, where are the best places for folks to follow up with you? Karl: The best place to find me at the present is on Twitter. I'm @karlfast, and that's K-A-R-L-F-A-S-T. I am not super active on Twitter, but if people ping me, I will respond. You can also look me up on LinkedIn. And again, if you message me there, I will respond. Jorge: Thank you so much for being with us and being so generous with your time. Karl: Pleasure to be here. Always nice talking with you.

Karl Fast is an independent scholar, information architect, and futurist. He's the co-author of Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding alongside Stephen Anderson, who was featured in episode 39 of the show. In this conversation, Karl tells us about what interaction designers can learn from cognitive science. We had a lot to discuss, so this episode is the first of two on the subject. Show notes @karlfast on Twitter Karl Fast on LinkedIn Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding by Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman Stroop effect The Extended Mind by Andy Clark and David Chalmers Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension by Andy Clark HCI Remixed: Essays on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community, edited by Thomas Erickson and David W. McDonald On Distinguishing Epistemic From Pragmatic Action by David Kirsch and Paul Maglio (pdf) The Intelligent Use of Space by David Kirsch Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think by Susan Goldin-Meadow Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes In The Age Of The Machine by Don Norman The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition by Don Norman Hans Moravec Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Karl, welcome to the show. Karl: Thanks for having me. Jorge: Well, I'm very excited to have you here. For folks who might not know you, would you mind, please, introducing yourself? About Karl Karl: Sure. So, my name is Karl Fast. I am a Canadian by birth and education and sentiment, and I have been working in information architecture and user experience design for about 25 years or so. I like to say now, I create systems for thinking in a world that is just jam-packed with information. And a lot of the questions I have, and the work that I do, are about how do we live well and how do we think well in a world where information is cheap and abundant and pervasive. But the same is also true for computation and the networks and all the different things that we use to bring these together. And we can see trend lines where we've got more technology, we're more dependent on it, it's everywhere. And the ways that we use that technology — the possibilities of it — are simply becoming richer and richer. And you can think back to the early days when we simply had a keyboard and a screen that was one color. And then we added a mouse. And then we had multiple colors. And then we get mobile and all of these types of things. I have worked as a practicing information architect. I have worked in startups, I have worked as a consultant. I have a Ph.D. in information science, and my work was on how to take digital libraries and how to design them so that they are more of a knowledge creation tool rather than just simply a document repository where you have to search and browse. How do we actually create knowledge from digital libraries, and how do we expand that potential? And then, I spent about seven years working as a professor of user experience design at Kent State University. And now I think of myself more as an independent scholar, and I do consulting work and writing. I also think of myself as practicing what I call "information futurism," of a sort — thinking about where information will go in terms of how we can use it as this resource. The last thing I would mention is that about a year ago, I co-published a book with Stephen Anderson. It's called Figure It Out: Getting From Information To Understanding. And some of the stuff I think we're going to talk about today is definitely part of that book. Jorge: Stephen was a guest on the show as well. Your book was one of my favorite reads from last year. It touches on many subjects that I believe more designers should know about. And you mentioned several of them during your introduction there. I'm very curious about the phrase "systems for thinking in a world"... I don't know if you use the word "flooded," but in a world that is inundated with information, right? Information Karl: Yeah, inundated, jam-packed. I think of information in a historical context. You know, in terms of civilization, really, that one way to look at civilization and information is that we have always tried to have more information. We have always developed new technologies for creating information, for recording it, for copying it, for distributing it, for organizing it, for sharing it, et cetera. And we have now — especially over the last 20, 30 years through digital technologies and through the internet — have just exploded the amount of information. And the other way to look at it, though, is we have lowered the cost, right? The cost of creating, publishing, distributing, searching, organizing. All of these types of things have been lowered. But just because we have information doesn't mean we also have understanding. And the cost of understanding still remains, I think in many cases, very high. One of the things that we're interested in in the book and my long-term interest here is: well, how do we change that cost structure around understanding? And I'm using that as a broad term to include things like planning, reasoning, thinking, sense-making, analyzing, decision-making — all of these more cognitively complex activities, which is, you know, more than say, "Oh, I'm just kind of skimming the headlines in the paper," or something like that. Systems for thinking Jorge: When you say systems for thinking, what does that mean? Like, what would a system for thinking be? Karl: Well, part of it is shifting language, as opposed to a formal definition of systems — or shifting our perspective. Many times, I think, if you work in design, you work in user experience, you make products. We tend to think about the application; we think about the device; we think about the website; we think about the content. We think about this thing — this artifact — out there, as opposed to all of the other things that could come into play. In that sense, I think we've often narrowed our views and sometimes often by necessity. But when we look at this long-term trajectory about where our technologies are going, we are going to see more and more opportunities to bleed these things out into the world, to connect to aspects of our physical environment, to connect to other people in richer ways. And we can also see this with augmented reality. We can see it with virtual reality. But we can also see it with artificial intelligence and robots. And what would it mean for a robot not to be just pursuing its own goals but to help pursue our goals as a true cognitive partner that has a physical presence? So these are big, big questions that I think that we need to be asking. And I think that a lot of the work that we do tends to be really focused on, well, I've got a rectangle with a lot of pixels. Jorge: What I hear implicit in what you're saying here is that for us to effectively design and create these systems that you're alluding to, like robots and AI, we have to somehow shift our understanding of the work we're doing beyond these rectangles composed of pixels. Karl: Yes, I think so. We need a broader toolkit. I like to talk about a broader conceptual toolkit. You know, we have a set of concepts that we use all the time when we are doing design when we are making things. But a lot of that language has been built up around a whole certain set of assumptions. So, let me give you an example of this. There's a paper that I was reading a couple of years ago about what researchers are calling mobile cognition. And they start with an observation that, in hindsight, is incredibly obvious. All these psychology studies we have — all these studies that are about how people think and how they work with information and make decisions. Think about all this stuff in, say, Thinking Fast And Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, right? Famous book. Well, basically pretty much every single one of those studies, the person is sitting down. But it turns out that there's a whole bunch of studies about, hey! When people stand up, when they walk around, things change. It actually activates different parts of our brains and opens things up. There's an example of this longstanding thing in psychology called the Stroop test. So this is where you're going to have a list of different names of colors, right? So red, yellow, blue. But sometimes the color is going to match the word, and sometimes it isn't. So, it's got to do two different things, and it's generally used as a measure of cognitive control. Can you focus your attention on the salient information, and can you come up with the correct answer? How many answers can you get correct, and can you do it quickly? Well, it turns out all the studies in the Stroop test, which is a standing thing in psychology, right? They were all done sitting down. So then somebody did a study where they said, "Okay, stand up." And they did better. So much of this, especially when we look at the research that we are building and the conceptual tools that we have, are all based on a set of assumptions that, when you see some of these things, you're like, "Oh, well, that's pretty obvious in hindsight!" But it's so obvious; we've kind of forgotten about it. Jorge: In the book, you talk about a distinction between the... I think you call it a brain-bound view of how the mind works versus a more expansive view. I think you call it the extended view. Is that what you're referring to here? Karl: Yeah. So, there's a famous paper by two philosophers, David Chalmers and Andy Clark. And in the mid-90s, I want to say 1996? They wrote a paper called The Extended Mind. And the idea of The Extended Mind is, well, where does the mind end? That's the question that they're really asking. And what they argue is that through cognitive science over the last 50 years and the rise of cognitive science starting in the late 1950s, come to equate the mind and the brain as the same thing. And they argue that they are not the same thing. That we shouldn't think of that, and to do that as very limiting. We can think the brain certainly ends inside the skull. But the mind, they argue, does not. We can think of the mind as extending out into the world. Now there are weak and strong forms of that argument. In the strong form of that argument, you would say that when you are holding your phone, it is literally part of your mind. In the weak form, you would think of it more as a way for offloading. And there's a lot of debate around this. The extended mind is one idea within this broader notion that I think many listeners have heard of to some extent, which is this embodied cognition or embodiment for short. In the book, we use the word "embodiment" as sort of this broad shorthand, kind of in the way that in design circles, we use UX often as a sort of umbrella term, rather than getting into the nitty-gritty details of the difference between interaction design and information architecture and usability and content strategy, right? Each of those is important, but as a broader catchall, that people who aren't doing the detailed work — it's a label for them. And so, we use embodiment in the book as this broad-encompassing thing because within it, if you dip into the academic literature, you're going to hear: extended mind, distributed cognition, situated action, activity theory, and activism. There's a whole pile of these different ideas. The distinction between the brain-bound model of cognition and the extended-mind model of cognition is terminology that Andy Clark comes up with. He doesn't use it in that paper, but he's explored it in several books. And I believe that actual phrasing comes from a wonderful book he wrote — although it's a heavy book for sure — called Supersizing The Mind. Interactionism Jorge: Circling back to the Stroop test that you were talking about and how the test participants' performance in the test varied depending on whether they were standing or sitting, what that implies for me at least, is a need for greater consciousness about what my body is doing whenever I'm performing any kind of activity — especially a cognitively taxing activity. Is that fair? Karl: I think that's absolutely fair. I would also say that this is important for people who are making things, who are building the tools that we have. We talked a bit earlier about the word "systems." You asked me about that, and I tend to use it in somewhat a loose way to mean that you're not seeing just the app, just the website, just the device; you're seeing the body. You're seeing the physical space in which they are. But more importantly, you're seeing how all of these things are connected together and what connects them together, right? So, you are changing the unit of analysis. In the book, we described this as the "locus of understanding." Where is the locus of understanding? Is it the app? Is it in the brain? Or is it more connected to all of these things? And what is it that connects these things? In the way that I've come to see it, I have come to see interaction as the fundamental thing that connects all of these together. And I've come to believe that we have a relatively weak way of talking about interaction or an understanding of all of the ways that it happens. I don't think this is great terminology, but my current working term for this is "interactionism." It's a bit of a problematic word, which I wouldn't mind getting into if you don't mind. Jorge: Let's do it. But first, to be clear on what you're saying here: Am I right to understand that what you're saying is that interaction in this view is where the locus of understanding resides? Karl: No, I don't think so. I wouldn't say that. That is one thing that one can focus on it, and I don't think we see it very well. And I can give you some examples of why I think interaction is really important. I think it's often a case where we want to change the locus. Sometimes you do want to zoom down and be able to focus just on what's happening on the screen or the app. Sometimes you do want to focus more on what the body is. I tend to think about changing the locus; we need to also go wide. To look at all of those things, which we would normally see as independent and discreet and interaction as kind of this glue that binds them and makes them all function together as a bigger system. Sometimes through things which are explicit, sometimes through things which are implicit or have to be inferred, and if we do that I think we get a new language for what do we see when we're, say, doing a usability study? Or what do we see when we're doing ethnographic work? And how do we interpret that? Jorge: So would a fair reading then be that whenever we are designing for interaction — when we're doing interaction design — we are... Well, first of all, this lays a big responsibility on folks, right? Because somehow you're designing part of the person's cognitive apparatus, so to speak. Pragmatic and epistemic actions Karl: Sure, sure. But I mean, interaction design already talks about designing behavior, right? And you know, that means that you are shaping the things that people do and the ways that they are in the world. But we can also talk about it in terms of just facilitating certain types of interactions. So let's step back a little bit and tell you about a paper that I read. I've got this lovely book called HCI Remixed. Learned about it 15 years ago. And they asked a number of famous people, important scholars and researchers in the world of human-computer interaction about what was the one paper that really changed your thinking. And they didn't print those papers; they just asked everyone to write an essay about that paper and why it changed their thinking. And every time I pick this book up, I think to myself, "well, what's the paper that changed my thinking?" And the answer is really easy. It's the paper called On Distinguishing Epistemic From Pragmatic Action by a guy named David Kirsch, who is a cognitive scientist at UC San Diego and his grad student at the time, Paul Maglio. And this is a study about how people play Tetris, but it's easiest to understand it by thinking about how people play chess. So when people play chess, imagine that you want to move the Bishop. You pick the Bishop up, and you move it into position, but you keep your finger on it. And as you've moved it, you realize, "Uh oh. That's a bad move." So you move it back. From an interaction design perspective, or from HCI, we would say, "Oh, well, you have done two actions on the world. You move the piece. And then you pressed undo." That was, therefore, an inefficient action. It was not worth doing. We would even probably classify it as a mistake. And what Kirsch and Maglio say is, we should not think of all action as being the same. Action gets done for different reasons. And through this study of how people learn to play Tetris, right? They're using chess to illustrate this. They argue for distinction between two different types of actions, at least. So this example, they would talk about what would we call pragmatic action. And a pragmatic action is one in which you are making a change in the world, the point of which is to change the world. Jorge: Moving the Bishop to a different square. Karl: You're moving the Bishop to a different square. So if that moving of the Bishop is pragmatic, then it's an error. But we all know from having learned to play chess that that's not an error, right? And so, they argue that what you're really doing is: you are moving it, in this case, and once you have it in that position, you're like, "it's easier to see." And it is easier to see than to imagine that in your head. So, it's what they call an epistemic action. Epistemic as in epistemology, as in of or relating to how we know. So, epistemic actions are things that we do, changes we bring about in the world that make our mental computation — that make our thinking — easier? That make it faster, or that make it more reliable, to reduce the chance of making a mistake. And once you begin to think about epistemic actions, when you see actions this way, there are so many different examples of it. You see it all over the place. Because if we only had pragmatic actions, what would happen is you would… This is how you would play chess. This is how the ideal person should play chess: they should sit their stock-still and never move. And then, they should make the most physically efficient move possible to pick up a piece and move it into position with as little extraneous movement of the body as possible. Because there's a whole bunch of different things that we do that really can't be accounted for unless we... if everything is a pragmatic action. There are so many things we would say are completely superfluous. For example, consider gesturing with our hands. Why do we talk with our hands? There are some people who have looked at this question. There's a woman named Susan Goldin-Meadow. She published a book about, oh, it was about 15 years ago. It's called Hearing Gesture. And for 25 years basically — or more by this point — she has been asking this question: why do people talk with their hands? And there's a pretty obvious answer to this, right? You're like, "Oh, well, I'm using these gestures because I am creating information for you, the listener." These are things that are helpful. It's extra information, just like talking faster or talking slower or speaking loudly or talking softly. That conveys different information. And that's a good answer. And the research says, "Yep, that is absolutely part of the story." So, why do you talk with your hands when you're on the phone? Or, say, on a podcast? Because people do this. You can't see the other person, but people still make these gestures. So, one answer there — and I think a pretty good one — is, "Oh, well, it's a learned behavior." You're used to being around other people, right? So obviously, these gestures would carry over. Fine. What about someone who is blind? Why do they talk with their hands? Because studies of people who are not sighted — and who are born without sight — show that they also talk with their hands. They will also talk with their hands when they are talking to someone else who is blind. So imagine, right? You've got two people, neither of whom has ever seen a hand. They are talking back and forth. They are using hand gestures, which they know cannot be seen. And when they analyze them and classify them, it turns out that they're using very similar gestures when talking about the same kinds of concepts. There are lots of studies around this, like, say, comparing kids who are sighted and kids who are blind and how they use gestures when they have a reasoning task, and then they have to explain their reasoning to somebody else. And they both use similar kinds of gestures. The conclusion from all of these studies, at a high level, is that, yes, there is a component in which that communication is meant for someone else. That gesture is for the listener. But there is also a component in which that is directed inward. We actually use these gestures to shape and facilitate and kind of grease our internal cognitive mechanism. And you can see this the next time you go to a meeting, and you're called on to speak. Try sitting on your hands and see how well you talk. Nobody likes to do it. And people actually find this to be a struggle. Or go to a conference, right? We're talking towards later on in the COVID pandemic where we're not really at conferences. But you'll go to say a panel discussion, and somebody asks a question, and somebody might fumble, but what's going to happen, I guarantee it. They're going to start moving their hands, and then the words will just tumble out, and it's because the gesture has an internal component to it. That's what the research is pointing to. Jorge: What I hear there is that somehow the gesture is part of our thinking system. Karl: Yes. Jorge: How so? Like how does that work? And I want to go back to the Bishop. It's clear to me what the pragmatic action does in that case, but what does the epistemic action buy me? Maybe I put my fingers on the Bishop, lift it, and hover it over the board. Am I building some kind of more tangible mental model of possible moves? Karl: You are because... Well, what you're doing is you're taking things out of a "brain" space and putting them into a perceptual space, right? You're shifting that board. So you no longer have to see.... well, without that as an epistemic action, with the Bishop, you have to — in your mind — imagine what the board would look like if you move the Bishop into that position. But when you do it in a space, now it becomes a perceptual problem, and you can actually see it. And that is easier for us to do, especially when you're a beginner. You could say here, "well, expert chess players, grandmasters, they don't do that." And this is true. But the reason they don't is that they have practiced really, really hard for many, many years to get really good at it. And studies of chess players have shown that the cultural idea we have of chess as being this indicator of intelligence are really incorrect. What are chess players really, really smart at? They're really smart at playing chess, but that doesn't make them really smart at, say, astrophysics. The point of that is that there is always a point in some domain — no matter how expert you are — there's always some other area where your brain-based cognitive abilities have limitations. We always reach a point... it is... our brain is just simply overwhelmed. Don Norman said it really well, many, many years ago at the lovely book design Things That Make Us Smart. "The power of the unaided human mind is greatly exaggerated." And so one way to look at what we do in design is, like, that statement. We are building things to overcome and extend, augment, and amplify the powers of the human mind. But what embodiment is telling us is that we need to incorporate more things into that picture. And I think that's especially going to be true as our technologies improve and allow us to use more and more of our physical abilities, our interactive abilities, our interactive powers, to amplify that. Learning about embodiment Jorge: Well, it sounds like an area that designers — particularly designers who are working on the sort of digital systems that we run so much of our lives on — need to be aware of. And unfortunately, we're running out of time here. I feel like we might need a second conversation to dig more deeply into this, but where could folks follow up with this subject? Like where can they find out more about it? Karl: If I was to recommend one thing for people to go back to that is very readable as a good starter on this, I actually would point to Don Norman's book Things That Make Us Smart. He talks about these kinds of ideas in that book, and that book is almost 30 years old now. I feel that book has been hugely overshadowed by The Design of Everyday Things. He gives many different examples. He introduces the concept of what's called distributed cognition, which is a subset... What I think of as embodiment. One of the principles of distributed cognition is that cognition is embodied. The Tetris paper is considered to be a major paper within the world of distributed cognition. I would recommend looking at that paper, On Distinguishing Epistemic From Pragmatic Action, by David Kirsch. I don't recommend reading all of it. We talked about just the one example he used in that paper of chess as an analogy for explaining their findings. The focus of the paper is actually on how people play Tetris, and they developed a robotic Tetris player — a program to play Tetris — and compared it to how human beings play Tetris and looked at the differences between those two. And the robotic player was based on a classical, cognitive science model, where it's all based on you perceive, and then you think, and you act. So I think that's a really interesting place to look as well. David Kirsch also has another paper that I think is just fantastic, very readable. It is called The Intelligent Use of Space. And you can easily find this one online as well. And this is a particularly fascinating one because it's published not in a journal of cognition or a journal of design; it is published in a journal of artificial intelligence. It is presented as, I think, a really damning critique of AI and robotics. Because what he points out is that all of this stuff, cognitive science, AI, and also human-computer interaction, and thus UX, has built on classical cognitive science. And classical cognitive science says, "Hey! We perceive information from the world. Then we've got our mind — our brain — which does all this thinking work, the cognitive part. And then action is simply output." And embodiment is like, no, no, no. It's much more complicated than that. Thinking and perception and action and the world are all intertwined in many, many different kinds of ways. It's very much more complicated than that. And so he says, "look, if robotics is based on this idea, like, it doesn't use the space around it as part of the thinking." The first driving robot, there's a guy named Hans Moravec. I think that's his name. And he did some of the early work on robotic vehicles as a paper that he did for his, I think, for his Ph.D. dissertation. The way that he designed the robot, it would look, it would sort of scan the environment and then it would think for like, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes? Okay, so it would scan the environment like, okay, where all the different objects? And then it would think and plan out its movements for 10 or 15 minutes, and then it would move like up to about three feet, and then it would stop, and then it would scan the world again, and then it would move. Well, we don't work that way. Babies don't work that way. Like, no animal works that way. you might think, "Oh, well — that's the early eighties." Like, that's the way that it used to be. But this is still the way it is in robotics. A big project in AI has been how can you get robot arms to assemble a chair, like a chair from Ikea. Can you do it? This is considered to be like the moon landing equivalent in robotics. And so, a paper came out about four years ago that made kind of a splash. It was even on the front page of The New York Times. They went and bought two off-the-shelf robotic arms and then programmed them so that they could assemble a basic Ikea chair. And when you read the paper, it's like, wow, it did it in 20 minutes. A chair! Like, people are going to be out of work. But then you read the paper, and you realize that does not assemble chairs anything like human beings assemble chairs. So, they broke the problem down into three phases. The first phase is scanning the environment. They randomly scatter all the pieces of the chair around onto the surface. And the robot spends three seconds scanning to identify all the different pieces. Then it goes and makes a plan for how it's going to assemble a chair. It sits stock still for about... I think it's like eight or nine minutes just thinking, not moving. And then the next 11 minutes is executing the plan. So it makes this plan. "I'm going to pick this piece up, and then I'm going to rotate this arm, and then I moved the other arm, and I'm going to rotate that, I'm going to grab it over here..." And that's how it works. It's this whole idea of perception, and then cognition is thinking really hard inside the head, and then action is simply the output. This idea is buried really deep. And if we're going to build a future where we have robots as true partners — software AI as true collaborators — and we can begin to see human beings in the full dimensions of our cognitive abilities, right? Until we can do that kind of thing, I think we're always going to be limited as designers. And we know that our technologies are changing quite a bit. We can see all these things on the horizon. So, my question around this idea of interaction is, are we really prepared for that? And I don't think we are. Jorge: Karl, it seems like a great place to wrap it up, even though it's kind of in a question mark. It's a prompt for us to have a second conversation about this. Karl: Yeah. Then we can talk about rats and heroin! Closing Jorge: I like that. That would be interesting. I'm very curious now as to what you mean by that. But in the meantime, where can folks follow up with you? Karl: So, I tend to hide a little bit. I've especially been hiding the last six or seven years. I'm hoping that that is going to change over the next year or so. The main way to follow me probably is on Twitter. You can find me on Twitter; I'm @karlfast. That's K-A-R-L-F-A-S-T. Technically, I have a website, but it's like seven years out of date. You can also find me on LinkedIn. You can look me up there and send me a message. I will tend to respond to those two places; it just might take me a couple of weeks because I tend to be very slow. I'm not active on Twitter, really at all. But I will be notified, and I will generally respond. Jorge: Well, fantastic. I'm going to include links to all of those ways of getting in touch with you in the show notes, and I'm also going to include links to the papers and the resources that you mentioned above. Thank you so much for being with us today, Karl! Karl: Thank you for having me.

In part two of our discussion with Karl Fast, we take a deep dive into how our bodies and physical surroundings are used as tools and actors in the process of cognition and understanding - that understanding is not something that solely happens in the mind but is inextricably linked to artifacts of our surroundings. Karl Fast is a former professor of User Experience Design and Information Architecture, an Information Futurist, and the co-author of the book, Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Throughout the history of civilization, we have seen an ever-increasing need and ability to create, store, and share information. But as our ability to access information grows exponentially, are we as designers, focusing too narrowly on the short-term; designing, developing, and shipping product based on the information and technology available to us today and ignoring what the future might have in store for us? In this episode, Karl Fast, a former professor, the co-author of Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding, and an Information Futurist, explores how we might approach the challenges associated with the exponential growth of information in our uncertain future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen Anderson and Karl Fast vist the show to talk about their book "Figure It Out: Getting From Information To Understanding."

What does it mean to understand something? How do we take information and create understanding? We talk to with Stephen Anderson and Karl Fast and do our best to Figure It Out. we talk about the challenge of making something understandable, different theories of cognition including embodied cognition, how some things we often consider wrong... The post #242 Figure it out with Stephen Anderson and Karl Fast appeared first on UX Podcast.

My guest today is Stephen P. Anderson. Stephen is a design leader who is focused on workforce learning and organizational development. He and Karl Fast recently published Figure it Out, a new book about how we can transform information to increase understanding. This is also the subject of our conversation; I hope you find it valuable. Listen to the full conversation Download episode 39   Show notes Stephen P. Anderson @stephenanderson on Twitter The Mighty Minds Club Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding, by Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences, by Stephen P. Anderson Mental Notes card deck by Stephen P. Anderson From Paths to Sandboxes by Stephen P. Anderson Scrabble The Information Architecture Conference Mural Miro Karl Fast Google Maps Business model canvas Polarity mapping Photo of the Dragon spacecraft cockpit The Art of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford (PDF) Hey.com Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the full transcript Jorge: So, Stephen, welcome to the show. Stephen: Great to be here Jorge! Jorge: Well, it's fantastic having you. For folks who might not know you, can you please introduce yourself? About Stephen Stephen: Yeah. My name is Stephen P. Anderson. I'm founder of The Mighty Minds Club and my second book, Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding was just published in May. I think a lot of folks are, some folks may know me from kind of the design world, the design circuit, where I've been doing design work for the last, oh, 20 years or so. I started talking publicly and sharing ideas about 10 years ago. But what a lot of people don't know is that I've kind of transitioned in the past couple of years in what I do as a designer. And so, a lot of what I'm doing now is more workshops, facilitation. I'm really interested in workforce learning and organizational development. And I even wrote a post earlier this year on how I, as a designer, feel like this is the natural progression of all that I'm doing as a designer, interested in changing the world and making it a better place. Jorge: And what is your background? How did you get into design? Stephen: So, interesting story. I was actually a high school English teacher, a high school English and Gifted and Talented, for the first three years out of college, always had an interest in, I would say graphic design. And in fact, as a teacher, I would make these handouts where I've been… this is back in the days of photocopiers and things, and kind of desktop publishing was just emerging, but I would cut out things from clip art or magazines, you know, take them through these handouts. I would line-break back in Word the end of every sentence to wrap around images. And, you know, making album covers for friends and bands and things probably where the interest in graphic design started. And then there was a series of odd jobs I had after teaching and through that, I started doing logo design, got hooked up with a dot com startup, and they were my first formal job as a designer. And this was in, I want to say '98? And, so I moved back to Dallas to join the startup. It grew very quickly. I learned a lot. And then over the next 15 years or so, you know, learned that it's not just how things look it's about usability and oh, by the way, it's not just about usability, we've got to think about – I didn't know the phrase at the time – but information architecture, how these objects and relationships map to each other. I became bored with a lot of the tactical stuff and became interested more in strategy and business topics, became more interested in human behavior and psychology, and why won't people do the things we want them to do? Why won't people would click on the things that we want them to click? And so that led to my first book in around 2010 or so, which is called Seductive Interaction Design. And also, around the same time I self-published The Mental Notes Card Deck, which a lot of people know me for as well. So again, very much a focus on human behavior. So that was about 10 years ago. And over that time, one shift I've gone through was marked by probably a seminal talk for me, “From Paths to Sandboxes,” where I started shifting my thinking from shaping the path that I want people to follow to creating the sandbox or the conditions where people play and learn. And so, my mindset shifted from that of a transaction and getting something I want, to how do I create the conditions for us to learn and work together? And I think that ethos and that idea has affected everything I've done since. And in many ways, the new book, even though it's about working with information as a resource, there's that ethos or that idea behind it, which is how do we pause, slow down, and figure things out individually, but also collectively. Cognitive environments Jorge: An image from the book that comes to mind as you describe the creation of sandboxes is the cockpit of an airliner as – let me see if I understood it correctly – but it's almost like the cockpit of an airliner as a thinking environment. Is that a fair take on that? Stephen: Yeah, I think one of the fundamental ideas – and we have a whole chapter, the second chapter that lays the foundation for this – is that cognition or thinking is distributed. And what we mean by that is we have this traditional idea, whether we label it as such or not, is that we have this idea that thinking happens in the brain, right? We do this computation in the brain and then we tell our body what to do. But I think if we pause and slow down, we know that this really isn't the case. So, if we think about why we've rearranged Scrabble tiles, for example – which I think is an example we mentioned in the book – if we did all our thinking in the brain, we wouldn't need to do that, right? But by rearranging these tiles, we see more possibilities. We bring thinking into… or thinking is in the environment around us. So, with the cockpit example, what we're talking about is it's a distributed system of cognitive resources. So, it's not only the pilot, it's also the copilot. It's also the controls in front of them. It's the air traffic controller tower. You know, they're reaching out to… it's this whole system of cognitive resources they're required to do the job of taking and landing a plane. And that's one of the examples we use to say, you know, thinking doesn't just happen in our brains, or it's not a solitary activity. And to bring this home, in a workshop where we do this, I ask everyone a simple math problem. Like, you know, what's seven plus nine? Right? And everyone just answers. And I would say, okay, in that case, you could say thinking happened “in the brain.” But I would actually argue if you went back to early childhood, it didn't happen in the brain when you learn seven and nine and these concepts; you probably were interacting with physical, tangible objects. But here in the moment, it's an association you have, you just activated that association. So, seven plus nine equals the answer, right? And then I say, okay, great. Now I want you to do another problem. 357 times 58. And instinctively either people will reach for a calculator on their phones or they start using the paper in front of them. And I say, okay, pause. Notice how you brought thinking into the world, and you're using these tools to think. So now these tools are part of your thinking and your cognitive environment. That's, that's the point we want to make. Jorge: The way I'm understanding it is that the traditional way of thinking about it is that thinking happens in the bit of meat between the ears, but the way that you're talking about it, it really is something that happens in conjunction with the… the entity that is doing the thinking is thinking in conjunction with the environment. It's almost like the environment is part of the thinking apparatus. Stephen: Correct. Yeah. It's becoming aware of the role of the body and the environment and others in that environment and how thinking happens in those cases. Now, if it's a super simple problem that may be very local and it may just be you in front of your notebook, right? Which is one extension of that. But if it's a particularly complicated problem… the example I like to bring up is think of workshops, right? Where we have these sticky notes, we have whiteboards, we have all these things that facilitate us working together and becoming more of a – I don't know, hive-mind is not the right word because we're not thinking the same – but if facilitates the dialogue that we can all have and ways we can exchange information and exchange ideas. And I think a lot of people don't think of the sticky notes as part of the cognitive environment. But when you start looking at it that way, then you become aware: well, what does it mean to have different colored sticky notes? Or how will it the affect our conversation to ask people to use Sharpie markers instead of pens on the sticky notes, and how will that affect visibility when things are on the wall? And you start to think about designing that learning and that learning-construction environment in a way that leads to fruitful outcomes. Collaborating remotely Jorge: I've previously referred to the space where workshops happen and the pile of sticky notes as a shared cognitive space, where we're… like you said, it's not necessarily that we're creating a hive-mind, but we are creating this receptacle where our minds can function together more effectively in some way because we are creating shared references in the environment. And I'm wondering, given that for the past three months we have not been able to be in these shared cognitive spaces, if you have found major differences and or ways of doing this effectively when working remotely? Stephen: Oh gosh, absolutely. I'm having to retool a lot of things like workshops I've done for years, I'm having to rethink. So I had one scheduled for the IA Conference earlier this year, and there was that moment where I had to decide, am I going to bring this online you know, using tools like Mural or Miro or other things, or am I going to pull the plug and, you know, just for context, that workshop, I do things where I do like live body polling. So I'll have everyone like line up along the wall on the scale, right? We have had this sort of, almost like a board game I've made the people play with at their tables, so it's very tangible. It's physical. People are moving things around. So, it's, it goes well beyond just the moving stickies. Like I use the physical space in these workshops. And so, I had to pause and say, okay, can this translate online? And if so, do I have enough time to do so? I ended up pulling the plug just because with the amount of time allowed, I was like, okay, there is a significant restructure that would be required to explore this material in a comparable way to what we do in the workshop. That said, I've been stepping back and taking time and thinking about how to do that with the same workshop material, and I'm kind of excited. I wouldn't say it's… it might be better. Actually, I think it will be better in some ways. I think “different” is probably a better word, but I'm moving towards something where we'll meet for a couple of times a week for several weeks, 90 minutes each time. And as I'm thinking about this, that shift from, you know, a physical all-day in-person workshop to now something that happens over say a month period and small chunks, allows time between sessions, for reflection and questions, which we know from learning theory is a big part of how we learn when you have a chance to reflect on things and think about it and come back again. There's a chance to assign questions for reflection or homework or things. So, I'm actually excited about the shift to that. So, there are certainly a lot of things lost in the shift to online and distributed. But there are some opportunities for new things. I think that's the catch, where instead of just trying to replicate or bring what you did online, in a physical format, stepping back and saying, okay, what are the advantages or disadvantages of going all digital and distributed and remote? And really catering to this differentiated medium and playing to its strengths and avoiding the weaknesses. And that's hard. I think a lot of people just want to say, okay, can I replicate what I did in-person online? And I don't know, I think you're seeing mixed results there. Outsourcing understanding Jorge: Yeah, I can relate to that. I was facilitating a workshop just yesterday and we were using Miro, which tries to replicate a whiteboard with sticky notes. And the workshop participants had put virtual sticky notes on the “wall” – I'm doing air quotes, as I say, sticky notes on wall, right? – in advance. And facilitating a workshop with sticky notes on the wall is something that I've done many, many, many times in my life and I'm very comfortable with and I can do very quickly. And it's not the same to be able to grab a physical sticky note and move it around than it is to point and click at something with a mouse. There was a little bit of friction there in going through that. And with that in mind, I wanted to ask you about a passage in the book. And this is an aside in one of the chapters… I'm going to quote now, you say I, and you clarify that it… because we haven't mentioned this, but this book is co-authored with our friend Karl Fast. Stephen: Correct. Jorge: But this snippet is something you wrote because it actually calls it out. It says, “I, Stephen, worry that we've conflated making things user-centered with always making things easy. And in the process, we risk dumbing down people. There's a kind of bad friction that should be removed from all interactions, but there's also the good kind of friction that gets us into a flow state and leads to understanding.” I'm very curious about that. I'm hoping you will expand on that a little bit here. Stephen: Oh, gosh, I think you had the privilege of being one of the early readers and I think I had a whole lot more on this that we ended up cutting just because of… we wanted to, we made the point, right? And I didn't need to repeat examples. But yeah, that's something that concerns me, something I feel strongly about. And again, my bias is towards education and I would love to see the entire world up-leveled in terms of our understanding our own cognitive abilities. So, anything that… or in most cases, things that don't challenge us or don't teach us along the way I tend to be critical or at least hesitant about. I can't remember which example made it to the book. But I think I use maps and finding a parking space. And I held up two examples, and one was a designer who has done a makeover on those confusing… the confusing parking signs, that's the one in the book. And so, you know, think of the parking signs and the downtown area that are confusing. And we have to pause and say, okay, what's this actually saying? Can I park here right now? And that's, that's usually the task or the question at hand. And you know, depending on how complex it is, the sign, you know, there's a bit of a mental wrangling we have to do and we stop and we figure it out because the information is there, it's just… it's not presented in a way that's easily understood. So, a designer is taken to redesign that into something so it looks more like a calendar with green and red boxes and, you know, shading for accessibility reasons. And you can glance, you can say, okay, I know it's 2:23 right now, I see where I am in this map, and I know right away I can park here, or I can't park here. It's very clear. So, the understanding has been made clear. Then there's another example, which, I admire for the cleverness: it's where you can just point your mobile app at the original confusing street sign and through the magic of machine learning and AI it'll translate and say, yes, you can park here or no, you can't. And so, they're both really great solutions to the idea. But I pause and say, okay, one of them, you learn about the pattern. You see, okay, there's this one time I can't park here on the weekends, but the rest of the time, I'm good. So, you start to learn in the process. And it's a super tiny example, but it's an easy one to hold up this contrast. So, there's that with the other one where you're just depending on the machine to tell you yes, you can. And no, you can't, there's no understanding. You get the information you need to make the decision in the moment, which may be all you care about, right? But if we pause and reflect on these, one of those you learn from, and the other you don't. And so that's an example, and you can make a value judgment and say, I would never need to learn whether I can park there. But then I translate it to other areas. And I say, okay, well think about maps and driving around. A lot of us just rely on… you know, actually there are two views within something like Google Maps. We can just have the turn-by-turn view, which is always oriented to where I'm at now and just says, “turn left, turn, right.” And we could drive in the same city for a year and never form a mental model of the city and the map. And so, we're entirely dependent then on the technology because we haven't figured our own way out. So that's one solution, or we could switch to the other view in Google maps, and actually it's the one where we see ourselves in context of the map, the dot moving around. And that gives us a better sense of orientation: North, South, East, West, where we're at at all times. And so, the contrast I would highlight there is one helps you develop a mental model or our cognitive understanding of the space or the other… the other doesn't. It just gives you what you need and keeps you going. And so, then you've magnified it out. Then you get much more complex and critical issues. Like, you know, I have a parent who has been diagnosed with cancer, what are my options? Right? Or, I need to buy a new car, what are my options? How do I make sense of it? And suddenly we find ourselves in the same boat where we can ask the machine and the machine says, you should buy this car for, you know, $16K from this place, in fact, I can contact them for you. But there's a lot of trust now, and we have not done any of the understanding or processing ourselves. And that's where I get concerned is how much are we okay with outsourcing the process of understanding and figuring things out for ourselves. And again, you don't need to figure all things out at all times. Sometimes we can just get the easy answer and that's fine. But I think there are a lot of areas where we are starting to outsource that understanding, and perhaps we shouldn't. Jorge: If I'm understanding this correctly, then a distinction in understanding something versus not understanding something is the degree to which you have… after an interaction, you have a model of the thing that you're interacting with that maybe allows you to extrapolate, make decisions, move forward in ways that maybe weren't designed into the system or that are explicitly accounted for. It's the difference between following directions and having a model that lets you generate the directions by yourself. Stephen: Exactly. And it may be in that moment, just following directions is all you need, but there may be other cases where you need more than that, and you don't have that foundation to begin with. And to use another, again, analogy, another gaming example… I was thinking about chess and the role that the chess board plays in our understanding of the possibilities and the game. And you know, we all are used to play [by] moving chess pieces on a chess board, presumably. But if I said, okay, we're going to play chess, but we're going to do it via text message. So, now you have to like talk about the pieces and where they're moving the removal of that physical spatial representation would make it that much more difficult to remember where players are, because you'd be scrolling through prior, text messages and written text summaries of moves and plays, which would just be insane to keep up with. But you could also argue even having the text message representation is a record, right? So, you can at least see it and reflect on it. You could imagine removing that altogether and not having it. So, the point being when we start thinking about chess as a cognitive activity, the role that the map plays is to hold all sorts of meanings and also help us see patterns we wouldn't otherwise see. And so, they go back to our traveling around, driving around town example. It may be that I'm fine just following directions from place to place, but there are going to be occasions where if I have that good mental map of my options, I can improvise or take a backroad or do other things that I think are natural. And again, we may decide that's not an area I need to understand, it's not the value, and that's fine, but let's take the principles then to something like a cognitive map, like you see with the business model canvas or things like polarity mapping, where these are canvases and tools, maps of a different kind game boards of different kind that are meant to facilitate dialogue. In those cases, I've found these tools to be invaluable for getting people to talk about really complex topics. Far superior to you said, and I said, and they said, you know, these simplistic, reductionist arguments we often fall into, particularly on things like Twitter, right? Where people are having what should be very nuanced conversations, but we're having to resort to very binary, simple, distinctions. Back to user interface design Jorge: A few weeks ago, my kids and I watched the launch of the rocket. Stephen: Oh yeah! Exciting! Jorge: Yeah, which was really exciting, right? And I remember one of the things that stood out to us in watching that live, were the shots from inside the cockpit of the spacecraft, the Dragon spacecraft. And it didn't look like the cockpits of the 1960s and 1970s and even 1980s, you know, the space shuttle, right? Which are really complex, with these assortments of controls and dials and so on. And I'm returning here to the example of the cockpit as a cognitive environment. The Dragon spacecraft cockpit is a series of touchscreens, so it's like a glass cockpit, where everything is software and it's up for display. And I'm wondering… That seems to me like a good stand-in for the path that so many of our interactions have taken in the last couple of decades where everything is becoming dematerialized and we're experiencing information more and more through screens, basically. And I'm wondering, the degree to which that impairs our ability to form models, when everything is up for grabs and everything is fluid on these screens. Stephen: Yeah. So that's a tricky one, because we get into the ergonomics of the database structure, and the physicality of things. So, I'm going to keep my comments very narrow. I do think with interfaces like the one you're mentioning, you're seeing just more of the increasing abstraction from how things actually function behind the scenes. And I think that abstraction, I mean, that's what we do or have done for years as designers is to make things easier for the user by abstracting how things actually work. The challenge there though then is when things don't fit the user mental model and the user has no idea of what's going on. Like, if things break down, you know, will the astronauts be able to do some repair in the moment or is this… is the abstraction so much so that that's not possible anymore as it was, you know, in decades past, would be a concern. But bringing it back to everyday user interface design, we know we all encounter error messages and things every day and a good half of them, because of the industry we work in, we know what's going on or we have a sense of, “Oh, that's how they architect it.” So, annoying pet peeve of mine, the dropdown menu button that only has one option than it. And I'm like, why, why, why did you have a dropdown with one option? This is silly, right? But if you understand how things were built and more of an engineering mindset, and there could be more, it was the easiest way to build that suite. We kind of understand a bit about the system and how it works and in doing so we can either be more forgiving or we can figure out work arounds because we understand a little bit that of that layer. So, the philosophical question there then is when is abstraction good and when is it harmful? And then what context might it be helpful to understand how a thing actually works? I would say for those who practice design, particularly UI design, this is why it's really good to understand a little bit about how things are being built and the language used by a lot of engineers and developers so we can be better at being that interface between, you know what our users, our customers, people need to do and how things actually run and function in the backend. Jorge: Are there pointers, heuristics, guidelines that help people decide how much abstraction is too much? Stephen: Oh gosh, I think it's entirely contextual. And again, are we talking about user interface guidelines? Are we talking about bringing people together to make a business decision? You know, I think it would depend on the context. Jorge: Well, these days, there's a lot of overlap between those, right? Like, given that we're interacting mostly through software, especially during this lockdown. like we were saying earlier, even workshops, which we would have done in physical space before, now having to happen in these abstractions of those environments. And to your point earlier, it doesn't serve as well to try to mirror what happened in one environment in this other one. I remember reading this book – and I know that you like games, which is why I'm going to bring up this example – but a book that was very influential to me early on, it's called The Art of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford. This is about early video game design, like late 1970s, early 1980s. And he talks about the folly of trying to replicate sports in the video game format or board games in a video game screen, because these are different… they're different media in a way, right? And they don't have the tacticality that you get in a board game is going to be completely lost on a glass tablet, right? Stephen: Yeah. Thinking about this in a different area… so just a week or two ago, hey.com, the new mail client or mail service from, from Basecamp launched. And it's funny because before they launched and had the information, I had arrived – this was just like a couple of weeks ago – I was doing research for something to collect all the newsletters I subscribe to. And I started thinking about the IA of email and it occurred to me, you know, I'm using email for at least three, maybe more things. So, one is the conversations, like you and I had the dialogue back and forth to set this podcast up, right? So that's one type of interaction. Then I am using email in a very passive way to read these newsletters that come in and there are different types of newsletters and different types of things, right? So, we could further split that, but it's very passive, right? I'm not meant to respond to those. And so, in that sense, it's more like a podcast service or a magazine or something else, not a chat or a conversation mechanism. And then there are things like transactions, like sign me up for new account, paying your bills where you know, you file of your records. Well, that ended up being the information architecture that hey.com is using. And what follows then is how you design that passive reading experience is very different from how you design the conversation experience. And it was one of those things that I think we've just grown so accustomed to email and email has been used as a workhorse for so many things that we haven't paused to say, wow, should I design the interaction of this type of media or content or this interaction differently from this one? And we know that, but we just haven't pointed out that at you know, something that's just been under our noses this entire time. So, I thought that was interesting just in terms of designing for thinking about the context of these interactions and how we design differently. Jorge: I've been following that as well, the release of that new take on email and it strikes me as a kind of stepping back and rethinking what this is about and how we interact with email, what we use it for. And I read your book as an invitation to do that in many realms, not just email, but it does strike me as something that deals with how we interact with and understand the world in general. Is that a fair take? Stephen: I'm jumping up and down clapping right now. Yes! That, I think that was the biggest thing is, because we're not writing a “how to” book to fix a known problem. We're trying to – Karl and I – are trying to raise awareness of these information or understanding, I think we call them “problems of understanding” that we live in every day. And so, we all get amazed when we see someone you know, design a better prescription pill bottle, right? Or just do a better sign make-over and fix these things. I opened with an example of a redesigned medical chart to help manage my son's diabetes and people go, “ooh,” and “ahh” over this. But I think the first thing is just becoming aware of these things as problems of understanding in the first place. And so, I think that's, we try to kind of double down on that in the opening chapter, which is we have all of these problems of understanding. Terms of service, like signing these things. They could be designed in a better way, such that they're more understandable. And so that's… that was really the first step. And then once you become aware that, okay, there are many cases where I'm given the information, but I don't know how to get understanding, whether it's for others or for myself, what do I do? And that's really the rest of the book is how to work with information as a resource. And whether that's activating these prior associations, like we talked about with the math problem earlier, whether that's bringing thoughts, ideas into the world and making them tangible, physical, whether it's interacting with them, a combination or coordination of all of those things. Like that's where our book wanted to go was raise awareness of this information or are these understanding problem challenges that we have and then what you can do about it. What anyone could do about it. Which was also hard, because it's not a book specifically for designers or it is for everyone who designs, which of course is anyone who arranges clothes in their closet or sorts their pantry, right? We're all designing when we do that. And so, it's, how do you translate those skills that we already do in these other areas of our life to things that are more conceptual and abstract in nature, which is often where the divide or the gap is. Closing Jorge: That strikes me as a great summary of what the book is about and a good place for us to wrap up our conversation. So, where can folks follow up with you? Stephen: I think this point, normally I would direct them to my personal site, but these days I'm pouring all my energy into The Mighty Minds Club. So, I think going to themightymindsclub.com, and you can sign up for only $2, right? Which is… it's a beta right now, but that's the best way to stay in touch. Otherwise, you know, I'm on Twitter, @StephenAnderson and other places, but I'm trying to send everyone there. And you know, this time, next year it will be a paid service and things, but right now I'm just trying to get a lot of people in the door and playing with some of these tools and things. And in many ways, everything I write about in the book, everything Karl and I write about the book, is laying the foundation for what I'm doing next. And so, for example, going back to an earlier question, you asked about heuristics and things. One of the things I'm trying to collect are what are the specific tested, really useful tools that are out there to help with all these different scenarios, and different challenges that we have. And so, I pitch it as – The Mighty Minds Club – as a method, you know, that's the tool part, a “method of the month” club, to help people and product teams work through difficult situations. And the difficult situation could be that, you know, that conflict and that disagreement, like we want to do more research, they just want to ship stuff out the door, right? It could be that. It could be more of an interpersonal nature, like the real issue isn't knowing what to do or the right thing. We all know it, we're just not, for whatever reasons. So, what's the bias, what's the fear, what's going on personally, that's keeping us from doing that. So, let's, let's dig into a tool or two that helps us confront that. I think right now there's a lot of fear and uncertainty about the future. And so, I'm launching with a tool from Foresight Strategies around how to create scenarios for possible futures. And even there, there's not one good tool. There are dozens of tools. And so, the one I'm doubling down on is the tool that helps us explore the most divergent from the most varying options, which I think is a good, good thing to launch with. And then you can actually walk through that door of different scenarios and say, okay, everything gets better. Everything collapses, everything… you know, we go through a major transformation, whatever it may be, we can walk through and explore what that future might look like, whether it's six months or six years, or, you know, 20 years from now. And so I figured that was a great tool to launch with, but that would be my answer to your heuristics is like, eh, I don't know the heuristics for so many contexts but a better answer, then “it depends,” is I think there are good tools, canvases, card decks, tool kits, playbooks out there for specific problems. And so, if we can bring all those under one roof and share and talk about those that's, that's what I'm trying to do there. Jorge: Well, I've signed up and I am so excited for the club and to keep learning from you. Thank you so much for being with us today. Stephen: Thank you Jorge!

Many years in the works, Figure It Out is coming out in May 2020! In this episode, authors Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast discuss the complex world of information (think incomprehensible tax policies to confusing medical explanations) we are faced with, and the ways in which information can be transformed into better presentations, better meetings, better software, and better decisions. Stephen also shares a personal anecdote about part of the inspiration for the book. Get your copy: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/figure-it-out/ Mentioned in the episode… Stephen’s latest project: The Mighty Minds Club. Learn more and subscribe: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/the-mighty-minds-club Karl’s recommended reads: Smarter Than You Think by Clive Thompson https://www.amazon.com/Smarter-Than-You-Think-Technology/dp/1594204454 and Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Hartford https://www.amazon.com/Messy-Power-Disorder-Transform-Lives-ebook/dp/B01BD1SU2E/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1587498076&sr=1-1 Stephen’s interesting people to check out: Nicky Case and her “explorable explanations” https://ncase.me/; Bret Victor and real time feedback loops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Victor

In this introductory episode of Design Everywhere, host and human-centered designer Jonathan Morgan invites guest, Karl Fast, author and Director of Information Architecture at Normative Design in Toronto, to discuss the new reality of design. Together, they will answer some of the design world’s most intriguing questions like: What is the concept behind Design for Understanding? How does simplicity play a part? What is the role of a designer? What is the cost of information when considering a design?

Karl connects planning to IA, AI, UX, and robots.