Podcast appearances and mentions of sarah barrett

Wharton's Dr. Americus Reed is joined by Lee Applbaum, President and Chief Operating Officer, Round 2 Spirits, LLC, to speak with Sarah Barrett, Managing Editor at Wine & Spirits Daily about wine & spirits sports partnerships. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode Vickie and Matt interview Sarah Barrett about her family's recent trip to WDW!  There were some pretty magical moments in this trip and a lot of great memories!  Do not miss this one! Follow us on all our social media accounts on Facebook and on Twitter at @Mousecapadespod. Thinking about being a guest on our show, or have a question or comment? Contact us anytime via text or phone at 636-373-4497. Have a magical day!

With help from industry icons Harry Schuhmacher and Sarah Barrett, the folks responsible for publications like Beer Business Daily and Wine & Spirits Business Daily, we use a fitting format, a draft, to debate the toughest and the most helpful trends and topics facing beer distributors in 2024. Rabobank clients can sign up for our research via this link: knowledge.rabobank.com Note: The content and opinions presented within this podcast are not intended as investment advice, and the opinions rendered are that of the individuals and not Rabobank or its affiliates and should not be considered a solicitation or offer to sell or provide services.

Today we are joined by our Wine & Spirits Daily editors, Sarah Barrett and Hana Kruger, to grok the two chats we had with Britt West at Spirit of Gallo and Tom Steffanci of Deutch Family Wines at the Summit about the wild success of their two breakout successes, High Noon and Josh Wine, as well as their other innovations and observations. ================================= Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/beernetradio Podcast feeds: https://www.beernetradio.com Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5mk5ITn9bXu1KOvx21QzEb Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beernet-radio/id1591940567 ================================= About Beer Business Daily publisher Harry Schuhmacher joins his editors and other guests once a week as they grok the beer industry issues of the day. -Podcast Hotline: Text or call Harry in confidence at:‪ (262) 345-2501‬ -Audio/Video feeds at https://linktr.ee/beernet -Articles referenced at beernet.com -Socials: @beerbizdaily #beernews #beerindustry #beer --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/beernetradio/message

In this conversation we are joined by Dr. Sarah Barrett to take a closer look at the Vetscan IMAGYSTTM platform, and the Virtual Lab clinical pathologists at Zoetis. We explore the benefits of digital cytology, sample types particularly well-suited for it, specific types of cases that benefit from it, and how digital cytology fits into the workflow of a busy hospital. We also review the currently available deep learning AI applications for use with the Vetscan IMAGYST, species types for AI vs. digital cytology, and where to look on a blood smear for spherocytes (hint: not the monolayer).

S3 Ep. 6: "I don't like being censored" | Teachers Who Quit ft. Sarah Barrett Sarah Barrett is a calligrapher, graphic designer, and social media manager from Mississippi. She loves creating marketing strategies that are organic and build trust within her clients' audiences with high-quality images and informational videos. When she's not scheduling content for her clients or calligraphing for weddings, she's spending time with her friends, family, or 70+ houseplants. Sarah enjoys painting, taking photos with her film camera, educating people about art, and learning new ways to express herself! Social Media: Teachers Who Quit Instagram: @TeachersWhoQuit Teachers Who Quit TikTok: @TeachersWhoQuit Join the Teachers Who Quit Community - click here Tierraney Richardson's [TWQ Host] Instagram: click here Tierraney Richardson's [TWQ Host] TikTok: click here Tierraney Richardson's [TWQ Host] Website: click here Sarah Cotta's TikTok: @sarahcotta Sarah Cotta's Instagram: @sarahhcotta Sarah Cotta's Website: https://sarahbcalligraphy.com Share your "I quit teaching" story anonymously with us - click here Simplify your business with HoneyBook - click here Organize your job search & life with ClickUp - click here Become a Teacher Entrepreneur today and teach what you want, when you want, for how much you want with outschool - click here. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/teacherswhoquit/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/teacherswhoquit/support

Dr. Sarah Barrett, of the Faculty of Education at York University, studies the impact that the core beliefs and values of teachers have on classroom practice. She talks here about the emotional experience of online learning and how this has affected teachers and students during the pandemic. Hosted and produced by Cameron Graham, Professor of Accounting at York University. Podcast or Perish is produced with the support of York University. Visit our website at podcastorperish.ca.

Sarah Barrett, DVM, PhD, DACVP, is a native of Southwest Virginia and completed her BS in Biology and DVM at Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech ('99 and '05, respectively). She practiced emergency medicine and critical care, followed by small animal day practice in Houston and Central Texas, before returning to Virginia Tech for a combined clinical pathology residency, culminating in board certification (2014) and a PhD in autoimmune glomerulonephritis (2015). She spent the next 5 years as a clinical assistant professor with a joint appointment at Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine and Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, before transitioning to digital pathology and joining Zoetis in 2021. When not working in the office she spends her time wrangling her many animals and working on her lavender farm. 

In today's episode Vickie continues the 2nd part of the interview with one of our own Your Story Travel Company story guides - Sarah Barrett!  Sarah and her family recently returned from their trip to Walt Disney World!  Don't miss out on the fun and memories, along with some Disney magic along the way!          Follow us on all our social media accounts on Facebook and on Twitter at @Mousecapadespod. Thinking about being a guest on our show, or have a question or comment? Contact us anytime via text or phone at 636-395-0544. Have a magical day!   Click HERE to apply to be an Independent Agent with Your Story Travel Company or email careers@yourstorytravel.com    Click HERE for Your Story Travel Company Website 

In today's episode Vickie interviews one of our own Your Story Travel Company story guides - Sarah Barrett!  Sarah and her family recently returned from their trip to Walt Disney World!  Don't miss out on the fun and memories, along with some Disney magic along the way!          Follow us on all our social media accounts on Facebook and on Twitter at @Mousecapadespod. Thinking about being a guest on our show, or have a question or comment? Contact us anytime via text or phone at 636-395-0544. Have a magical day!   Click HERE to apply to be an Independent Agent with Your Story Travel Company or email careers@yourstorytravel.com    Click HERE for Your Story Travel Company Website 

Ann Rohmer speaks with Colin Furness, an infection-control epidemiologist and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. He discusses his take on back to in-person learning, confusion surrounding vaccinations and the line-ups for rapid tests. Tina Cortese is with Dr. Sarah Barrett from York University's faculty of education. Is it safe to be back in the classroom, how to ease student anxiety and how to support students who have fallen behind Ann Rohmer and Dan Kelly from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business discuss the supports available for small businesses and can companies survive the latest restrictions? Kevin Frankish looks into Alzheimer's month with Loren Fried – CEO Alzheimer's York Region. They discuss where to go for support and what to do after diagnosis? Jim Lang introduces us to a young environmental activist. Eighteen-year-old blogger, author, changemaker, and environmental activist Hannah Alper joins Jim to chat about the importance of people of all ages getting involved to impact climate change. She is lending her voice in support of CanadaHelps Protect the Environment Fund, which supports registered charities that are working to protect the environment and conserve Canada's parks and forests. The Fund has raised almost $33,000 to date and Hannah wants to see that grow.

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.

Today we speak with Jason Murphy at B-dubs on cracking the hard seltzer code on-premise, and more. --- Panel ---Harry is joined by Jason and editors Sarah Barrett and Jordan Driggers. ---Time-Stamped Contents ---00:00 Intro - hilarious and amusing banter. 00:40 the biscuit is back. 01:05 harry describes his impression of discus. 02:00 sarah describes the vibe at the discus meeting in atx. 04:10 jason from b-duibs joins. 05:00 jason explains bw306:05 business is returning to on-premise, re-opening 1,200 draft systems. sports in full swing - weekends good. 07:25 on-premise nearly where it was in 2019 - sales to-go up. 09:00 do hard seltzers play on-premise and at bww?10:20 more success with seltzer on tap. fall reset: national truly wild berry, plus a local/regional player in some states. 13:00 draft seltzer so new, not a standard pouring ritual.  over ice or neat? we need you jim koch to tell us. 15:30 jordan asks if having color in draft seltzers adds to demand.16:35 why doesn't package seltzer work at bww?  curated buckets?19:00 talking real beer: mich ultra and model the hot gainers. 20:25 jason gives his theories on why mich ultra jumped several spots up after covid. 22:00 stone buenaveza salt and lime lager is surprise hit. 23:20 several regional standouts too.  805, great divide hazy, mango cart, etc. 24:00 fruit beers making a comeback in 2022. 24:50 sarah asks about building out cocktail program at b-dubs: 80% beer, 18% spirits, 2% wine.  27:25 non-alc mocktails small but increasingly important to consumers. 29:40 non-alc beers at bww.  31:00 ipa's and blue moon still popular. local brews hit too. 34:20 jason gives the industry an uplifting message of hope. ---About---Beer Business Daily publisher Harry Schuhmacher joins his editors and other guests 2 times a week as they grok the industry issues of the day.  -Podcast Hotline: Text or call Harry in confidence at:‪ (262) 345-2501‬-Audio/Video feeds at HarrysPod.com-Articles referenced at beernet.com-Twitter / IG / TikTok:  @beerbizdaily

Conversations about Information Architecture Dan Brown talks with Sarah Barrett about the Lens of Rules

--- Panel ---Harry is joined by entrepreneur Jo-Anne Reynolds of Sexy AF non-alc spirits options, along with Wine & Spirits editors Sarah Barrett and Hana Kruger.---Time-Stamped Contents ---00:00 Intro - hilarious and enchanting banter. 02:00 Jo-Anne Reynolds, founder of 0% abv Sexy AF spirits.02:50 south african roots to canada. 03:05 aha moment. 05:40 tackling bar call/awareness challenges.06:00 harry goes on a typical man-splaining riff.  jo-anne takes it in stride like a pro.07:20 getting the bar call sexy af out there. 09:00 educational component on dtc during pan. 10:00 not competing with liquor, as consumer wasn't going to drink booze anyway.  11:25 any pushback on sexy AF name?12:00 i'm offended that you're offended. 13:00 selling models, dtc vs traditional dist. 15:10 sarah: strongest of non-alc spirits? no distilling. 18:30 new challenges every day. 22:20 jo-anne on collabs. 23:40 canadian-based company, sells dtc in US and looking for distribution. 25:00 states versus europe and middle east.26:40 doesn't matter why you're not drinking alc, nobody's dang business. 26:50 big margins, no excise tax. 27:30 jo-anne: the margins are amazing. 28:00 waiting for the market to ketchup. 29:20 hana gets some deserved airtime. ---About---Beer Business Daily publisher Harry Schuhmacher joins his editors and other guests (almost) every other day as they grok the industry issues of the day.  -Text or call Harry in confidence at:‪ (262) 345-2501‬-Audio/Video feeds at HarrysPod.com-Articles referenced at beernet.com-Twitter / IG / TikTok:  @beerbizdaily

Today Harry is joined by Chelsea Phillips, the vp at Anheuser-Busch of Beyond Beer - Launchpad, and Wine & Spirits senior editor Sarah Barrett. --time-stamped contents--00:00 Intro - fighting with the internet. 01:25 Chelsea joins us02:30 beyond beer and now launch pad05:20 babe wine - adjacent to ab's core comp but not completely. 06:20 blessing and curse of being in AB network: amazing distribution capabilities, but some brands like babe need to choose accounts/geographies more surgically. 06:40 brands in graveyard being victim of "too far too fast". 07:00 mich ultra is good example of that. 07:45 harry: are you discouraged by ab's huge scale compared to running smaller brands? "these are important brands" learning how to execute them, "nuture them" like boarding school.08:50 sarah: did babe inspire launchpad? 09:00 budweiser playbook not always great for smaller brands. measure success based on investment, managing expectations.10:20 getting the route-to-market mix right11:00 drilling down to consumer-centric behavior. 12:40 targeting accounts for babe. 13:20 sarah: what are new plans for babe? retailer decision points that look like target.14:30 leaning into holidays with babe. 15:40 transitioning babe from personality driven of founders to lifestyle brand but keeping the founders' voice. 17:20 taking the voice to retail.19:40 it's okay to say no. 20:20 focus is key. choose what's best for you, distributor/retailer/market.21:00 chelsea:  bet on rtds. 21:30 talking wholesalers, how to lean into these brands. 23:25 using data to find what works best in market. not souring market with brands/categories too soon. 25:40 sarah:  what categories are you keeping an eye on? 27:10 chels loves to work on a portfolio of brands.30:00 sarah: do alc bases matter? (malt, sugar, liquor, wine?)31:00 babe wine cocktails coming soon, in limited locations. 31:45 supporting the brewers collective with spirit-based products.  

--- Panel ---Harry is joined by Wine & Spirits Daily editors Sarah Barrett and Hana Kruger, along with beer editor Jordan Driggers, to discuss the latest in the W&S distribution world. ---Time-Stamped Contents ---00:00 needless banter about tech difficulties, Biscuit (the dog harry obsesses over) had cbd oil and is feeling the vibes. 04:45 industry trying to define these new bev-alc rtd's. 08:00 do rtd's play on-premise?  harry says no, sarah says yes in short term.09:25 jordan says seltzers don't mix well with food.  so true09:60 grokking seltzer's fall, but hana says still popular11:00 seltzers all about latest hot flavor or variety pack. 11:40 jordan doubles down on wc variety pack 312:40 sarah: rtd's expanding outlets13:30 harry goes on rant about trucks and delivery19:20 RNDC going into all control states direct threat to S-G.21:25 Montgomery county and boss hogg.---About---Beer Business Daily publisher Harry Schuhmacher joins his editors and other guests every workday as they grok the industry issues of the day.  -Text or call Harry in confidence at:‪ (262) 345-2501‬-Audio/Video feeds at HarrysPod.com-Articles referenced at beernet.com-Twitter / IG / TikTok:  @beerbizdaily

--- Panel ---Harry is joined by Jenn Litz-Kirk, Sarah Barrett, and Jordan Driggers---Time-Stamped Contents ---00:00 Intro - Gopuff model02:00 They have the capital to win the prize.02:15 Harry takes us down milkman and diaper delivery lane03:35 So many models: tip of the iceberg04:45 It will all end up being Amazon in the end05:45 Favor was Harry's first delivery app experience, at Jenn's wedding in 201407:00 Jordan doesn't think tobacco is healthy. 07:40 Harry disagrees. 08:20 Sarah groks Gallo's High Noon.12:15 Jordan wonders what the demo is for HN at that big price point.13:10 Making flavors unique is the game. 14:00 A-B's Neutral is their answer to High Noon. 16:10 Shortage of sixtel kegs.18:20 Hot girl summer has breached America's airports.19:40 For the rest of the pod Jenn speaks into a megaphone.---About---Beer Business Daily publisher Harry Schuhmacher joins his editors and other guests every workday as they grok the industry issues of the day.  -Text or call Harry in confidence at:‪ (262) 345-2501‬-Audio/Video feeds at HarrysPod.com-Articles referenced at beernet.com-Twitter / IG / TikTok:  @beerbizdaily

No guest in this episode. Instead, I answer listener questions. If you have a question you'd like me to address on the show, please email me at live@theinformed.life or tweet to @informed_life. Listen to the show Download episode 67 Show notes The Informed Life episode 17: Rachel Price on Improvisation The Informed Life episode 65: Sarah Barrett on Architectural Scale A brief history of information architecture (pdf) by Peter Morville Information Architects by Richard Saul Wurman David Macaulay Alexander Tsiaras Why Software is Eating the World by Marc Andreessen (WSJ paywall) Dave Gray The Information Architecture Institute How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango The Information Architecture Conference World IA Day Information Architects Facebook group UX Design Information Architecture LinkedIn group Mags Hanley's Information Architecture Masterclasses Jorge Arango's Information Architecture Essentials workshop Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript A question from Vinish Garg The first question comes from Vinish Garg. And I apologize if I have mispronounced that. Vinish is based in Chandigarh, and he writes, "the design agencies with around a hundred plus headcount have big and experienced teams in user research, interaction, design, and UX design. But many of them don't have an information architect. How do they see the need of a specialist IA and make space for this role?" And he adds a postscript, he says "those who have an IA, I spoke to many of them, but they are doing wireframes or card sorting without really understanding anything of taxonomy or findability. This is misplaced IA." All right. So, let me take the question first. Information architecture in general has withered as a job title. In the last 20 years, we've seen fewer and fewer people signing up to become information architects in organizations, not just in internal design teams, but also in agencies. In fact, I don't know many organizations that still have internal information architects. One notable exception — and I'm just calling it out because we've had two of their folks in the show — is Microsoft. Rachel Price and Sarah Barrett, both former guests of The Informed Life, are information architects within Microsoft. So, that's an example of an organization that still has the role internally. But I think that the more common scenario is that there is someone with another job title. It might be a UX designer or interaction designer or something like that, is tasked with structuring the system somehow. Sadly. I think that the even more common scenario is that no one does this explicitly at all, and they're just basically painting screens. I suspect that is the more common scenario. And it's a shame, because information architecture is very important, especially if you're dealing with a large complex system that presents a lot of information to end users. I want to comment a bit on the postscript. I think that it may be the case that there are people who, as Vinish points out, are practicing what they call information architecture, but they're doing it very superficially. And I encounter this most often in the confusion that people have between site maps and information architecture. I've seen folks draw up an outline in the form of a site map and basically call it a day. A site map is a useful artifact for communicating structural intent, but there's much more to information architecture than making a site map. And for many interactive systems, a site map might not even be the most appropriate artifact to communicate intent. Site maps tend to be very hierarchical, which is something that is more appropriate for some systems than others. I expect that, given the waning of information architecture, as I was saying earlier, much of what is practiced today under the rubric of information architecture is kind of cargo cult IA, where folks go through the motions of doing something like putting together a site map without understanding the reasoning behind the decisions they're making or why they're even making the artifact at all. And this is not something that's unique to IA. There are a lot of other areas of practice, other disciplines, where folks adopt the superficial trappings of the practice without really understanding the foundations. And in the case of information architecture, the foundations have to do with making meaningful distinctions. So, setting things aside in categories that are recognizable to the users of the system, that allow them to relate to the information in the system in meaningful ways, with the goal of ultimately making the system easier to use by making information easier to find and understand. Now, Vinish asked specifically about the context of agencies. I don't know much about the Indian market, but here in the U.S., the role of agencies in the design process has also waned as compared to 20 years ago. A lot of the work is happening internally in organizations, and that might be part of the reason why the role has waned as well. Because I think that people think about information architecture — if they think about it at all — when there's a major system change, when there's a redesign or a new product is being built and not so much during the day-to-day operations of the system. Again, there are exceptions. I called out Rachel and Sarah, who are part of a team that has ongoing responsibilities, because it's such a large system where so much content is produced. But in many cases, folks only need to do this sort of thing when they're making a major change, when they're implementing a new system or redesigning a system, as I said before. Which would lead me to expect that it is a role that would be more appropriate for design agencies, if, for no other reason, because design agencies do deal with more projects at the beginning their life, as opposed to the operational phase of the project. But alas, as Vinish points out, the role has also been waning in agencies as well. I don't know how they see the need for IA specialists. I don't know that they'd see the need for IA specialists. I believe that more likely they are experiencing the pain of not having an information architect in the team. Peter Morville has written of the "pain with no name" in reference to information architecture, this idea that people in the team might know that there's a problem, but they don't know how to name it. And they don't know that I'm more careful distinction making our structuring of the information in the environment might be part of the solution. And the net result is that frankly, information architecture isn't as popular as it used to be. And that may be a failing on the part of us who practice IA. We simply haven't been very good at explaining why it's important, why it's needed and why teams should consider having folks look after this stuff. That said, I know that there are people doing it out there. They just don't have the job title information architect — or at least that's what I would like to be the case. A question from Jose Gutierrez The next question comes from Jose Gutierrez; I think Jose is writing from Costa Rica. He writes, "I'm curious about what subjects does IA impact, but people normally don't associate with." These days, most people who think about information architecture — at least the few that do — think of it in relation to user experience design or digital design. But when I first learned about information architecture, I did so through Richard's Saul Wurman's 1996 book Information Architects. The impression that I got from that book was that IA was much, much broader. The very cover of the book has three definitions of what information architects are, and the first one says, "the individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear." There's nothing in there about digital anything. We encounter patterns inherent in data and complexity in many different parts of reality, not just in digital systems. In fact, while the book touches on digital design, it's remit as much broader. It profiles folks like author David Macaulay, who has produced a series of wonderful books that explain how things work, or Alexander Tsiaras who works in medical imaging. And there's also cartography and illustration and yep, also some digital design, like structuring websites and that sort of thing, which is what we today, mostly associate with information architecture. And this isn't surprising because as software has eaten more of the world — to use Marc Andreessen's memorable phrase — more and more of our information is digital, and we experience more of the information that we deal with in digital environments. But structuring information to ease findability and understandability is much older than computers. I remember seeing a presentation many years ago by Dave Gray on the history of the book as an artifact, which really opened my eyes to this. Before there were books, we would write down information in things like scrolls. And what we know of as books — the form of a book, what is called a codex — was an innovation. It allowed for greater portability and random access to the information in the book, because you didn't have to unroll the whole thing to get to a particular section. Those were all innovations, right? But the very first codexes didn't have things like page numbers or tables of contents or indices or any of those things, and those were all innovations that allowed readers to find information more easily in books. I think that those are examples of information architecture, and they are many centuries old. So, any time that you're trying to make things easier to find and understand — whether it be in a book or a built environment or a medical image, or an app — Information architecture can help. As I said, in response to Vinish's question, I consider the essence of information architecture to be about making more meaningful distinctions. And this is something that applies to all sorts of aspects of reality. In fact, part of the intent for launching this podcast was precisely because I think that information architecture manifests in so many different fields. And I'm very interested in hearing from folks about how structuring, categorizing, organizing information more mindfully helps them get things done. A question from Elijah Claude Finally, here's a question from Elijah Claude. And again, I hope that I am pronouncing your name properly. I believe that Elijah is writing from Atlanta. He writes, " what are some of the best ways to learn good information architecture outside of school and work. In other words, how do you do personal projects where you can practice real information architecture? Great resources for IA books, podcasts, videos, et cetera." This question has two parts. So, there's a part that has to do with learning IA. And there's another part that has to do with practicing IA in our everyday lives. I must note upfront that I personally don't like to draw hard lines between life, work, school and all these things. I think that you can practice information architecture at any time. Information architecture is as much a mindset as it is a practice. And it's a mindset that has to do with looking beneath the surface of things to the way that things are organized and structured, and the ways in which we create shared meaning in how we organize and structure things in our world. That sounds a little abstract, so I'll give you an example. When we moved into the house that we're currently living in, my wife and I had a conversation about where we were going to store the various objects in our kitchen. So, we had boxes with things like plates and cutlery and food items, spices, and such. There are many categories of food items. There are dry foods, and there are big bulky foods that take up a lot of space, things like sacks of flour, rice and stuff like that. And here we are in this new house with a different layout than the one that we're used to, and many places in which to put things. And we had to coordinate where we were going to store things. Because if not, we would make it very difficult for each other to find things when we need them. And that's something that happened somewhat organically. We had an informal conversation saying, "Hey, maybe the cutlery can go in this drawer. And maybe this cabinet close to the stove would be perfect for things like spices and so on." Some things were obvious where they should go, others less so — and the arrangement has evolved over time. Over the time that we've been living here, we've occasionally moved things and found better ways to organize our kitchen. So, it's an ongoing thing and we talk about it. I think that it would be different if either one of us was organizing the kitchen for ourselves as individuals. When you must consider that at least one other person is going to be sharing the place with you, then you must take into consideration how they are going to be able to navigate the environment to find the stuff that they need. And I consider that to be an information architecture challenge. I'll give you another example. And funny enough, this one also has to do with our kitchen. Recently, we discovered that we have a minor problem. This is something that has emerged in the pandemic. It used to be that before the pandemic, I would often work outside of the house. And of course, with the arrival of the pandemic, more of us have been working from home. And as I've started working from home — and I tend to wake up very early — I would find that some days I would feed Bumpkin, our dog. I would feed bumpkin. And then, later in the morning, my wife, who normally feeds Bumpkin, would come along and would feed him not knowing that that I had already fed him. Bumpkin can be very insistent if he's hungry. So, if he comes knocking on my home office door, I will feed him because that's what gets him to stop knocking. And my wife and I have been prototyping a system to let each other know if Bumpkin has eaten or not. I wrote two sticky notes, one that said, "Bumpkin has eaten breakfast" and the other one said, "Bumpkin has eaten dinner." And we put it up on the cabinet where we keep his food. And the idea was that every time that she or I fed him a meal, we would place the appropriate sticky on the outside of the cabinet door. And that kind of worked for a while. But the glue the sticky started wearing out after switching them around so many times. So, we tried something else. We tried another sticky, this one on the refrigerator door with a checkbox. And one checkbox says, "Bumpkin has eaten breakfast" and the other checkbox says, "Bumpkin has eaten dinner." And we have a little magnet that we move between them. And what we discovered with that new prototype is that the sticky is much more resilient, because we're not moving it around, but it's in the wrong part of the environment because we're normally not looking in the refrigerator when we're feeding Bumpkin. So, we often forget to move the magnet. And I'm now thinking about the third rev of this thing, which would combine the two. And this will probably involve putting some kind of magnetic board on the door where we keep the dog food. And I consider all of these to be information architecture problems. On the one hand, clarifying the distinction between what was the last meal that Bumpkin had eaten, that's information architecture. And another is the location of this marker in the environment. Like I said, we were having a lot more traction when we had the sticky on the door that had the dog food in it than when we put it on the refrigerator door. And the only reason why we did it, there was a completely technical reason, which is that the fridge is already magnetized. So, these are examples of information architecture or architectural thinking at play in real-world problems — admittedly a very simple one. But it's not unusual. It's not unusual for us to apply that kind of mindset to organizing the real world. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we structure our environments so that we can get things done. And it doesn't just happen in information environments, it happens in physical environments as well. So, that's with regards to the practice question. The learning question is a bit tougher, because as I have said in the previous questions in this episode, interest in information architecture has waned over the last 20 years. So, resources are less plentiful than they used to be. The Information Architecture Institute, which was the preeminent place that I would point people to who wanted to learn about IA has seized operations. It feels to me like the discipline is in something of a state of transition. I am sure that there is a robust future for information architecture, but it's hard for me right now to point to any one definitive resource and say, this is what you should check out. There are books. That is the first thing that I recommend that folks check out. And Elijah, given the fact that you asked about non-work or school related contexts, the number one book that I would recommend for you, if you haven't seen it already, is Abby Covert's How to Make Sense of Any Mess, which is a primer on information architecture. It's a beautiful book in that it really articulates the core issues that transcend digital in a very useful way. Another book — and this one is, alas, a bit self-serving — is the fourth edition of the polar bear book, Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond. And I say it's self-serving because I had the great privilege of having been invited to coauthor the fourth edition alongside the original authors, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. And that book is more specific to digital information environments, but I still think that it's one of the best places to learn about IA. There are also conferences. The two most prominent are the Information Architecture Conference and World IA Day. Both of those happen in the spring. The IA Conference is global. It usually happens in one city and folks fly from all over the world — or at least they did in the before times. The last two years, it's been virtual because of COVID. But it's more global, and it's a central gathering for IAS and the IA-curious. If you are interested in learning more about IA, I would recommend that you participate in the IA Conference. World IA Day is more of a localized initiative. It's a single day event and many cities participate around the world. It's driven by the communities in those cities. So again, super local. And it's a great way to meet people who are interested in information architecture in your own community. So, those are two events that I recommend: the IA Conference and World IA Day. There's also social media. There is at least one group on Facebook that is dedicated to information architecture. I know that there are also groups in LinkedIn. I haven't participated much in either of those, but I know that they exist. If that's what you prefer, you have those options. And then there are also courses. I know that Mags Hanley has a course on information architecture and by the way, a little bit of a spoiler: Mags is an upcoming guest of the show. We don't get in depth into her course, we talk about other subjects, but I know that Mags has a course that she does online and that may be worthwhile checking out. And then I have a workshop that I've done several times called Information Architecture Essentials, which is designed to introduce folks to the discipline. And I'm in the process of turning that into an online course as well. And by the way, if you are interested in that, I would love to hear from you, because I'm in the process of crafting that now. I'm also interested. If you have suggestions for folks like Elijah who want to find out more about information architecture. I would love to learn about other resources I might've missed, so please do get in touch. Closing So, there you have it, the first listener question episode of the show. I have other questions that folks sent in, but we didn't get a chance to get to them. So, I might do this again. Please do reach out if you enjoyed this episode, if you think I should do another one, and most especially, if you have a question yourself that you would like me to answer on the show. You can find contact information on the show's website at theinformed.life. That's also where you can find show notes and a transcript for this episode. For now, I want to thank Vinish, Jose, and Elijah for their questions. And thank you for listening. As a reminder, please rate or review the show in the Apple Podcasts app or in the Apple podcast directory. This helps other folks find it. Thanks!

Talking DTC for wineries and online retailers with their staunchest advocate, Tom Wark of Wark Communications and exec director of the National Association of Wine Retailers. ---Panel---Harry is joined by Sarah Barrett.---Contents---00:00 Intro - Tom Wark01:55 Update on retailer direct shipping to consumers across state lines.02:30 The reciprocity era. 04:20 Explaining dicta in court rulings: The court may declare Tom and Harry to be a-holes, but it's not the law.05:00 Most interpreted Granholm to only apply to producers/wineries, not retailers.05:20 The weird Tennessee case.07:40 Easier for states to level-down?09:20 Wineries still account for vast majority of DTC shipments, even where retailers are allowed to ship direct.10:30 And the vast majority of bev-alc retailers are not shipping direct. 13:25 Not just wineries. Most new labels are imported, and must get through wholesaler. 14:30 Today big suppliers, retailers, and wholesalers all invested in three-tier system. 19:40 Tracking provenance.22:00 What's next for Tom?23:10 Future of retailing is to source unique products.24:35 The cannabis effect on $7 - $15 wine.28:25 Russia bans French Champagne from being called Champagne.29:50 Only one reason to take cannabis:  Getting high.31:10 Harry tells story of getting arrested with a firearm. 33:00 Tom and Harry make amends for old war wounds. ---About---Beer Business Daily publisher Harry Schuhmacher joins his editors and other guests every workday as they grok the industry issues of the day.  -Text comments and topic ideas to Harry at:‪ (262) 345-2501‬-Video feed on YouTube.Twitter / IG / TikTok:  @beerbizdaily

---Panel---Harry is joined by Chanel Gulf Coast, Jenn Litz-Kirk, Jordan Driggers, Sarah Barrett, Jessica Lopez, and Hana Kruger.---Time-Stamped Contents---00:00 Intro - BS-ing, gratified to get props from Rabobank/Liquid Assets pod. Introducing the entire SchuPub staff.13:00 Comparing YTD-May shipment trends with same period in 2019. 15:50 Jordan says it's even more impressive that the industry is holding up compared to 2020, so far. 16:16 Mexican shipment comps will get tougher as the year progresses past May. 18:00 Jenn's Spec's interview highlights: seltzers and canned cocktails galore, coming from non-local craft, other beer, and chilled aperitif spirits.19:45 Top Seltzers now just a "war of attrition".20:00 Topo Chico seltzer variety is 7th largest beer pack in this Texas chain. 21:07 Beer takes too much pricing every year. Harry says it should take more.21:45 Harry shocked that retail beer pricing is up over $1:20 a case on average in IRI this year, mostly mix shift.22:46 The consumer has driven avg price up for us, buying more higher-priced seltzers, Modelo, and Mich Ultra.24:00 Sarah talks spirits pricing.25:30 Jenn-Litz can't get Wywy a job-job. Harry is taking him to New York for a long weekend instead. 27:40 Pee break:  Chanel Gulf Coast describes freshening Harry's bedpan all July 4th weekend. Sarah's dog didn't pee at all on a long road trip.29:25 The dad on Succession reminds staff of Harry.30:20 Harry tells his pistol-whip story.33:25 Chanel Gulf Coast unironically wins a bunch of free liquor in a charity raffle.35:20 Could Jordan get into Savor today given his choice of style?  37:40 The long goodbye. We wish you good-morrow, and of course a happy and prosperous hot girl summer.---About---Beer Business Daily publisher Harry Schuhmacher joins his editors and other guests every workday as they grok the industry issues of the day.   Watch on YT as well.-Text comments and topic ideas to Harry at:‪ (262) 345-2501‬-Audio feed at HarrysPod.com-Articles referenced at beernet.comTwitter / IG / TikTok:  @beerbizdaily

----PANEL----Jenn-Litz, Sarah Barrett, Jordan Driggers00:00 Intro - Jordan attends Fiesta NIOSA block party.01:56 Jenn finally got her mic figured out.03:44 Harry administers an FMB pop quiz to Jordan. 04:40 Ranking FMBs.09:35 Wine and spirits also having supply problems. 12:37 Jenn groks celebrity-backed FMBs.16:00 Harry hosting a Molson Coors exec tonight to discuss the charms of San Antonio as a host city for next year's distrib meeting. 18:07 Jenn's ideas for podcast recurring segments. 20:55 More texts from Harry's son.22:58 More discussion on pod segments. 24:25 Jordan talks about Great Nation Brewing's expansion plans.26:06 Jordan discusses Reyes' on-premise account issues in SF.27:35 truly trends and on-premise seltzer sales. 29:33 Harry picks on Jordan for being a picky seltzer drinker.30:26 Hot girl summer flavor: watermelon. ---About---Beer Business Daily publisher Harry Schuhmacher joins his editors and other guests every workday as they grok the industry issues of the day.  -Text comments and topic ideas to Harry at:‪ (262) 345-2501‬-Audio feed at HarrysPod.comTwitter / IG:  @beerbizdaily

Shipping bev-alc to consumers' doorsteps is the last frontier. We grok the GoPuff model of buying brick-and-mortar with technology to bridge the last mile.----PANEL----Jenn-Litz, Sarah Barrett, Jordan Driggers, Gulf Coast----Contents-----00:00 Intro - After Harry makes it needlessly complicated, Sarah offers a simple yet elegant solution for fixing Jenn's mic. 02:14 Victory!  Jenn's mic finally works.04:23 Jenn and Harry bicker about the direction of the podcast at a dinner with a top industry exec.05:43 Banter vs content: Why can't we have it all?06:45 A rare apology from Harry 07:55 GoPuff buys Kentucky's Liquor Barn09:13 GoPuff's interesting model of buying liquor retailers instead of partnering with them (like Drizly).10:46 Jordan brings up the Kentucky Bourbon angle.12:00 Harry discovers he doesn't fully understand GoPuff's model as clearly as he thought. Sarah sets him straight.13:18 First purchase on Favor:  Camel Snus14:02 Biscuit's eating and sleeping habits15:37 Jenn describes a three-tier panel she attended last week, and how w&s suppliers and distribs are in lock-step in supporting tech to solve the DTC issue rather than through the courts. 18:14 Technology solving the decades-long DTC / three-tier fight that the courts couldn't solve.18:46 The amazon wildcard23:38 The perils of DTC, beer vs wine/spirits:   freshness vs progeny.28:13 The shortages of hot girl summer, and why you don't order raw seafood on Mondays. ---About---Beer Business Daily publisher Harry Schuhmacher joins his editors and other guests every workday as they grok the industry issues of the day.  -Text comments and topic ideas to Harry at:‪ (262) 345-2501‬-Audio feed at HarrysPod.comTwitter / IG:  @beerbizdaily

Sarah Barrett is a principal IA Manager at Microsoft. She's been writing compellingly about information architecture in Medium, and in this conversation, we focus on her most recent posts, which deal with how architectural scale affects our perception of information environments. Download episode 64 Show notes Sarah R. Barrett @documentalope (Sarah Barrett) on Twitter Known Item (Medium publication) Microsoft Learn MSDN docs.microsoft.com World IA Day Breadcrumb navigation Rachel Price Websites are not living rooms and other lessons for information architecture by Sarah Barrett Understanding Architectural Scale: Tabletops and landscapes by Sarah Barrett Microsoft Bob The Informed Life episode 17: Rachel Price on Improvisation Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Sarah, welcome to the show. Sarah: Thank you for having me. This is so exciting. Jorge: Well, I'm excited to have you here. For folks who might not know you, would you mind please introducing yourself? About Sarah Sarah: Sure. My name is Sarah Barrett and I lead the information architecture team for Microsoft's Developer Relations organization. So, in addition to the kind of stuff that you might think of as standard developer relations, like advocates going out and doing talks about Microsoft technologies and that kind of thing, we also have a huge web presence. So, we publish Microsoft Docs, developer.microsoft.com Learn, which is a training and kind of like micro-learning platform. All of the information about Microsoft certifications, a Q & A site, a whole bunch of other stuff. So, it's really everywhere where we're not trying to sell you stuff; we're just trying to teach you how to use all of Microsoft technical products. It's a really fun, huge problem. And we've got a good-sized information architecture team for information architecture teams, which tend to be small. So that's really exciting. Before that, I was a consultant and I worked with a lot of different companies looking into how they solve their information architecture problems. But I wanted to go in-house somewhere, so I could actually sit with a problem and work with people in order to make it happen rather than just creating some shelfware, which everybody does, no matter how good your work is because organizations just aren't ready for it. So, I've been in house there for about three and a half years. It's been a really fun challenge. Jorge: That's great. I think I'm going to be revealing my age here by saying that at one point, I had an MSDN subscription where I would get these big boxes full of CDs, basically. And I'm guessing that with the advent of the internet, those things are no longer distributed on CDs and your team looks after the organization of all that content. Is that right? Sarah: Yeah. So, I mean, the funny thing about information is that it did not arise with the internet, as you know. This stuff has been around for a really long time. And even you know, a tech company like Microsoft is newer than many others, but like all of that information about MSDN did not go away. And MSDN TechNet, which was kind of IT pro side... originally, they would mail you physical CDs, and that was kind of the gold standard. Then all that stuff got put on websites. There was msdn.com. And we just finished migrating all of msdn.com over onto Docs - docs.microsoft.com. A lot of that information is still stuff that we're half-heartedly organizing and trying to find a place for because that history is so long. Jorge: From my brief experience with it, I get the sense that it is a massive amount of content. And it's also content that is undergoing constant revisions, because it deals with the documentation that developers need in order to use Microsoft's products and platforms, correct? Sarah: Yeah. So, it's a funny thing, because I sort of feel like if you were to go to docs.microsoft.com, which is the main thing we publish, you'd look at it and go, "somebody does the IA for this?" Like, it doesn't look like there's a lot of IA there — which, I promise you, we do! And we're even good at it. It's just a huge... it's a huge problem. It's a huge space. It's an enormous ecosystem of things. And a lot of the work we do is really around strategy and policy and winning hearts and minds and that kind of thing. It's been a long process. And yeah, because it is so big, so many different teams at the company publish to it, it's really more of a platform than a product. The way you talk about websites as places and emergent places rather than products or services or something like that, is extremely true for us, because it is something that lots of people are creating in an ongoing way all together, in perpetuity. And it changes constantly. So, a lot of what we do is try to adjust rules, try to incentivize different behaviors, create standards and structures around what people do rather than just architecting a site and saying, "cool, it's architected. There's your IA! It's done." There's no room for that in our work. Jorge: What I'm hearing there is that you are more the stewards of the place than the people who are structuring the nitty gritty content. Is that fair? Sarah: Absolutely. You know, we create guidelines for how you structure a table of contents or the kinds of things you put in navigation. We don't actually do any of it for you if you're a publisher on our platform. How websites are not living rooms Jorge: Well, that sounds super interesting, exciting, and necessary, I would imagine, especially in such a large distributed system. I've been wanting to have you on the show for a while, but what prompted me to reach out to you was a post you published to Medium called, "Websites are Not Living Rooms and Other Lessons for Information Architecture." I was hoping that you would tell us a bit about this. What do you mean by "websites are not living rooms?" Sarah: This article that you're talking about came out of a workshop I put together for World IA Day, when you and I last met in Switzerland. And the idea of the workshop really arose out of this work I was doing at Microsoft, which is so different from the consulting I was doing before. I often found, as a consultant, people are very ready to treat you as an expert. And oftentimes when you come in as part of a consultancy or an agency, some project sponsor or kind of some champion for there even being an information architecture problem that needs to be solved by a consultant, has done so much legwork for you in convincing everybody that this is a problem, in convincing everybody that information architecture is a thing. You know, somebody has done so much of that work. And so, everybody's very primed to treat you like an expert and accept the basics of what you're telling them when you come in in that context. When I started at Microsoft, I was the only information architect. There are more of us now, but at the time it was only me. And in retrospect, like I still can't figure out why they hired me, because I spent the first, probably 18 months I was there going to meetings with extraordinarily nice and talented people who I adore... but going to meetings with them and then being like, "I don't see why you have to have breadcrumbs. I don't see why things in the navigation all have to go to the same website. Why?" And it was... it wasn't hostile, but it was a challenge to explain the first principles of everything that tend to be true about information architecture. Like, "yes, you ought to have breadcrumbs on every page." Like, "yes, the steps in the breadcrumbs should go to pages where you can get to the subsequent breadcrumbs!" Very nitty gritty details like that, where I had never had to explain how breadcrumbs worked before because usually we all just have such a shared mental model about them. And one of the things that comes out of this so frequently, and the example I use in the article actually comes from my colleague Rachel Price, from her consulting days where people often come with a very simple idea of how they feel like it should just work. And those ways, like, "why can't we just..." so frequently comes from an experience in the real world, where I think the example that Rachel has is she was working on a product that was for college students. And the product manager was like, "why can't it just be a dorm room? And my backpack is on the floor and my wallet is in my backpack. And if I need to change something about my payment, I go in the backpack and I get my wallet. Why can't it just work that way?" And as an information architect, like I know in my bones that the answer is, "it can't. That will not work!" But it's really actually very hard to explain why, other than like, "that's weird and we tried it in the nineties! But it won't work." And so, a lot of this article is about like, okay, why does that idea of structuring something like physical space — why does it feel so appealing? Why does it seem so easy? And then why is won't it work? Why is it a red herring? Jorge: And what you're talking about here, I want to unpack it for the folks who are listening, is the idea that you can structure a digital system in ways that mimic the ways that we structure our physical environments, where we do things because, hey, we're used to operating in a living room or an office or what have you, why can't we just have the same affordances and signifiers, but presented in a two dimensional screen somehow. Is that right? Sarah: Yeah. And it seems like it ought to work, but it really doesn't. And it's because... and the point I'm making in the article is that there are implicit rules to how physical spaces work and I'm actually working on the next article in this series to unpack some of those more. I'm trying to get it published this week as we record it. But I have a two-year-old, so we'll see how that works. There are implicit rules to how these spaces work in the real world. And it's easy to mimic the look and feel of a physical space without actually following those implicit rules. So, we need to unpack what the implicit rules are. Jorge: The example that you bring up in the article is one that... again, I'm going to reveal my age by saying this, I remember being on the market, which is Microsoft Bob. And there might be a lot of folks in the audience who are not familiar with Microsoft Bob. How will you describe It for someone who hasn't seen it? Sarah: It wasn't the only one of these kinds of products. I think there were a lot of them in the early days of software and the internet. We didn't have this one, but I remember the very first computer I used that accessed the internet... it had other things that were like this. But it was basically that Microsoft was trying to sell the idea of an operating system and a personal computer to a home market. And in order to make it more accessible and appealing, they tried to structure the desktop, or like the operating system, as if it were a house. And so, the idea was that your accounting would be in a checkbook that was on a little drawing of a desk, which was in a study. And if you wanted to look at your contacts, that was in a Rolodex on the desk. If you wanted to do something that wasn't in a study or an office context, you would go to a different room, and that would be there instead. And it has some weird rooms. I've never actually used it, so I've only been able to kind of piece it together from stuff on the internet. But there's like a barn or something — it gets very strange! There are obviously parts of it that are just silly, where, you know... why do you need that room? But there are also parts of it that just, again, they don't follow the rules of how architectures are going to work, so it's not going to work. And it provides a kind of fun counterpoint to realistic requests and objections that you do get doing this kind of work. Metaphors Jorge: We use the desktop and file folder metaphor in interacting with our… let's call them personal computers as opposed to mobile devices. And that is a metaphor; it's not inherent to the underlying technology. Why would you say that the desktop and file folder metaphor works whereas the architectural metaphor doesn't work as well? Sarah: Yeah. I think there are a couple of things going on. This is very much like the subject of the next article that I'm working on. Which is that I would argue that our brains understand space at different scales. And we understand what I call tabletops, but you could also call a desktop or something like that in a very different way than we understand larger scale physical space, like a room, a house, a city, and then you even get into a nation and understanding that scale of space, which is huge. We understand those things in very different ways, and a lot of the ways that the personal computer and like the notion of the desktop have evolved to work mirror the ways our brains expect tabletop-like spaces to function. Tabletop-like spaces, I think in general... you can see them all at once or at least see how you would get to all of their pieces at once. And they consist of small moving parts. In a very similar way to how, if you're working at an analog desk, you can just have your stuff around you and you see it in your peripheral vision and you can affect most of the things around you. This is very different to how larger scale spaces work, where you can't see them all at one time and you have to construct a mental model of that space by moving around it and stitching those pieces together over time. There's a whole neuro-biological component to this where we have certain kinds of cells called place cells that fire in certain kinds of circumstances that tell you, “Ah, this is a new place." And that doesn't happen when a small object moves around you on a tabletop. It does happen when you move from room to room. And so when we're in more operating system-like experiences or more app-like experiences, you know? You and I are talking to each other on Zoom right now. That really functions like a tabletop. Everything's right there. I could open stuff up, but it works more like drawers or something like that. It's not at all like something like Microsoft Docs or the BBC's website or any other kind of like large, content-based website, which is really much more like a landscape where you have to kind of move around from place to place and reconstruct a picture of it. And so, the big argument there — and this is something that I work with my designers on a lot — the big argument there is you have to be really clear about what you're building so you know what kinds of rules to use, because those things are actually really different. And most of the time we just kind of go, "eh, it's sort of like an app, right?" Like, "what is this app like?" And it's like, "Oh, its website-like." We know that Zoom and the Wall Street Journal don't and shouldn't work the same way, but we have a hard time articulating why. And for me, it's that difference in architectural scale and how our brains understand it. Agency Jorge: I find that idea super intriguing. I'm wondering if you could elaborate or give us examples of how something like the Wall Street Journal would differ from something that is more... I don't know, a communication tool like Zoom. Sarah: Yeah. So gosh, I wish I'd opened the article up, because I haven't thought about this a couple of days, but they vary in some kind of predictable ways. One is the scale of the things around you. Something like Zoom tends to have a lot of little pieces or I use Keynote as an example too. The reference, in the real world that you're using as metaphors, tend to be smaller and the actual elements in the interface tend to consist of a lot of little things. Whereas in a more landscape-like environment, you're dealing with a few big things. In a real-world landscape, those are buildings. Those are landmarks. They are mountains that are far away, as opposed to like objects that you have on a table around you. And we have a similar scale with the tabletop kind of apps versus landscape-y websites. You also get different degrees of agency. I have a lot of say over exactly what Zoom does. Perhaps not as much as one might like, but I can customize something about it, and I would expect that customization to persist. I can rearrange things. There's not a lot of expectation that I can do anything to gov.uk, other than maybe put my information in a form. I'm not going to do a lot of customization. It's not going to remember a lot of details from time to time. We also talk about kind of how you interact with the thing. The best way to learn something like Zoom, even if they put an overlay on it, is just to kind of poke at stuff. You know, turn that on and off and see what it does. You move things around you, open up settings. It really rewards interaction. Whereas with a large content-based landscape-like website, you have to move around. You're walking around and looking at stuff. You're moving from page to page and forming that mental model rather than poking at stuff to see what it does. There are a few different things like that. And then they come with different expectations too. There's a real expectation of intimacy with tabletops or with app-like experiences, even if they are a web apps. You kind of expect that it's yours in some way, and you don't expect that kind of of more websites that seem more like public goods. And we run into funny situations with that, like with things like Twitter, which I would argue functions like a tabletop, even though it's kind of a web app. You can experience it as an actual app too, but it's mine. I don't go anywhere. I just push buttons and do things on it and my stuff is there. And there all kinds of stories about people getting wildly upset about a new line showing up or a design change happening. I remember how much everybody freaked out when they went from 140 to 280 characters. You tend not to get such a feeling of ownership and people being so concerned about changes in websites that feel like public accommodations. You know, people have lived their lives in docs. They spend tons of time there. They don't tend to care very much about the exact details of the design or something like that. Because it doesn't feel like theirs. Jorge: If I might reflect that back to you, this principle of understanding the scale at which we're working seems to have something to do with the degree of agency that you have over the thing that you're interacting with. And the more granular the level of control that you have with the thing that you're interacting with, the more... I'll use the word intimate, maybe the more like personalized... it's something that you use as opposed to something you inhabit, in some ways. Is that right? Sarah: Very much so, yeah. And I think it's really like, "does your brain think that this is a place or not?" We don't expect places for the most part to be only for us that no one else could ever get into. It's an easy jump to be like, "ah, yes. Other people are here too. This is not just only for me." Whereas something at a much smaller scale... like, I don't expect other people to be messing around with my nightstand. Or my desk at work. Even though theoretically they could, but it's my stuff and I left it there. And there's that greater expectation of control and of intimacy. Naive geography Jorge: Great. So, I don't know if to call these principles or just things to be mindful of when doing this kind of work. You've mentioned scale as one of them, and you've already said that there's another post coming out specifically on that. In the post that is currently published, you mentioned three other principles, if we might call them that. And I was wondering if you could, recap them for our listeners. So, scale is one. A second here you say, "leverage the principles of naive geography." What does that mean? Sarah: I came across a really interesting article a few years ago that is by geographers for geographers, which is like not a field I'd thought about at all. And I was looking into the idea of cognitive maps and cognitive mapping with the idea of like, "oh, do people have like complex maps in their heads that they navigate and are those things the same in the real world and the digital world?" And the answer is, for the most part, no, we don't have maps that have any integrity to them. There are a couple of exceptions, but this was the theory for a while, and it's been pretty disproven. It's not a thing we have. We do, however, have representations of ways to get places in our head. I distinguished between the kind of tabletop more small-scale and the landscape more large-scale because we don't need these representations and we don't form them for small scale experiences. If you can rely on everything you need being in your peripheral vision, your brain doesn't bother remembering where everything is. Because it can get that kind of continuous sensory input. But for these larger-scale experiences where you have to construct a representation over time, and you have to reason against that to figure out where you're going. We construct those representations. And the interesting thing about it is that we're very good at it. I talk about that a little bit in this article with all kinds of cultural traditions that rely on remembering things by relying on how good humans are at remembering places and how to get between places. We're very good at it. But like more interestingly to me, we also make a lot of mistakes while we do it and we make those mistakes in predictable ways. So, one of the principles of naive geography that I think is just fascinating is that for the most part, when we remember things, we remember the earth as flat and square. We're very bad at remembering or estimating depths and heights in comparison to lengths and widths and distances and that kind of thing. Our brains really smoosh everything down. We also, for instance, think about distance in terms of time, not absolute distance. And so, they have eight of these or something like that. And the idea was that naive geography is how everybody understands geography and makes geographic calculations, even if they are not geographers. And they compare it to the idea of naive physics, which is that you can tell what's going to happen when you throw a ball without being a physicist. Like we can figure that out. The same way as we can give directions, we can make judgments and we can reason based on distances without being a geographer. And we're good at it, but we're also bad at it in these kinds of known ways. And I found that almost all of those ways are relevant for digital spaces as well as physical spaces. So, we go into exactly how those work and how you can apply them to your designer information architecture work. Wayfinding Jorge: Another principle here says, "check your wayfinding." That sounds like it's related to this concept of naive geography. What's the distinction here between wayfinding and what we've been talking about so far? Sarah: Yeah. I think of it as, naive geography is what humans do. And developing wayfinding principles or instantiating those way-finding principles in our designs, is what we as information architects do. Basically, it's great to know that people's brains mislead them in this standard way that we can predict, but you have to turn that into something that we can use because nobody I work with cares as much about neuroscience as I do, you know! Or geography, or cognitive mapping, or any of these things. We have to change it into guidelines and principles that I can give to product designers and developers and that kind of thing. And so, for wayfinding, it's really bringing it out of the more esoteric and theoretical space of like landscapes and tabletops and whatever is happening with cognitive geography and this kind of thing into like, "okay, what does that mean?" It's very simple stuff that I largely adapted from museum exhibit design, where it's like, "hey, you need to make sure people have landmarks. You need to pave paths so they know where to go." And we tie that back to the principles of naive geography to figure out why. I tend to illustrate this with grocery stores because I find that they have great wayfinding and it is way more accessible than a lot of the other examples people use like airports, especially with none of us have been in an airport for a year. And grocery stores make a lot of complex things very findable. I often have conversations with stakeholders where they're like, "well, no wonder nobody can find anything. We have 200 products!" And like the average grocery store has something like 800,000 SKUs, and you never are surprised that you can find your brand of maple syrup or be sure it's not there. Which is like the gold standard of wayfinding as far as I'm concerned. So, you can use the structure well enough to be sure that something doesn't exist. "Oh, that's so findable, it's great!" So, we talk about the specific things that you need to check that you're doing in your experience to make sure people can use those naive geographic skills they have. Jorge: And that's a learned skill, right? Knowing to expect something to be there and realizing that it isn't because of its absence is something that you have to pick up. This weekend, I took my kids to Barnes and Noble. They were wanting to buy some books and as convenient as it is to do it online, it's still quite pleasurable to browse through the shelves. And I was explaining to them how the books are organized alphabetically by the author's last name on the shelves. And that came up in the context of looking for a specific book and realizing that it wasn't there because the author's name wasn't on there. That's kind of what we're talking about here. Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. Jorge: This example of the grocery stores is also useful in that perhaps we understand these organization schemes at different levels of granularity. Once we understand how a grocery store is organized, we can find our way from the very highest level of the organization scheme all the way down to a specific product. And, at the highest level, the distinction that sticks in my mind is this phrase that I've heard used for people looking to eat healthier. They say, "shop the perimeter." Shop the edges of the grocery store, because that's where the fresh foods are kept. Whereas all of this stuff in the middle is processed foods. And that's a very high-level distinction that once you understand it, you can navigate that environment differently. Sarah: Yeah, that's also a great example of being able to reason based on a structure, rather than on content. Which is another gold standard of doing information architecture, I think. If somebody can understand the structure and your wayfinding and experience well enough that they can go, "hmm, I'm going to go around the edges!" Rather than saying, "I'm going to go to the lettuce and then I will go to the chard!" You know, that's what we dream of creating for our users. Standard elements Jorge: I want to move on to the last of the principles that you present in the article. It says, "use standard elements intentionally." What do you mean by 'standard elements'? Sarah: 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. And this comes up a lot for us in things like design reviews, where the group will decide that we really don't need a content-type label on that card. And I'll say, "okay, the thing that that is doing for us is this thing!" Like, it is fulfilling this wayfinding need. How else are we going to do that? Because if you want to take this label off, I have to pick up the slack somewhere else. Whereas if somebody says, "oh, hey, I think we don't actually need..." I don't know, "we don't use breadcrumbs on this page or something." I can say, "okay, cool." Because actually that same need for being able to zoom out or being able to orient yourself relative to a landmark is actually being taken care of in these three other ways on the page already. So, if we lose that one, it's okay. It can help you make decisions about those trade-offs with design elements. It can also help you check the things that you absolutely need to be coherent with each other, that you need to be consistent because they're trying to do the same thing. And if they give people two different sets of information, that's worse than not having it at all. Jorge: It's an exhortation to be mindful about not just the elements you're using, but why they're there, right? Sarah: Yes, and all of this is really because, again, I had ideas about what I was doing as an information architect and I didn't have great answers for the little granular-wise. And so this is a result of my exploration of, okay, well, why? Why do we need them to work that way? And so, I'm sharing it with everybody else. Jorge: I'm wondering how thinking this way has affected your own work? Sarah: So much of information architecture is in the people and not the models. And so, my work has been about gaining allies and building relationships and getting people on board, and a good explanation that you can be confident about that doesn't rely on, "just trust me!" goes a really long way. Being able to break it down and decide where I make trade-offs and where I can accept more dissent, where I can encourage that and really learn from it versus where I really need to double down and say, " no, we need this." That's made a huge difference in my ability to get things done and to just build better experiences. Closing Jorge: Well, that's great. I'm very excited to see the upcoming posts in the series. It sounds like you're well ahead with the one about scale. Where can folks follow up with you to keep up to date with what you're writing and sharing. Sarah: Yeah, you can find me on Twitter @documentalope, or you can find everything I and my colleague Rachel Price write at a Medium publication called "Known Item." Jorge: Fantastic. And I have to call out that Rachel is a previous guest in the show as well. And I'll link to the conversation we had in the show notes. It's been so great having you on the show, Sarah. Sarah: Thank you so much. It's been fun. Jorge: Thank you.

Plus, still working out the logistics of the podcast ..... on the podcast.  It's called being efficient. By the way, if you have ideas for the pod, text Harry at ‪(262) 345-2501.  (

Panel:  Editors Jenn Litz-Kirk, Jordan Driggers, and Sarah Barrett.  (

Ft. Lazy Sunday with the TTB:  "We gonna chase ya' Southern Glaza."  (

Panel:  Editors Jenn Litz-Kirk, Jordan Driggers, and Sarah Barrett are all in studio to record and quick pod before a supplier reception.   (

Ann Rohmer speaks with OMH President Dr. Samantha Hill on how we get through this latest lockdown and how the CDC in the United States has changed it's policy on masks – could that be in our future? Tina Cortese is with York University Professor Sarah Barrett from the faculty of education and the discussion looks at the long-term effects and challenges in how and where students learn, will high school grads have a tough time in college/university this fall and what will the classroom look like in September? Heather Seaman has the details on YSpace. a community innovation hub in Markham that helps entrepreneurs build sustainable and impactful businesses in York Region. Karen Johnson looks at the Markham Teen Arts Council, a group of young people continuing to create films and other creative outlets including crafts for cash – even during the pandemic Jim Lang introduces us to Brampton's own, Jasman Sangha; who signed with Texas A&M Corpus Christi on a Full Basketball Scholarship Ann Rohmer returns with World Fine Cars, a car dealership in South Etobicoke that has not only survived but is doing a solid business through the pandemic Music Director Cristina Lavecchia and Afternoon Host Amber Payie talk to JP Saxe, a multiple Juno nominee who talks about going to school in King City; his partnership musically & personally with Julia Michaels.

Sarah Barrett is Principal Information Architecture Manager and Rachel Price is Senior Information Architect at Microsoft. Together they have used OOUX to untangle, among others, the insane complexity of Microsoft's technical library, Microsoft Docs, as well as Microsoft Learn, which provides interactive learning paths and certifications for beginners and pros alike. In this episode of the podcast, Sophia, Sarah, and Rachel discuss how to think like a library scientist, how being conventional can be a virtue, and why accessibility is good for everyone, not just the differently-abled. Enjoy! LINKS: Connect with Sarah on Twitter: @Documentalope Keep up with Sarah on her website: sarahrbarrett.com Connect with Rachel on Twitter: @r_audrey Read Sarah's article about getting to structured content at Microsoft: How We Did It: Getting To Structured Content Check out more from both of them on their Medium Publication: Known Item Senior Information Architect position at Microsoft: Senior Information Architect --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ooux/support

Last week you heard what it's like behind the scenes of organising our online conference. Women in Language. But what is it like to prepare for speaking at this event? Let's hear from the Women in Language speakers! Introducing Women in Language Women in Language is a 4-day online event filled with talks presentations from 30+ female language experts who have done amazing things and documented their journey. The conference is open to everyone, regardless of gender identity. Here's the full schedule for 2020: Women in Language Schedule 2020 https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/9/9103f3da-a263-4bfe-b5a3-58649ff9b5f7/DqRDkNdf.jpg Get your ticket at www.womeninlanguage.com Here are the voices you're hearing on this show: Angela Pegarella from Passion for Dreaming (https://www.youtube.com/user/PassionforDreaming) Chesline Pierre-Paul, a life, language and creativity coach Chesline (https://www.chesline.com/) Devy Baseley, who runs FrenchSpeak.au (https://frenchspeak.com.au/) Esther Ciganda, an independent Basque teacher at Basque in Languages (http://www.instagram.com/basqueinlanguages) Gaby Simmons who's the creator of Tim Tim Tom Books (https://timtimtom.com/) Lina Vasquez, a language coach and polyglot who runs the Lina Vasquez YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/LinaVasquezLinguist) Sarah Barrett from family-focused language company Lingotastic (http://lingotastic.co.uk/) Sara Maria Hasbun - remember her? Here she is! (https://www.fluent.show/guests/saramaria) Shanthi Cumaraswamy Streat, expert English teacher at English With a Twist (https://englishwithatwist.com/) Support This Podcast Like all podcasts, the Fluent Show is supported by your online reviews and word of mouth. If you liked this episode, please tell someone about it. Click here to support us on Patreon (http://www.patreon.com/fluentshow), go to your Podcasts app and leave us a review, or simply text a friend about the Fluent Show. Thank you! Special Guests: Angela Pegarella, Chesline Pierre-Paul, Devy Baseley, Esther Ciganda, Gabriela Simmons, Lina Vasquez, Sarah Barrett, Sara Maria Hasbun, and Shanthi Cumaraswamy Streat.

In Episode Two we hear from Stephan Whelan, founder of DeeperBlue.com and Michael Menduno, Dive journalist and author as they have a candid discussion of their recent Op-Ed "The Day Diving Stood Still" and they share their assessment of where the Scuba and Freediving world are now under Coronavirus.Then we have an interview with underwater filmmaker David Diley who discusses some incredible stories from the making of his seminal film, "Of Shark And Man".Then we hear from freediving legend William Trubridge on How To Breathe for a freedive.And then finally we hear from Sarah Barrett on her Best Dive Ever.Don't forget to give us ★★★★★, leave a review, and tell your friends about us - every share and like really makes a difference.

SaaS subscriptions tend to be month-to-month and if it lapses, designers and architects lose access to their projects. Go from concept to completion all in one BIM software with Vectorworks and keep what’s yours. Christoph Trappe speaks with industry expert Sarah Barrett about their perpetual license that allows users to keep the software permanently. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/buildings-podcast/support

Public Trans is a new podcast for trans people by trans people. An informal conversation between your hosts, Mac and Ave, Public Trans talks about what it means to be trans in the public eye, taking the structure of your morning commute. Through the Morning Cup of Gender, the Commute, and the Platform, we talk about the questions we often ask each other, such as: how do you pass if you don't identify as a binary gender? How do we raise children with or without gender? What challenges does the modern dating landscape confront trans people with? What are the failings of mainstream androgeny? These questions raise different issues for trans people with varying gender identities, and though we attempt to explore the intersection of identity with these issues as much as possible, we acknowledge our viewpoints can be limited. That is why The Platform ends every episode. The Platform is a section of our show dedicated to contributions from our community and serves as a space for trans people to contribute their voices and thoughts about our episode's topic. Our wonderful Platform contributors for episode one include: Cass Adair (he/him), a radio producer, former academic, and Animorphsexpert (find Cass and his work here!); Lucy Brown (they/them), a rising third year at Oberlin College who is passionate about working with the Jewish community at Oberlin and making Reform Jewish youth spaces more accessible for trans youth, as well as playing ultimate and working to make that community a better place for trans players; Gregory Rosenthal (they/them), an Assistant Professor of Public History at Roanoke College who works with LGBTQ+ history, including trans history; and the Transmasculinidad project, which explores gender and masculinity throughout Latin America where gender roles are strict and machismo is unforgiving, headed by Sarah Barrett and Carmen Graterol, who travelled from Chile to Mexico documenting trans masculinity as they went (check them out here!). The excerpt from Transmaculinidad you will hear on episode one features Matias and Joaquin, from Peru. Check us out on Instagram as public.trans.podcast, on Twitter as @trans_podcast, on Facebook as Public Trans, and on Patreon! Public Trans is made possible by our audio editor and producer, Savannah Tracy (she/her), and our music producer Alexander Fiorentini (he/him). Alexander is a sweet tune mastermind located in Providence, RI and making hip-hop, pop, and everything in between - find him here or here. Your hosts are Mac Maclean (they/them), a writer and artist based out of Boston, and Ave Bisesi (they/them), a scientist and educator working in the Cleveland area.

In this episode I welcome Sarah Barrett to talk about her company Lingotastic, where she introduces young children to foreign languages with games and songs --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/actualfluency/message

On this week's episode, Chance and Noah tell you about everything but their childhoods. But a little personal disclosure is appropriate as they discuss three movies about therapists and their patients. Plus, Chance invites a counseling graduate student (to whom he's also a live-in boyfriend) onto the show to talk about the accuracy and responsibility-of-representation sides of "A Dangerous Method" (2011), "Girl, Interrupted" (1999) and "Analyze This" (1999). Via drama and comedy, these titles portray psychotherapy from its birth to its cultural growing pains to its absolute exhaustion in the wrong hands. Enjoy, and don't forget to tell us how this episode makes you feel. 8:15 - "A Dangerous Method" 23:30 - "Girl, Interrupted" 41:45 - "Analyze This"

With the holiday right on top of us- it's always nice to have a old friend stop by and give us advises on what we can do to help our schools raise money. Sarah Barrett will be in the house give us some truly heavenly ideas and suggestions from her book-A Mom's Guide to School Fundraising! Spiritual Coaching with Ari Mac on K4HD.com Live from Burbank, California every Friday at noon PST! You know your local school can use all the help that it can get!!! ‪#‎candlesbyari‬ ‪#msarimacThis show is broadcast live on K4HD - Hollywood Talk Radio (www.k4hd.com ) part of Talk 4 Radio (http://www.talk4radio.com/) on the Talk 4 Media Network (http://www.talk4media.com/).

We continue our #BadAssMomma series this week with Sarah Barrett. Sarah took her spirit of helping others raise money for schools to a whole new level by writing a book chock full of tips and insight so that anyone can do the same for their organization. Ari Mac has always believed that everyone has a gift, but it takes time to grow that gift. Sarah shared her growth and experience to help others through her book. Listen every Friday Live K4HD.com #candlesbyari #1spirituallifecoach #msarimacThis show is broadcast live on K4HD - Hollywood Talk Radio (www.k4hd.com ) part of Talk 4 Radio (http://www.talk4radio.com/) on the Talk 4 Media Network (http://www.talk4media.com/).

When Anne + Amy try to cook with Amy's young daughter, there's an unexpected ingredient in the mix: fear. Plus, a profile of a transgender mom and her daughter. Production assistance by Sarah Barrett. Special thanks to Sue Yacka. Music credit: -"Doctor True" by Jingle Punks, courtesy of YouTube Audio Library -"You and Me" by Penny & The Quarters Logo created by Justin Schnarr. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The "Rap Sheet Trap" reports shine a light on the criminal justice system's inability to fix its own mistakes-and the pain suffered by those caught in the trap. Tom Robbins, CUNY J School and team, Laura Bult and Sarah Barrett discuss their findings.

Do you want to help out your kid's school or PTA but find the idea of pushing candy at work or selling gift wrap lame. On Todays show we discussed fundraising and I shared some of my fundraising horror stories. After the break we were joined by Sarah Barrett author of the book A Mom's Guide to School Fundraising:  A Mom's Guide To School Fundraising You can listen live by going to www.kpft.org and clicking on the HD3 tab. You can also listen to this episode and others by podcast at:http://directory.libsyn.com/shows/view/id/moneymatters