Made my way into work listening to BBC Radio4’s Between Ourselves programme today. It was a informal interview/chat between Tom Dixon, inventor of the Jack lamp, creative director of affordable stylish furniture store Habitat [here is their site, un-navigable without Flash] and Kenneth Grange, founding partner of Pentagram [their site again un-navigable without Flash… couldn’t even get a phone number for them if I was a really important client, etc, etc… sigh], venerable uberdesigner of the London taxi, the Intercity train, the Kenwood Chef – amongst other things.

The thing that struck me listening to Grange was the same thing that I saw when seeing photos of Robin and Lucienne Day, or Charles and Ray Eames late in their lives/careers. They had, and were still having so much bloody fun designing things.

Listening to Grange speak made vow to carve myself some of that fun from now on – starting entering with my first architectural competition since CarFreeLondon: a competition to design a kiosk on the Thames near Cleopatra’s Needle.

Be quick to listen to the programme. It will only be there for seven days before being replace by the next programme unfortunately(roll on the Creative Archive!!!!) please do, it’s only 30 minutes and while it’s not a particularly theoretical or deep grilling of either man, it’s a smashing fillip if you’re a designer.

Or at least they’ve gone and built their own asylum, somewhere nice, by the sea.

It’s been linked up the wazoo already, but in case you missed it, a number of the usual IA suspects have set up an institute for “advancing and promoting information architecture”: The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture Best of luck to all involved.

The most interesting/provoking parts of all this to me were:

a) A quote on the homepage from Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain

“Order and simplification are the first steps toward mastery of a subject -the actual enemy is the unknown.”

Which I found sort of alienating. I’m not a big fan of ‘order’, or treating the unknown as an enemy. Big fan of simplicity, which often, but not reliably often, comes from simplification. I know, I know… I’m being vague, but that quote set my teeth on edge. BWDIK?*

b) Andrew Hinton‘s ’25 Theses’ manifesto, which I have niggles with:

e.g. “3. Without human intervention, information devolves into entropy and chaos.”

Huh? What’s the defn. of information used through this piece? Is it “Meaning?” which is inherently linked with human perception; or is it the physicists definition of ‘information’ – i.e. that “Information is what remains after one abstracts from the material aspects of physical reality”

On reading Andrew’s point (3), a physicist friend of mine said that it implies that consciousness is the only thing that can lower entropy. Physics, and specifically thermodynamics say that entropy and information can and do exist without reference to human consciousness. And there is also a fair amount of theory and experimental evidence to point to order spontaneously arising from chaos.

And so it unravels.

If I do a quick search-and-replace on the manifesto substituting ‘information’ with ‘meaning’**, things get interesting.

I’ve used the clumsy metaphor of the construction industry before – that architects, engineers, construction workers, clients and everyone else involved in the complex interconnected endeavour of actually building something, unite in understand around that which they are actually building, which is actually a building.

UX/ID/IA/Designers/Programmers/Whatever could unite around what they are actually building – which is ‘meaning’. (cf. Mok’s ‘understanding business’) Forming a federation or just loose field of understanding, around what you need to construct for ‘understanding’: The Meaning Construction Industry

But I digress. And hey! It’s a manifesto, you’re meant to have niggles with it!

(C) Andrew’s notion of the internet being a ‘shared information environment’ is fantastic – might help those in the Meaning Construction Industries(tm) to think outside the webpage/website paradigm, and into the more ecological mindset recquired to deal with next-generation concepts like web services and the semantic web.

Anyway – all of this doesn’t distract from the good that this will do those who practice IA (in the USA at least) – and congratualtions to all involved.

» The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture

“If Saville’s look has remained constant, it’s probably because he’s allergic to the idea of design for design’s sake. ‘

‘We have a situation now where you want to clear the cultural space,” Saville says.

”Designing things is vulgar. That’s why I can’t be bothered doing it anymore, why I do it by special appointment only. Next year will be the 25th anniversary since I left college, and as far as I’m concerned, I’ll just take the gold watch and go. I don’t want to be like Phil Spector: ‘Hey, I have a great idea, let’s get that old guy.”’

» NYT: Peter Saville: Outstanding Alien [via daidala.com]

As a colleague from Sapient once dubbed the dot-com years is described beautifully in The Morning News.

From all the reminiscences, this still resonates, unfortunately:

“…still not understood, exactly, what content is, how it becomes dynamic or forward-thinking, and exactly how the creatives are supposed to populate or architect it…”

» The Morning news: Quitter [via CityofSound]

Got very annoyed at the Design Council the other night. They were pitching their series of talks on ‘Humanising Technology”. Strikes me as a very odd phrase: ‘humanise technology’…

To separate and demonise ‘technology’ seems false. It’s what makes us human. It’s our evolutionary distinctiveness.

And anyway what’s so bad about technologising humans?

Would the cro-magnon Design Council be complaining about the distinctly un-apelike flint axes that the crazy stonehacker kids were coming up with, and staging talks on ‘simianising technology’???

I’m reminded of both Maeda‘s desire to explore honestly the ‘materiality’ of the digital in design, and once again, Neal Stephenson’s excellent ‘In the beginning was the command-line’ – where the he casts the ‘humanisation’ of technology via graphical user interfaces as the creation of a schizm between the technologically-adept and conversent Morlock elite and a growing group of Eloi in thrall to the GUI, living in a dreamworld they have no control or agency within over that allowed by their unseen and incomprehensible Morlock captors.

What’s the middle ground? Can we make technology, and computers easy to use while maintaining the transparancy, freedom and agency of command-line culture?