Andy Polaine: Hi and welcome to Power of Ten. A podcast about
design operating at many levels zooming out from thoughtful
detail through to organisational transformation, and onto changes
in society and the world. My name is Andy Polaine. I'm a
service design and innovation consultant, coach, trainer and
writer. My guest today is Jorge Arango, a consultant, author,
speaker and educator and host of the informed life, a podcast
that explores how people organise information to get
things done, and which was also a guest. Jorge is the co
author of the famous polar bear Book Information Architecture
for the web and beyond he co wrote with Lou Rosenfeld and
Peter Morville. More recently, he published Living in
Information responsible design for digital places. Jorge,
welcome to Power of Ten.
Jorge Arango: A pleasure to be here Andy, big fan of the show.
Andy Polaine: Befriending austere. Now, we've had a few
conversations that have, you know, spun off in all these kind
of interconnected directions. And you know, as an organising
information guy, you probably have some thoughts on where to
start. But I guess I would like to start chronologically in a
way and ask you how you're interested in this field,
developed in the first place.
Jorge Arango: My background has two threads that became
unexpectedly woven, inter woven with each other. One thread was
computers, which I was exposed to at a very young age, I like
to say that people have our vintage and I think that you and
I are more or less age peers. I like to think that people of our
vintage are part of the first generation that grew up with
computers as playthings. Yeah. And I was very fortunate to be
exposed to computers that are at a very early age. And the other
thread is architecture, which is what I studied at university,
which has gone on to really inform my worldview, in many
ways, and what happened to me is that I graduated, just at the
time when the World Wide Web was about to come on the scene. And
when the web happened, I essentially left my career in
architecture, to devote myself to making things online. And it
was returned to this childhood interest, if not outright
obsession with computers. And I became very interested in how we
structure information spaces. So if you think of architects as
being designers who structure spaces for us to do certain
things. In the physical world, people who design websites, apps
and other digital systems are in a sense, designing spaces where
we get certain things done, we pay our bills, we learn we we do
all of these things. So that's, that's my background. And it's
how I essentially came to do what I do now,
Andy Polaine: where was the sort of first time when you started
kind of combining those things professionally there.
Jorge Arango: The first time was before, like I said, before the
web, I was, I was studying architecture. And again, I'm
saying so much about my age. In this conversation,
Andy Polaine: we must be very similar. I was 50 this year. So
Jorge Arango: there you go. So very similar age. I was a
student and architecture student at a time when architects would
still draw plans and such by hand. But that period was just
about to end you could see computers already taking over.
And when I was in university, we started using computers for 3d
modelling and such. And my interest in computers had never
waned, really. But I hadn't been as obsessive about them as I had
been in my, in my youth and in my early teens. But it was
really through the emergence of the computer as a tool for
architectural practice that I got involved with computing
again. And using computers to model 3d spaces is where the two
worlds initially collided for me, which is very interesting to
me to see what's been happening over the last few years with
things like virtual reality and augmented reality and how
computer modelling of 3d spaces has, for example, taken over the
movies. We're having, I was having a discussion on on one of
the social networks a couple of days ago about a new Universal
Studios theme park that's opening in Beijing. And I was
saying that I think I wonder to what degree those the experience
of those movie making theme parks He says relevant now that
all movie making happens in computers, right? Like, it's
like visiting their sets and stuff is not as interesting when
it's all green screens.
Andy Polaine: Yeah, well, it's weird you visit a kind of
facsimile or a kind of a sort of made up version of the set. That
it would be it's like, you know, you build the set in the
computer, and then someone has to build it in real life. Not
for the movie, but for the theme park. Right?
Jorge Arango: Well, that's, that's absolutely right. Movies
are one of the ways in which we tell stories and engage in like
mythologizing. Right. And these theme parks give us the
opportunity to go experience the mythology to somehow participate
in the shared experience of inhabiting these places. Yeah,
Andy Polaine: it is kind of fascinating how much of that has
crept in, and then it sort of becomes this novel thing where
movies as one we did all the effects practically, you know,
we'd actually blew things up and we met recently has been a thing
where, you know, they drove for Tom Cruise film, they drove a
train off of a cliff and actually did it, instead of it,
you know, the beginnings of visual effects was the other way
around that the novel thing was to have kind of done it as a as
an effect, not as a kind of practical effect. So we could
talk about film for ages, actually, because that's, you
know, I started filming, that's where I kind of, I wanted to be
a film director and visual effects were initially my thing,
it's been interesting for me to see Unreal Engine actually has
been used now as a kind of visual effects backdrop thing,
so and it's to do with the resolution of screens as well.
So they have these huge screens that are acting as the kind of
matte painting or the backgrounds, what would have
been the kind of set flat, the things that kind of a fake in a
background was painted on a little bit of kind of set, you
know, in the foreground, basically, then the camera is
react, as you probably know, this, right, the camera is then
set up with a VR head on it so that the computer knows where it
is in space and is adjusting the background so the camera can
move around, and the background also moves around. And it's just
amazing, because there's a huge screen over the top or lighting
over the top, and then the sides and there's okay, right and it
can we have it like nighttime now or a sunset. And the whole
thing kind of just switches around is quite remarkable. And
because of the depth of field, you just don't see the the
background just looks real. It blurs and
Jorge Arango: yeah, the first time I heard about that was with
the production of the Mandalorian. Exactly. Yeah, it's
a famous one. Yeah. It might seem like we're going down a
tangent, but really, this is about placemaking. Right, like
you're creating a, an environment. Yeah, that is going
to serve as a context for in the case of the movies for a
particular story to unfold. In the case of our work, and daily
life. It's where things happen, it's where we live out our
lives, right. And the places are, where we interact with each
other, where we accomplish the things that we set out to
accomplish. And we can structure them purposefully to help us do
that or not, right?
Andy Polaine: Yeah. And we've all had this experience, I think
for I've worked remotely for quite a long time. But and you
probably have done as well. But I think you know the rest of
world in the last few years, I've just experienced what it
means to be literally living in information, or it's a quite the
title of your book of all of a sudden, you know, it was I mean,
I think it's been fascinating to see that all the usual excuses
of why you can't do stuff. You know, suddenly, if you kind of
fell away and watch people engage. In my early days, or
doing sort of remote workshops, there was an awful lot of stuff,
if this is how you use mural on mirror. This is how you kind of
set up zoom, don't forget where you are. Now everyone knows that
stuff, social etiquette of being on mute. And all of those kinds
of things have. And I recently did a thing and there was like
an icebreaker exercise. And I was expecting to have to explain
things a bit more. And everyone just, you know, cracked into the
straightaway. Because they're just so used to it. And I
really, always fascinated about the way that technology goes
through this arc where you know, it's this different thing, then
it's a little bit clunky, doesn't really quite yet fit
with how we interact as humans. And then we develop, I think
etiquette around it as the way I'm thinking I like to think
about it. I still think one of the things I've written about
this before, one of the things that's a little bit strange,
like say with a zoom conversation, or video call is
how you say goodbye, it doesn't have the same, it's a little bit
awkward because you don't ever do that in real life. You don't
so just it's not like a screen comes down between you two. And
then suddenly you're not connected anymore, you would
walk to the door and say goodbye. And then you know, and
all that stuff and turn your back to each other and stuff.
But you know, I mostly think back to the early days of the
telephone and kind of the how people got used to actually
telephoning and how to kind of say hello and how to say goodbye
and stuff. And so it's been fascinating to watch that become
more every day, I think in the last couple of years. Yeah.
Jorge Arango: And I'm sure that the early days of the automobile
for example. There wouldn't be all of the standards that we
take for granted now, like I'm thinking of like driving on one
side of the road, right? Like, that's something that had to
emerge. And I don't know the history of this, it might be
that it was imposed from the top down. But I would imagine that,
for practical reasons, people must self organise to keep
themselves from getting into jams. Yeah. In the case of
traffic, quite literal jams,
Andy Polaine: right. So, in your book, you were talking about
living in information? What's the kind of when I was when did
you write it? Or it came out? I think 2018. Right. So it's a
it's quite a few years. Now. There's always this thing,
especially with a book like that, where you're sort of
capturing a moment in time, what's the kind of general
thesis of the book? And how is your sort of thesis or thinking
about that evolved? Since you wrote it? You know, what would
you love to have written or added into it or change?
Jorge Arango: The genesis of the book is the northern hemisphere
summer and fall of 2016, which was a period of political
uncertainty and turmoil. It's when Brexit happened in the UK.
And then the election in the US, which was very polarised, very
contentious. And if you followed, especially if you
followed the mainstream media, I think that the result was
unexpected, and surprising to a lot of people. And there was a
perception at the time. This was happening in no small part,
because we had moved all these key civic conversations and also
our news gathering. We had moved it to the spaces that are
monetized by selling our attention. And that seemed to me
to be incompatible with having transparent and even keeled
conversations about policy, you know, about the things that make
us society tick. So that was the genesis of that what has changed
since then? I think that people have become much more aware of
this issue. Like there's even a Netflix documentary series,
which I haven't seen, which one, I think it's called the social
dilemma. Ah, that's right. Yeah. Which, which deals with these
types of issues? Right, the conversation has become a lot
more mainstream. I think that there's been research that's
come to the fore both for and against this position. Since I
wrote the book, I still believe that the core argument of the
book is sound, which is that the incentive structures that drive
the places where we engage in conversation will influence the
form that that conversation takes. And I don't know that we
have made much progress since then, in that regard,
Andy Polaine: it wasn't really adequately thought about in the
first place. I guess that's the, you know, the most obvious one
is that is that thing of kind of extremist views on all posts on
Facebook get the most engagement and thus, the most advertising
dollars for Facebook. And you know, it's structurally set up
that way all the time. While kind of, you know, Mark
Zuckerberg saying, you know, we've got the largest amount of
experts, you know, tackling this information, but they've just
they've got a far larger amount of experts tackling how to make
that engagement pay. So is this keynotes a never ending? Well,
it's something can never be kind of finished unless you
completely restructure it. So I guess that's, you know, probably
the example that most people will think of. It's interesting.
You mentioned the social dilemma. I started watching it,
I just wanted to kind of punch everyone, I have to say on it,
because there was mostly men sort of there saying, Yeah, you
know, we just didn't really kind of think anyone was gonna use it
this way. And I was really shocked. And and I just, I had
this kind of response to it of how could you possibly not have
at least gone through the exercise of thinking, how might
someone use this nefariously? You know, because that seems to
be a fundamental, it's my favourite critique tactic with
my students is, you know, they've got a service concept in
front of them. And they're saying, Well, you know, what
happens if I do this? And what happens if I do that? How about
if I break this? And then they're like, oh, but we don't
think people would do that. But of course, someone will. And
it's a very good way of stress testing these ephemeral things
that would, you know, in Bali, in architecture, actual
architecture, and also in industrial design. That's what
you do you make a prototype, not just because it's sort of a nice
thing to look at, but you make a prototype to put it through to
smash it up and to see where it breaks and stuff, right, see if
it's dangerous, but the kind of digital tools and services out
there and platforms didn't really go through that.
Jorge Arango: And it's ironic because prototyping in digital
spaces so much easier than prototyping in, you know,
physical stuff, right? Yeah, much cheaper to run cheaper, it
scales much faster. And surprisingly, also, digital
requires a systems mindset. Like you have to understand how all
these things fit together in order to build these things. So
it's surprising to your point, it's surprising that the people
who make these things don't engage in second and third order
thinking when they build them. It's equivalent,
Andy Polaine: though, I think, to you know, watchmaker
understanding how all the cogs and and springs and parts fit
together, but not really interested in what does it mean,
when people can have can carry around a device that tells the
time all the time, how does that shape our daily rhythms and so
on. And, you know, famously, as you I'm sure, you know, you
know, the watch was a kind of artefact of the railroad.
Because once you have things running on the schedule, then
people have to know, they can't just say, Oh, I'll be there at
noon, nor when the sun is in the sky, you have to know exactly
what the time is in order to catch the train and the rest of
it. So that kind of system side of it, I don't think, comes in
that much at all. Yeah, and now, you know, I guess our lack of
teaching that in school, our lack of kind of thinking in that
way, both economically and also kind of in the workplace, you
know, leads to all the other problems, like sustainability
and climate change and the rest of air.
Jorge Arango: And I'm thinking one, one other thing that has
evolved for me since I wrote the book. And it's not that it's
new. For me, it's something it's been part of my thinking for a
long time, but I've just been kind of leaning into it is the
notion that there are information environments, which
is the phrase that I use in the book, and it's a phrase that
comes from the information architecture community, as far
as I'm aware, it might be had been used earlier, but that's
where I became aware of it. And there are information
environments that are designed for public use for public
discussion, as we're talking about here. And you have to be
very mindful of those, obviously, the effects of
creating a system that allows people to have discussions at at
the level of an entire society is there's tremendous power
there. But these systems can also be used personally, at a
personal level, right? Yeah. And you and I have both talked about
this metaphor of the garden, which is such a great, such a
great metaphor. And it's one that for me, resonates greatly,
it first resonated with me through the work of Brian Eno,
who I know you're also you're also familiar with, yeah. And
the reason that I got attracted to he knows usage is that he
contrasted architecture with gardening, right? He said that
there's this this notion that in architecture, that what you're
doing is you're structuring a system from the top down, you're
saying, Well, this is how it should be. And I'm going to put
the conditions in place that are going to serve this particular
set of needs. This this programme, and I am the expert.
And I know how to do this, I've been trained to do this. So I'm
going to bring my expertise to bear on this problem space. And
then the people who use the system will be the beneficiaries
of that hard earned knowledge. And that's one worldview right,
of how these systems get designed. Yeah. But, you know,
contrast that approach, what he calls the architectural approach
with gardening, which is the notion that you structure the
system, not with the intent of making it right from the get go,
but with the intent of setting up the conditions that will make
it possible for the system to evolve into something that meets
the needs of the gardener or the society or what have you, right,
yeah, yeah, so it's this kind of top down versus bottom up
approach.
Andy Polaine: So I think it's probably significant, that
musician kind of comes at it from that angle, as well,
because I think working in music, or composing music, or or
this creation of quite a lot of kind of artistic artefacts is
much more of a, you people like to think it's a masterful act of
creation from the top down, but it's much more of a kind of
feeling out of, you know, what is here and trying to sort of
draw out some aspects was kind of clip back others. So I'm not
surprised that, you know, took that kind of view,
Jorge Arango: but not all musicians, right. And he's
talked about the classical Western musical forms. This
notion that Beethoven goes off and composes a symphony, which
gets articulated in a set of documents that the orchestra
then goes to perform. And the idea behind those documents is
to capture as precisely as possible the intent of the
composer, right? Yeah. And when you perform the symphony, you're
trying to hew as closely as possible to the vision of the
Creator. And if you contrast that with If jazz, for example,
where the musicians are working within a structure for sure, but
it's a structure that allows for improvisation, happy accidents,
riffing, you know, and in ideal conditions, a new thing will
emerge every time that you're listening to it. And in some
ways, listening to a recording is kind of like going against
the grain of what music actually is. Oh, what it is. Yeah,
exactly. Right.
Andy Polaine: I have some recordings of I'm a saxophone in
Well, I'm not really anymore. But I used to be a saxophonist,
now, some recordings of Charlie Parker sessions, and also some
John Coltrane sessions, where you get the outtakes as well,
you get multiple takes of it. And it's very fascinating
because, well, first, it was very fascinating. Two reasons.
One, because there's a bit where some someone was recording when
Charlie Parker was, was practising. And it's, I mean,
it's obviously very good, but it's kind of also he's making
loads of mistakes. And he's, he's kind of in slows down. And
in practice, you know, and you hear this person who you, you
only in a recording here, this snapshot of this kind of moments
of brilliance, the polished version, but actually to hear
him getting there was really kind of fascinating, and quite
heartening, but also, you know, in particularly someone like
John Coltrane, and his kind of, you know, sheets of sound and
stuff to hear the different takes. And it's like I'm going
to tonight, throwing down the clay on the kind of potter's
wheel each time is that one came out pretty well, let's use that
one. But there has been multiple other versions of it, that they
could have chosen for whatever reason, you know, it's always
really great. And it same week, we talked about film, you know,
there's all these, it's always really fascinated me, the, you
know, deleted scenes or the bits, these moments when the
director in the sort of commentary saying this scene was
fantastic, really beautiful bit of acting, you can tell they're
sort of enjoying being able to show it finally, and then they
just say, but you know, ultimately, it didn't really
drive the story along, so we had to cut it. And there's this kind
of fat Kill Your Darlings thing of an eye, you know, we're going
to get rid of this thing that is actually a kind of amazing piece
of artistry, because it doesn't drive this other piece of
artistry that we're trying to achieve.
Jorge Arango: You know, we were ragging earlier on social media.
But one of the wonderful things about social media, is that the
way that we would share ideas in the past was that the the ideas
would have to go through this gauntlet of gatekeepers, right?
Yeah, yeah. All the way up to the point where it gets
published as a book or gets made into a movie or what have you.
And it's like this very formal artefact that cost a lot of
money and took a lot of time and a lot of effort. And it didn't
give us as much opportunity to riff and to improvise, and to
try different things. To make mistakes, right, and I have come
to think of social media, I actually drew a pace layer
diagram at one point with, if the listeners are familiar with
pace layers, it's notion that complex systems change are
composed of things that change at different braids. So some
parts of the system change faster than others. And the
layers influence each other. So the faster changing layers
inform slower changing layers and such. I'm not doing the
concept justice. But I do a paste layer diagram that had
social media and the faster changing layer. And things like
books in the slower changing layers, with the idea that I see
social media as a place where you can go and try out ideas
that are half baked, and sketchy, and incomplete. And
then you put them out into the world and iterate. You know that
we're talking about prototyping. It's like prototyping for ideas
at a very kind of granular level. And it's been amazing for
me in that area. That's another way in which my thinking has
evolved since I wrote living in information that I'm trying to
find a way to fit all of the systems that we're living with,
into my own kind of production function, which is a phrase I
picked up from the economist Tyler Cowen which I love this
idea that we all have tools, processes, habits that allow us
to do what we do, right. Yeah. And I feel much better about my
own use of these systems than I did back in 2016. Because I
understand them for what for what they can do for me and for
my thinking much better.
Andy Polaine: So this neatly brings us on to the idea of you
know, personal knowledge systems or information gardens. You and
I have been kind of going back and forth at little bit as well
about an app called obsidian. And I have to kind of rewind a
little bit. So for people who kind of write in writers have
done this for a very long time, the idea of kind of, you know, a
day, was it called? Is it a book, the way you kind of write
down stuff that you've learned about in the day? It's got
another name, I know, I can't think of you will know it,
probably a commonplace book. Yeah, a commonplace book, thank
you. But also, you know, if you're doing research, and if
you're, you're trying to capture all the stuff and capture your
notes and your ideas about things, I mean, lots of
different ways of doing famously zettelkasten, which in German,
it means a box of notes, etc, is like a slip of paper, like an
index card or a slip of paper. And I've used lots of different
tools, I've tried to remain kind of plain text for a long time
and keep my own, keep my own my own data, I had a differences, I
used to use a thing called envy, Alt, and then NVR chose to do
this anyway, obsidian allows you to it's basically we write
everything in plain text, and it's in Markdown. And then
you're able to kind of wiki link it together. But it's got a few
other kind of powerful things around because there's big plug
in infrastructure to or community around it, people
writing these plugins to do sort of cool things about how you
start to see the hidden connections between the
information. And I saw you wrote about it the other day, as well
as you're using it. So tell me a little bit about why you do
this, and have your kind of own information garden and what you
see it is, and how you sort of go about thinking about it.
Jorge Arango: I spoke earlier about my obsession with
computers from a very early age. And that obsession started with
video games with computers as entertainment. And it became
evident at some point, and I can't pinpoint exactly when but
it became evident to me that they were useful for more than
that, right. Like, I knew, I knew that that things like,
like, VC Calc, and, you know, spreadsheets and stuff like that
existed and that people are using these things for uses
other than playing games. But computers are obviously much
more than that. And there's this analogy that Steve Jobs made
famous, this notion that computers are bicycles for the
mind, yeah, that they allow us to do things that we would not
be able to do before, in much the same way that a bicycle
allows us to leverage our body's energy very powerfully, right.
And the thing with tools like obsidian is that that analogy
about computers being bicycles for the mind, think about all
the types of different bicycles there are right so you can put
them on a spectrum. And in one end of the spectrum, you have
Pee Wee Herman's bicycle from Pee Wee's Big Adventure if
you've seen that movie,
Andy Polaine: right? Isn't one of those little guys weirdly up
and down and stuff? I can't remember
Jorge Arango: it. I forget the name of it. But it's like a
1950s style, big, bulky flashy bicycle. Like I saw chopper type
thing. Yeah. And it's an it's kind of tacky looking and kind
of fun. And, you know, and it's clearly a bicycle that's been
designed to draw attention to itself and to, to be
entertaining, right? Yeah. And in the, in the opposite end of
the spectrum, you might have the sort of bicycle that someone who
is competing in the Tour de France with us, right, yeah,
those are all bicycles, but they're very different from each
other. Right. And they're designed with different purposes
in mind. And I think that for people who live during the time
that we're living in having access to these amazing tools,
we have, I was gonna say responsibility, but I don't know
that it's a responsibility. It's more like we have the ability,
the wherewithal to decide which type of bicycle we want to use,
what is our relationship going to be to these technologies that
are a part of our reality. And we can choose to employ them to
entertain us, to help us wile away the time and to do some
basic things like I don't know, transfer money in our bank
accounts, or keep in touch with, with our friends and family,
stuff like that. Yeah. But these things also give us the ability
to greatly expand our knowledge, and to live richer, more fuller,
more meaningful lives. And I am very interested in using them
for that purpose for the purpose of living a better life, which
for me, means the life of the mind, but the life of the mind,
as it helps me act more skillfully in the world. So it's
not like philosophising for the purpose of, I don't know,
sounding clever or what have you. It's, it's becoming
informed so that we can act more skillfully. We were talking
earlier about politics. Right, there's so much chatter
happening about political stuff that comes from a position of
reaction reaction to what you read in the media reaction to
what you hear other people saying, versus becoming truly
informed about the subject. And studying the history of what
happened here, what led to these conditions, and it's possible to
do so much more so than it's ever been for humans on this
planet. You know, we have these amazing technologies, we have
the internet, we have the internet in our pocket, for
heaven's sake, you know, and we, we take it for granted. And I
don't want to take it for granted, I want to be very
intentional in how I grow as an individual by being augmented by
these technologies. So that's, that's how I see it.
Andy Polaine: Okay, so tell me what the information garden is,
how do you do something new, you write your newsletter, with much
more dedication than I do mind always been billed as an
occasional irregular newsletter. And in fact, there's one that I
need to finish off. But you're very kind of regular with it,
you also kind of pulling together with drawing together
these different threads? What's the kind of workflow for you or
kind of thought flow maybe as a better information flow,
perhaps, in terms of you know, how you go about connecting
these things that you find together? How do you then sort
of make notes as it were about them? And why do you do it in
this way?
Jorge Arango: That's a great prompt, you talked about
obsidian. And obsidian has become a part of that toolset.
And we can talk about the tools in particular, but first of all
talk about it at a high level, I see what I'm doing happening on
two levels. On one level, it's reactive, which is finding a way
to make note of capture, annotate, keep track of things
that come to my attention, which I find interesting or important,
or what have you. We are exposed to so much stuff just in the in
the act of like going around in our daily lives, right? If we're
working on a project, there's all sorts of information coming
at you from that project. If you open Twitter, or what have you,
you're all of a sudden, you have this firehose of stuff coming
out to you. A lot of it is is just not relevant. But some of
it might resonate might be important to you, he might just
be interesting. And if you don't find a way of capturing it,
there's so much coming at you. And it's so fast that the moment
will pass and you'll likely drop it right. So that's one level,
the kind of reactive like, yeah, just trying to capture what I
have coming at me. And the other is more proactive, which is, I
have certain topics that I am interested in, that I am working
on, at any given moment that I'm doing research for those things.
And my research yields, notes, things that have resonated with
me things that I want to follow up on. And again, as with the
reactive stuff, if you don't capture that stuff, there's so
much out there that it will pass, at least for me, like I
don't have a very good memory. So if I don't capture this
stuff, it gets lost. And I've long had systems that allow me
to do that. There have been no taking applications forever.
Yeah, the difference now, and I think that we are living in a
special moment for this, the difference now is that there is
a crop of tools in the market that make manifest some of the
early visions of what computers could do for us, you know, this
notion of hypertext is hypertext is not new, right, Ted Nelson,
and folks like that have been writing and talking about this
stuff, since at least the 1960s. But now there's a crop of tools
that make a lot of these ideas usable, you know, and make them
make them easier to use. And obsidian is one of them Devon
think is another. And what I do is I'm always kind of on the
lookout for things, whether they come at me or whether I have
sought them out. And I put them into the system, which is always
evolving the this kind of personal garden. And one part of
the garden has obsidian for notetaking. And the other key
part of the garden for me right now is devonthink, which is kind
of an everything bucket where I drop hyperlinks and PDFs and
stuff like that. And it's an app that uses artificial
intelligence machine learning that sort of stuff, to suggest
possible connections between items so that it might spot that
a certain PDF might be relevant to you. If you are interested in
the thing that you're currently examining. It might be a web
page or what have you. And all of a sudden, you can surface
connections between ideas in your repository in a way that
that would be difficult time consuming for you without this
technological augmentation.
Andy Polaine: And so I'm interested in this part of,
because we started off talking about how sort of technology
influences then, when we live in information, just like
architecture, you know, the famous McLuhan thing of which,
you know, was was coined by his friend of, you know, we shape
our tools. And thereafter they shape pass was originally set by
Churchill, I believe around buildings, right, we shape our
buildings, and they offer the shape pass. And this this idea
that I'm using a tool, but the tool is, if not using me, it's
certainly kind of shaping my way of thinking. And I noticed that
you, you know, you mentioned before, there's a nice piece you
wrote recently about a generation of people who kind of
don't really get the whole file, or folder mental model. You
know, and I think it's, you're quoting Monica chin and the
verge. And there's a quote from her, it's a directory structure
isn't just unintuitive to students, it's so intuitive to
professors that they have difficulty figuring out how to
explain it. And I'm kind of interested in then how these
tools like this, where you, you're getting assistance, in
the case of devonthink, to connect things together. But in
at the same time, you're also then revealing something like
obsidian is revealing connections that you have made,
but you've kind of made in the course of your sort of, you
know, entering notes and linking things together, without
explicitly sort of trying to kind of create necessarily a
graft and what you're looking for the kind of emergent things,
right, and so the hence I am guessing the garden metaphor,
right, where you're, you're sort of saying, well, over here, you
know, I know it's sunny over here. So I'm going to plant
these kinds of things and or, you know, perhaps say, those
kind of microclimates that have gardens or those things where
you planted of one herb next to some other plant, because you
know, that herb repels a certain kind of insects that normally,
you know, attack that other vegetable or whatever. So it's
things like that going on. But then there's also these kind of
emergent things that happen, because obviously, plants grow,
you know, based on a whole bunch of different kinds of
environmental forces, so that you end up in this situation
where you're kind of seeing connections that you or
connections are revealed that you hadn't initially thought of.
And I'm interested to know whether you've had a kind of
moment like this, where, you know, there was something that
you hadn't really realised, was connected. And by the use of
these tools, you had a kind of a hammer of, oh, there's a
relationship between these things,
Jorge Arango: It does happen, I don't have any that comes
immediately to mind. A lot of them might be too trivial to
spin a good story around. Yeah, but it does happen. And it
happens even without the augmentation of something like
Devon think or obsidian, right? Like just the notion of putting
stuff down, sets in processes feedback loop that allows your
own mind to make connections, right? What these tools are
doing is they are greatly expanding the scope of what the
process can include, in my reaction to the McLuhan quote,
is that it might contain a false duality, this notion that there
are tools, and there are us, I think, is suspect, because in
this case, I believe that these tools are us in the sense that
they augment our minds. And our mind is not something that is
contained within the little MIT meat computer that I have here
on top of my shoulders. It's it's something that includes
elements of the world around it. I'm reading this fabulous book
right now called the extended mind by Annie Murphy, Paul, that
talks about the various ways in which we think with our
environments, with our tools with other people. And these
tools are in some ways me, right, like, if you were talking
about you were talking about a blog post that I published
recently. And the blog post is a way for you to know what I'm
thinking, you know, I'm fortunate to think of you as a
friend and to be able to talk with you, over zoom like we're
doing now, I have a lot of relationships with people on the
internet, where there is a relationship, but it's not a
relationship like the one we're having where we're talking one
on one, it's a relationship where I'm polishing something,
and they're reading it, and they get a sense of who I am through
the words that I'm putting out there. And those words didn't
come just from the meat computer, you know, they came
from this system that I've set up that includes tools like
obsidian, and Devin think and these tools become part of the
system, the function the process that makes these ideas manifest
in the world. So I it might be worth questioning whether that's
a valid distinction.
Andy Polaine: My PhD was bouts of interactivity in play. And as
I looked into it, I went deeply into the whole kind of metaphor
thing as well and like often Johnson and phenomenologist view
that you experience the world through your body, you don't
experience it the world through your mind, you process what your
body signals to your mind. But you're this Cartesian view of
kind of, I think we're therefore I am I'm somehow I kind of
separate consciousness from my body is an illusion. And it was
very important for me to kind of be thinking around metaphors and
interaction, and this idea that there's this weird moment where
they collapse into each other sometimes. And lake of and
Johnson in their famous book of metaphors we live by, you know,
talk a lot about this with language. And they as they sort
of pull apart language, you realise, you can barely speak
without using metaphors. And I've just said, pull apart
language as if language is a thing that you know, is made out
of building blocks that can pull it apart, and all those kinds of
stuff, we just, once you get there, like, can barely speak,
because there's so you go, hang on a second. Now, now, I've just
used another metaphor, and even the idea of using a metaphor as
if it's a tool and all those things. And what I was
interested in was with, with digital devices, and if just at
that I wrote my PhD, just as the kind of iPhone was coming out,
was this collapsing of metaphors, where when you pull a
file, let's say, into the wastebasket, you know, it's,
it's a metaphor, it's a it's a visual metaphor, if you're doing
that, it's not really you pulling a file in the
wastebasket. But you know, when you delete that stuff, and you
say, you empty the waste box, you will feel exactly the same
kind of emotional response. If you've accidentally done that to
the wrong file, as if you had actually thrown something in the
bin in real life. And there's a kind of physicality to kind of
dragging into the wastebasket. Sometimes, as well, there's all
these kind of things where, as soon as touchscreens came out,
some of those things collapsed. And yet, you're still actually
in kind of metaphor land. Because when I'm, you know,
zooming in and out of a photo, it amazes me that I feel so
intuitive, because there isn't really anything in real life
that feels like that, you would have to be a photo sort of
printed on latex, and you were kind of somehow kind of
stretching it, because what you're doing is just making
little pinching motions on a pane of glass. And yet it kind
of feels like it's really intuitive. So I'm always
interested where the fabric of that metaphor, if you like to
use it alone, is so thin that we can barely recognise it's there.
And I think that's what people mean when they say this
interface is so intuitive. And then you kind of realise how
much that's just a learned behaviour. And so that article
that you mentioned, just shows that kind of generational split
between people who are used to just Googling the big mess of
the internet for staff and people who are used to this idea
of carefully collecting and curating information and putting
it in files and folders and stuff like that. And I'm kind of
always interested in when these kind of new tools come out and
become a kind of dominant paradigm. And at the moment, you
know, we're on the cusp of it, I feel like we're sort of there's
a whole load of them jostling for position at the moment. But
it really does shape the way you think about going about
something. And I'm wondering if to go back to the nature
metaphor, whether this is akin, and we were talking about this a
bit before between, you know, say subsistence farming, or
farming as it was in mediaeval times versus kind of industrial
farming now versus a botanical garden, which serves this kind
of utility function, as well as a function of beauty versus
something that's like a, you know, a, well, I sometimes drive
past, you know, crops that have got, you know, fields that have
got this little, little kind of steak with a sign in front of
it, you know, list with some kind of gobbledygook on it,
which is there, obviously, different strains of some kind
of seed or something that are being tested in this very, very
kind of scientific way of thinking about those things. And
whether that's kind of, that's just the way it is, you know,
that you use these different tools in different ways. Or
there's something more fundamental in the fact that we
will carry around a computer in our pocket that's connected to
this vast store of information. There's a lot there, there
wasn't a question in there.
Jorge Arango: Well, there's several threads we could pull
on. There's a metaphor, having a computer in your pocket that
gives you access to a lot of the world's information is a deeply
transformational fact about the current world. I think that we
don't appreciate how weird and transformational it is, because
we're living it. Yeah. But we still don't know really, what
the effects are of doing that at scale, right, giving everyone
access to all this stuff ubiquitously, and I think that
it's safe to assume that it's a period that has a lot of
turmoil. Like you can't introduce a major change like
that without expecting some kind of turmoil. And we as
individuals have to determine how we engage with the world in
which we live. Some people choose to reject it, right? Like
they will say I want no part of this. This is so weird. This is
messing with my mojo. You know what have you. I will have no
part of it. I will revert Using a flip phone or no phone at all,
I want nothing to do with the internet, I will only read paper
based books. I mean, there's many, many ways in which you can
reject it, right? Yeah, you can embrace it, I think that we've
been talking about embracing it, you can embrace it, you can
choose to play, if you choose to play, you have to be conscious
about how you're going to be playing, and what that's going
to do to you. And I think that we have to work on ourselves at
several levels on one level, we have to work on how we engage
with these technologies, how we make better use of them, all
this stuff that we've been talking about. But on another
level, we have to work on how we think of ourselves as, as actors
in the world. Like our mindset, right? Yeah. And I'm saying
this, because this idea of the metaphors that we use is a is a
great illustration of this. So one of the things that's
happening, because technology changes so fast, and it's
affecting so much change in its wake, is that the metaphors that
we've been using for a long time have become unstable. And if you
are caught in a metaphor, if you somehow feel like the metaphor
is the way things are, you are going to be less able to
navigate the changes that are coming at you, you're going to
be less resilient, frankly, because the metaphors are going
to be changing. We you were alluding to this article about
file systems, right. Yeah, that's an example of that. And
we are in the process of de-materialising a lot of our
experiences, a lot of our interactions. You've seen this
meme that goes around with the scan from the Radio Shack
catalogue and all the products that the iPhone replaced, right?
Yeah, yeah. When that happens, you end up with icons that
represent floppy disks, meaning save right, and no one remembers
what a floppy disk was. But it's like the icon now suddenly, like
contains that meaning. So my point is, we can work on our
abilities of dealing with specific technologies like AI,
learn, obsidian, or learn Devon think or what have you. But we
must also work on our ability to change in response to those
technologies. And our ability to keep our system open to new ways
of being in the world, which these tools demand, right, like
you can't expect the world not to change when you're dealing
with these technologies.
Andy Polaine: With that comes the idea that, you know, you're
aware that it's going on, that we're part of these, the kind of
interplay between the two, maybe we're just getting on now we're
talking about age earlier, have kind of kids today don't realise
that they're doing it, and maybe it's the same? Or maybe the kids
today like yeah, of course, you know, let's just just there, of
course, the internet is just, I'm gonna have this experience
my 12 year old daughter, and are saying something the other day
about, oh, no, you can't do that. Because we're not online.
And she's, she's like, what does that mean? It's like radio waves
in the air or something. She doesn't, which of course they
are. But you know, she doesn't really kind of think of the
internet, she said thing was there. For her. The idea that
it's not there is like saying, because there's no sun in the
sky today. And it just starts to not make any sense. There's
loads more we could talk about. There's a whole lot of music
stuff that we could talk about, too. But we're coming up to
time, it's been a long a very interesting conversation. I can
only recommend that people subscribe to your newsletter or
listen to your podcast for more the deep thinking, Where do
people find you in this digital information garden that we will
inhabit?
Jorge Arango: The best place is my website. It's J arango.com.
So J A R A ngo.com. I'm also fairly active on Twitter, and
I'm at Durango there. So yeah, I'd love to engage with you all
on either of those.
Andy Polaine: Excellent. I'll put it all in the show notes.
Listen, thank you so much for being my guest on Power of Ten.
Jorge Arango: It's always a pleasure talking with you.
Andy Polaine: As I'm sure you're aware, you've been listening to
power of 10 My name is Andy Polaine. You can find me at a
Polaine on Twitter, or perlane.com, where you can find
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guests. All the links are in the show notes. Thanks for listening
and see you next time.