Author: Amy Jiménez Márquez

Amy Jiménez Márquez is the owner and Publisher of Boxes and Arrows. She’s also a Design Director at a tech startup, and formerly led the Alexa Personality Design team at Amazon.

Amy has been a design professional since the late 1990s, working in both corporate and freelance settings. With a Master’s degree in Directing, she’s also been performing improvisational comedy for over 20 years, and enjoys applying improv collaboration techniques to her daily work.

You can connect with her on Twitter (@amymarquez) and LinkedIn.

Articles by this author:

The beach at Port Townsend, WA, at sunset. It's a sandy beach covered in rounded stones.
From the Editors

Hiatus…indefinitely

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Updated January 30, 2023 – Amy Jiménez Márquez After much internal debate, I’m placing the publication on indefinite hiatus. It’s a difficult decision, and if you have questions or want to talk about the future of Boxes and Arrows please contact me. Boxes and Arrows will continue as an archive freely available to readers. Thank you so much for your readership over the years. This isn’t the end of Boxes and Arrows. It’s simply a new chapter that is yet

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Black Lives Matter
From the Editors

We are a community

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Message from the publishers As a native Texan in the Pacific Northwest, and a transplant Texan from Southern California, we are very aware of the significance of today’s date: Juneteenth. And we celebrate its significance and reflect on what it means to us. We’re left asking ourselves how we can be better allies. We know we haven’t done enough. We are educating ourselves on how to do more. Boxes and Arrows has always been a platform for community.  We are

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From the Editors / Information Architecture

Information Architecture Expert Panel – Part One

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The Structure of Complexity With the 2020 events for World IA Day (est. 2012) and the IA Conference (est. as IA Summit in 2000) approaching, the team here at Boxes and Arrows is taking this opportunity to highlight the importance of Information Architecture (IA). We reached out to some pillars of the IA community to ask them for their thoughts on, where information architecture is today, and where it’s going. Their response was so enthusiastic that we will be breaking

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Learning From Others / Process and Methods

The Creative Impact of Improvisation

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Improvisation is a very old and time-tested form of theater. The earliest use of improvisation is found in records of a Roman farce performed in 391 BC. Given its long history, it’s surprising to me that in our modern world, comedy–and comedic improvisation–is considered a low-brow form of entertainment. It is generally eschewed by the erudite. But it shouldn’t be. My own experience with improvisation spans 20+ years. And in the middle of that I took a hiatus from performing

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Learning From Others / Process and Methods

Going Beyond “Yes – and…”

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My first experience in improvisational comedy was in 1989. I was a freshman at Texas A&M University. Some of the students in the theater department decided to get an improv troupe started and somehow talked me into joining them. In the beginning, I was petrified to perform without a script. Looking back now, I can see just how much improv has taught me and how it informs the decisions I make when working with a project team to create a

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