A few years ago, a manager of mine gave me the assignment to work on a five-year career plan. I had never created a career plan before (not even to plot out goals for the coming year), so I was completely unprepared for how and why I should do this.
Workplace and Career
At the beginning of 2004, Boxes and Arrows, takes a moment to reflect back on the predictions made for 2003 and where we landed at year’s end. Feeling optimistic, we also invited our peers in the community to share some of their professional resolutions for the new year.
Looking Forward and Back
Even with the present downturn in the economy, more companies, from new media to established banks, have larger usability and design teams than ever before. Should we be content that we have come so far?
Designing Customer-Centered Organizations
In 1934, years before Vannevar Bush dreamed of the memex, decades before Ted Nelson coined the term “hypertext,” Paul Otlet envisioned a new kind of scholar’s workstation: a mechanical desk that would let users search, read, and write their way through a vast database stored on millions of 3×5 index cards.
Forgotten Forefather: Paul Otlet
Discussions of how we should label ourselves and define our work are like flu epidemics. They break out from time to time, follow a fairly predictable course, and often make us want to barf.
(Not) Defining the damn thing
There is not consensus on exactly what information design is. Definitions of the discipline from stakeholders who associate themselves with the field are consistent only in that they are typically high level, not very concrete and do not offer much in the way of direct practical application.
Information Design: The Understanding Discipline
The following ten things have been said by actual clients and represent common and very human reactions to a new wrinkle in the process of building software: design. By gathering these comments in one place and sharing them widely, it becomes easier to recognize them, so we can keep our calm and contribute to effective software teams.
Ten Quotable Moments: Challenges and Responses for UI Designers
Once upon a time, we were curious and everything we encountered was new. We were excited about discovering new things and the world offered unlimited possibilities. Then we went to school and were taught to color inside the lines, that everything had its place and the world was ordered.
Coloring Outside the Lines
Both programming and IA are oriented towards abstraction. They both want to find patterns and rules that describe and predict. They both are concerned with handling structured content and metadata. But more often than not, IAs don’t know what’s going on with code. In this article, Andrew Otwell introduces IAs to the basic building blocks of programming.
Programming for Information Architects
A few months ago, on the cusp of another reorganization, my boss challenged me to present ideas about how my group should be organized. The challenge: “If you could organize the group in whatever way you wanted, what would you recommend doing?” Everyone who has ever been a manager longs to hear those words.