Just of fun I took the sketch in my notebook and plotted where I have lived on a world map. The size of the dots represent the total duration of my stay (14 years in Korea was not continuous) and the lines with arrows represent where I moved to and the year.

In my last days at Forum One, I’ve been trying to meet up friends (who were often clients) I’ve become close with during my time here. Mike Lee from AARP stopped by and he took some snapshots of me in my office on his iPhone and he saved me the bother (and embarrassment) of having to set up my own shots of myself in my office. Thanks Mike.

He took a photo from my notebook of all the places I have lived during my lifetime. I was tying to show each line to represent a significant move, and dots and the size of the dots to represent to location and duration of stay.

The most interesting photo he took was of the contents of my pockets. I hate carrying stuff around in my pockets so the first chance I get, I pull them all out. On this day I had a Motorola RAZR, Apple iPod, my wallet, bunch of keys, Moleskine pocket cahier and my cheap plastic I-can’t-live-without Parker Vector fountain pen. I realized that most of these things can be replaced with one iPhone. I know in some parts of the world you can pay for stuff with your cellphone, so I wouldn’t even need my wallet. Do you think they can put my driver’s license on an iPhone?

Call me old-fashioned but I don’t think I can ever replace my notebook with an electronic device. I like doodling in my notebook too much. I like leaving evidence, plus nothing compares to the sensation of flowing ink on paper.

As I have been packing to move to Korea, I came across a box full of slides I took while I as at Columbia University in the late 90s. Using my office’s cheap Epson scanner, I scanned a couple of my favorites.

The above is Frank Gehry’s American Center in Paris, taken 1995, I think.

You can also see my Flickr set of architectural photos. I’ll be posting random photos from the set if I don’t have anything interesting to write about.

Ambient Findability is Peter Morville‘s “Lemur Book” on how we go about finding information and how what we find affect us.

I started out thinking this is going to be a technical book about how we orient ourselves in relationship with the world around us, and what internal mechanisms we employ to navigate and find our way to our destinations or goals, whether it be in the physical world or in the virtual world. It starts out discussing these things and challenges we face in information architecture, but he begins weave an interesting argument when he introduces us to Calvin Mooers and his views on how we interact with information:

An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.

There is an accessibility or effort component to information. In other words, we are fundamentally lazy when it comes to information. We would prefer to sit at our desks and search Google than go to the library and browse bookstack on a given topic.

Over the short course of internet history, as we have developed organization systems and various algorithms to improve the quality of information retrieval modeled on traditional models of interaction with information, we now see new behaviors and technologies emerging to overcome the limitations of these automated and rigid systems. Crowdsourcing over AI. Folksonomies over rigid taxonomies. Thus with the digitization of information emerges a social aspect to information retrieval. Information is no longer in the control of a few institutions, and the learned. The flow of information is no longer controled by traditional media or academia. It is now controled by sites like Google who provide the path of least resistance to the retrieval of information. Findability is key in this new information environment.

This is where his book gets really interesting. He takes the concept of findability on a journey that start out as innocent and technical and turns it into a quiet manifesto for the redistribution of information wealth. He says:

Findability is at the center of a fundamental shift in the way we define authority, allocate trust, make decisions and learn independently.

Given this newly discovered freedom of access to information, he does not share the unsubstatiated optimism/idealism of some. He remains deeply cynical of extremes. Complete freedom is often crippling, where the over-abundance of choices leads to us paralysis. He compares information consumption to food and diet. One should choose carefully what one consumes and understand where it comes from in order to stay healthy. Web is not the solution. Google is fast food.

In the end Peter Morville’s book is an artfully balanced essay that seeks to reconcile the views of authoritarian control with the distributed popular intelligence of the masses. His conclusion is an uncomfortable one: we need both the cathedral and the bazaar. In an age where libraries are seen as outmoded and a symbol of control, he reminds us that the notion of the free public library was an idea hatched from the mind of a rebel, Ben Franklin, who sought the equal access to ideas and information for all, and the Oxford English Dictionary, the pinnacle of authoritarian definition, was in fact the first open-source project.

I must say that Ambient Findability was a very enjoyable read, and refreshing to see Peter Morville critially examining his information architecture background, relinquishing control and embrace a more optimistic future where both control and freedom over information needs to and is able to coexist. It is our job then, as professionals who are entrusted with the care of information, to be aware of the complexity and contradictions and to maintain the balance.

He end the book with a quote from one of my favorite authors, Jorges Luis Borges, from his “Garden of Forking Paths”:

The book and the labyrith are one and the same.

I never thought I’d see a literal representation of architectural typography.

[via thought bucket]