The Diary of a Suburban Frontiersman

Tale à la Hoffmann by Paul Klee

I am putting together an online portfolio to showcase my abilities in research, structure and design. And of course you can’t think about a design portfolio without thinking about branding. And from branding it’s just a short walk to online presence. And now I’m thinking about my followers on Twitter – are they my users or am I using them?

What started out as noodling on the mechanics of tossing a few PDF files up on the web has become a massive project to redefine the architecture of an entire village. WordPress, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are very different but highly interwoven destinations on the Brand Me experience. But shouldn’t they at least be making an effort to work together toward a common goal?

The problem is, as anyone on Facebook knows, the online world is in a constant state of flux and upheaval. I just started to get the hang of Twitter and now I have to learn Google+? And what about Spotify, Quora or Diaspora? Shouldn’t I have an online presence on these sites too?

It’s overwhelming.

Howard Rheingold talks about “infotention” – the critical ability to be able to direct our attention to things that matter at the same time that we are being bombarded by a thousand streams of data. It’s absolutely essential for communicators to have a robust set of filters that allow them to capture high value information and ignore the rest.

But these filters need to work both ways. We need to be able to target, define, tag, highlight and otherwise focus the message that we have for the world.

It’s a two-way street. And that’s what makes Bonnie Nardi’s concept of information ecology so compelling – “We feel a sense of urgency about the need to take control of our information ecologies, to inject our own values and needs into them so that we are not overwhelmed.”

So, how would a person go about designing a personal information ecology? I’ve recently been re-reading Edmund Bacon’s Design of Cities. Bacon believed that cities live or die on their ability to structure four dimensional movement systems. In other words, a successful city design will constantly reward the individual as she moves through its spaces.

Ever since the days when we navigated the network through Gopherspace, if not before, people have considered networked information in spatial and architectural terms. The amazing thing is that we continue to think in terms of spatial metaphors now that hyperlinking any sense of movement from one space to another. Rather than ambling down the Via del Corso toward the Piazza Venizia we simply “pop” to an entirely different location as if we were traveling by portkey.

Any movement system within an information space needs to be centered on relationships, then, and not on locations. That, I think, is the place to start looking when considering a design for an information ecology. How does content relate to modality and how does modality relate to social capital? Or to put it in American English, how does the conversation we are having on Twitter relate to my most recent blog post and how does that conversation relate to a prospective client’s storyline?

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Tagged as: Architecture, blogging, Organizing, Purpose

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