by The Adaptive Path Team
December 14, 2006
The IDEA (“Information: Design, Experience, Access”) conference came to a close with a rousing keynote address from science fictioneer Bruce Sterling. His speech was a truly inspiring, sprawling, hilarious piece of information architecture fiction, and to adequately capture its freewheeling nature, we’ve opted to include it here in its entirety, “likes,” laughter and all.
So, you know, that was very kind of [Peter Merholz, who introduced Mr. Sterling to the stage] to explain why he asked me [to speak at IDEA 2006]. Now, let me explain why I actually showed up [laughter] and what I’ve been doing here. Well, I’ve been listening. I’ve been listening and learning. Yes, Professor, my brain is full and doesn’t often get the chance to hang out with information architects. So I want to read you a little summation of your event here.
Now, these aren’t perfect quotations. I’m trying to like, assemble a professional zeitgeist here. Basically, I was trying to collect the kinds of things that only information architects would think to say. Because, you know, as William Burroughs liked to say, “If you cut up the present, the future bleeds through.” So I have kind of a narrative here, kind of a “composite persona,” for you designers in the audience. This isn’t science fiction. This is actually information architecture fiction. I like to call it the wit and wisdom of IDEA 2006. It sounds kind of like this:
This is the moment for data visualization.Regular people are paying attention to this sort of thing.
What’s going on here? All of the sudden, we have thousands of people engaged in data analysis.
For the info-vis community, sense-making is becoming a big deal.
We know we can’t control the end result, but we know that we can stimulate activity.
It’s not a weight loss program. Don’t feel guilty about using these things.
How many archeologists in the room? One archeologist.
That’s my girlfriend. [laughter]
[An audience member yells, “Does Peter know?”]
[laughter]We did a whole fake festival in second life to go with the real festival. And as your avatar approached the stage, it inherited new dance moves.
Meta tags, collaborative filtering, GIS — if those work on the web, why not in a museum?
On opening day, they had a beautiful exhibition with no content. We designed a process that created an exhibition.
The touch points were less than satisfactory.
People spend whole days of their lives on the phone dealing with billings. It’s just an incredibly arduous experience.
There’s something about being in front of the illuminated glass surface that turns part of my mind off. [laughter]
To be connected is to be alive, to be recognized, to matter, to be in an artificial sense of constant crisis.
Technological excise, those are the technical things we force people to do that people don’t actually want to do.
There’s a lot to be said for what we have and even more for what we have that we’re not using.
If it’s just easy to use, it won’t rise above the noise.
Seattle is the smartest and reading-est city in the country. [laughter]
I quiver at the concept that libraries were ever considered stodgy, dusty places for books.
It’s a kind of heat map around the country that shows how interested people are.
Libraries are trying to create an interesting physical virtual bridge. We have to give the public credit for being interested in what is interesting. [laughter]
How do we deal with an explosion of choice? I’m going to do that through a series of incredibly tenuous metaphors. [laughter]
Email isn’t a tiger. Email is like a cloud of flies. [laughter]
I like to think of data as a big block of data. [laughter] On its own, it’s devoid of all substance.
I’m not sure how to describe that development process. It’s like a potter playing with clay. I click on this, and it takes me to a sandbox where I can play with data.
It’s the simplest, easiest, dorkiest thing in the world, but half a million people are using it.
Everything that can be located will be.
I embarked on this quest to sell polygons. [laughter]
They’ve got 500 tricked-out SUVs that drive the world with positional cameras.
[An audience member yells, “Four times is enough.”] [laughter]No, that was rhetorical genius, actually. [laughter]
They scrape the Internet, and wherever there’s geographical data, they boil stuff down and attach it. They’re not just using other people’s sites, but entire ID schemes and databases. They’re able to do things I’ve never seen any library do. LibraryThing moves at the speed of light.
People will run across a battlefield to spray a DJs name on a tank.
Cities are clusters of spatial events. We want to repopulate the map with the rhythms of urban life.
The centralized cataloging apparatus of the world doesn’t have the time.
We don’t do “directions.” We make data sets and license them for mashups. [laughter]
We’re thinking about all the ways people can vandalize a data set.
It’s aggregation, attention, centralized portals and massed eyeballs against the wide canvas of the entire Internet.
These transmissions that surround us, they’re the Hertzian equivalent of land marked church steeples.
This is Le Corbusier Ville Radieuse, which is clearly insane and absolutely beautiful. [laughter]
In physical interaction spaces, people will do whatever you say — if you make it super clear and super seamless.
Want shorter meetings? Install some white boards and remove all the chairs. [laughter]
It’s not just about the scale and the technique. It’s about the experience.
So in a speech like this, I know I’m supposed to soft-shoe about how I don’t know anything about your line of work, and I’m a neophyte, and I’m not an information architect. And I’m supposed to, like, pull my forelock at your technical expertise and all that. But in point of fact, I’m keenly and painfully interested in your line of work.
And not just your line of work — information architecture — but also user experience design and user interface engineering and communication design. And human factors. I like that. They’re not human factories; they’re just human factors. Human factors…what? [laughter] Human factors. Nevertheless, they’re human factors. You gotta, like, take human factors into account.
Industrial design, of course I’m interested in industrial design. Interaction design, usability engineering…yeah, I’m keenly interested in that. Human-computer interaction. Taxonomy — yes, I know information architecture is not the same as taxonomy. Folksonomy — yeah, I know folksonomy is an even newer neologism than information architecture. Being in the area between taxonomy and folksonomy — yeah, I completely get it about that. I understand why that’s interesting. That’s like declaring yourself to be sunk right into the absolutely bog of language. [laughter] All those synonyms.
Are those synonyms? No, they’re little Venn diagrams. They overlap, slightly different areas of expertise, all of which are young, all of which are tremendously important, all of which are struggling to differentiate, merge, reemerge. It’s hard to find a pure information architecture play. It’s hard to find anybody in the business who isn’t also an architect or also a human experience guy, also a factors guy, also one or the other. It’s a young trade, if you can call it a trade. It’s hugely important, really important.
Now, in my book, Shaping Things, I go on about a great many things that only information architecture could possibly bring to pass. It’s like my little prophesy as a design visionary. Tons of it hinge on unbelievable expertise in information architecture. I’m not going to plug my own book here. You didn’t come here to watch the dilettante plug his damn book. No, I’m — and my brain’s already full, Professor. I’m going to plug somebody else’s book, okay.
Alex Steffen — yeah, you gotta read this book. Forget my book. Read this book immediately. This is like Seattle’s gift to the visible universe right here. This isn’t just the book of the year; this is like the book of next year. And I’m going to be here this weekend with Alex. We’re going to be plugging this book. It’s a big stinkin’ deal. Okay, end of plug.
[An audience member yells, “What is the title?”]
Oh, sorry. Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, and they’re not kidding. I mean, yes, get it; read it; become it; do it now. Yes, you are changing the world in your line of work. Yes, absolutely tons of people are losing parts of their brain adhering to the glass screen. It’s your work, absolutely. Change it better, damn it. Do a better damn job. Change it faster.
And let me tell you a little parable about your line of work and why you’re, like, just a small group of Seattleites here instead of a monster 21st century army. [laughter] Okay, let’s just say I’m an information architect, and I’m, like, fresh out of design school. I’m probably not even a Gen X, or I’m one of these miserable guys who doesn’t even have a generational name [laughter] or a decade. This is the first decade that doesn’t even have a damn name. 70s, 80s, 90s and what? What? The Bush Leagues, I don’t know. Your decade, whatever the hell….
All right, let’s just say you’re, like, out of work, but you’re with it and hip. You’ve been trained in information architecture, and you’re, like, noticing that, like, your teeth are decaying ‘cause you have no health insurance. [laughter] But you’re brushing ‘em, and you say, “Oh, gosh, my teeth are starting to pang me here. Wait a minute. That’s like a social need.” And you’re training leads you to say, “Wait a minute. There’s an information architecture approach to this difficulty. The solution? Better information interface with my teeth. Yes. Oh, and how do I do that? The instrumented toothbrush. My god, nobody’s thought of this before. Fiber optic bristles. It makes so much sense. You just light up your teeth while you’re working on it.
“All right, how would I charge up the bristles? Wait a minute. Wait a minute: iPod plug-in, that’s it. All right, I’ll make a corporate allegiance with Apple, and we’ll, like, hook the toothbrush to the iPod, and I can…fiber optic illuminate my teeth. And as the thing is moving, it’ll be like a visual scanning thing that will actually, like, look at the holes in my teeth and do a kind of upgrade on my laptop screen that sort of actually shows me the condition of my teeth in real time.
“But wait a minute. Apple, they’re not big enough. No, Microsoft. I’ll go to Microsoft. Wait a minute, Microsoft’s got the lock on everything. They’ll just fold me into the damn operating system. All right, well, never mind that. I’ll make it myself. I’ll find a boutique manufacturer. It’s a brilliant idea. I can’t possibly pitch it to the monsters who are running over the information landscape. I’ll just make it myself. Yeah, $450. Okay, that’s the cheapest I could possibly make it because I’m only making 30 ‘cause I’m kinda making it myself, and I don’t have, like, actually, any kind of promotional budget ‘cause I’m just kinda hookin’ it up.
“So I’ll put it on my blog, my Wiki, I’ll go for some viral marketing here. I’ll get the key user base. We’ll get, like, designer fanatics together who are already completely obsessive about their teeth.”
And then you win a design award, and you sell a certain number of your super high-tech, hooked up toothbrushes, and that putters along for a little while, and then it sort of lapses from lack of interest. And then, eventually, tooth scanning is built into toothbrushes as a matter of course but 30 years from today — not today. And that’s, like, absolutely the name of your business. I mean, that’s why you’re small. That’s why you’re not the rulers of the visible universe, even though you’re throwing up stuff in front of the screens of half the damn planet. And it’s the oldest design story in the world.
You can go right down to Design almost Within Reach — Design Almost within Reach — and you can try and buy yourself a Harry Bertoia. Harry Bertoia. He made the damn thing out of bicycle wire. I don’t know if you ever saw it. It’s like a friggin’ fruit basket. It’s made entirely out of cheap industrial steel. It’s supposed to cost $4. It costs $400. Why? Because Harry Bertoia made it 50 years ago. And you can go down to — what the hell — IKEA, and you can get the functional equivalent for $5 absolute, sit on it, it doesn’t bust. It does everything Bertoia wanted to do. Just the nature of the design enterprise.
I’m kinda sick of watching it. Do better. Do better. Get out there, do better. Dig in. I don’t care if it’s the legendary damn Harry Bertoia or not. The guy was not intending to be a boutique manufacturer. He was actually intending to change people’s lives radically, immediately, right after World War II. He didn’t make it; do better than he did.
This is great, I’m really enjoying this. [laughter]
Okay, now I’m going to explain to you how you do this. You know, I have a few hands. I don’t have many, but I’ve got a few. I wanna explain to you how the world actually changes, and I want to prove that, yes, I can think visually even though I’m a damn novelist, and I type for a living.
Okay, I actually drew this [diagram] while I was sitting up there listening. You’re going, “What the heck is this?” Well, this is the classic adaptation diagram. We got like two axes. This is how many people are willing to use the damn thing. And this is time. And I wrote “TIME” with, like, some groovy serifs here because it’s like deep and magisterial. [laughter]
Okay, now, this is where you lived during most of your enterprise here because you’re not really information architects. Most of you are former Greek history majors or whatever, who got sucked into the enterprise. This is the quadrant: Question Mark, Rising Star, Cash Cow and Dead Dog. This is what all processes and all objects and services and experiences go through.
You have a period where it’s a Question Mark, nobody knows what the hell it’s good for, which is, “Gosh, I can’t believe people are actually using data analysis.” Well, you know, probably ‘cause they don’t know that it’s data analysis. They’re just plain using it. So that’s like this area here.
And then there’s the chasm of commercialization, which is between the kind of R&D lab and kind of homemade, “Hi, I’m a Web 2.0 zealot,” kind of, and the difference between that and actually getting some traction in the real world. So this would be like the Rising Star area here, denominated by this dashed line.
And then this much larger and bulkier and more prosperous area would be the Cash Cow area, where we’ve finally gotten out of permanent gamma, and we’re actually, like, making some money.
And then here’s the area which we call Dead Dog, where the thing actually passes out of common use, and it’s like a dis-intermediated by new and better techniques, or economies of scale scoot up, and it just kind of falls off the edge of the universe, and this becomes what we would finally call the heritage economy here or entertainment destinations or Amish BS kind of ticky-tacky, etcetera, etcetera.
Okay, now given that we know that all objects and services sort of go through this rollercoaster ride, what the hell could we do about it. Well, all designers, by their nature, tend to cluster around this trough ‘cause this is like the turbulent area where the atelier can really go out and kind of kick ass because nobody knows what it is yet. You could put together a great product pitch and go to the board of directors, and they’re all panicky. And you sort of say, “Well, you know, I’m younger than you, and I’m, like, hip to all this stuff, so give me some money, and I’ll go make it. Maybe we’ll break out, and we’ll do something, and it’s groovy and so forth and so on.
All right, well, our society actually kinda knows how to do that a little bit. I mean, even though there’s, like, more cruelty and kind of IP barbed wire and more and more trouble actually moving stuff out of Question Mark into Cash Cow now, what our society does not know how to do effectively is this part — actually moving stuff out of use into the death area. What we really need are a class of people who can kill the economy we now have. [laughter, applause]
We need undertakers for the coal economy. We just need undertakers for the fossil fuel business, for the non-renewable economy. Basically everything you see that doesn’t have a groovy little LEED silver badge on it has got to be exterminated. And like, quickly. Not slowly — quickly. Like, faster than the New Economy came up. It’s actually gotta be removed.
Now, somebody’s gotta design a way to actually hook this part of the graph to this, to monetize that. There’s a gotta be a way to, like, kill it and replace it at the same time. Right? And make money doing it. And make money doing it really fast. And like, visualize how to do it. And like, make it obvious to people that that’s the proper thing to do. And like, move it into complete and total overdrive and kill everything and get richer. [laughter]
Kill everything and get richer faster. There’s practically nobody on earth who’s likelier to do that than the people like you. That’s a killer app for you. Go do it. I don’t know how you do it. Go do it. Do it fast.
Okay. How are you going to do that? I don’t know. I would know how you would think you were going to do that because I’ve got a whole bunch of other synonyms, which would be stuff like: architectures of participation, Web 2.0, Folksonomy, Flickr, Wikipedia, Digg, Reddit, GNU, and Open Source. Which are kind of like this week’s models for groovy new methods of production.
And you know, they’re not new methods of production. They’ve been sitting around here for, like, 17 years, ever since GNU wasn’t Unix, and they’re finally working their way through the turbulence here and starting to pick up some mainstream acceptance. It actually is going to ramp up because it really is important. It really is a new method of industrial production, and those are pretty friggin’ rare. I mean, those just don’t happen very often, and it’s a big stinkin’ deal. And I’m happy to look at it, and boy, who couldn’t be more excited for this. And you write for Wired Magazine, which I do, there’s nothing easier than selling this to the editor. It’s like, “Ooh, ooh, ooh. 2.0, O’Reilly says it’s cool. Wow, wow, wow.”
All right, that’s not what worries me. All right? I think that could take care of itself. You’re all extremely hip about that. You’re fully briefed on the subject. You don’t need to do any of your handholding there. What I worry about is this part, when it’s like the Cash Cow of sort of mass dis-intermediated production, when it’s like bigger than Microsoft. And I find that kind of worrisome.
Why? Well, let’s just say you’re in science. Let’s say you’re from a kind of important but kind of small area of science, like cellulosic biochemistry, which is cracking wheat into alcohol, or wheat stocks. It’s just like…you can make newspapers into car fuel, supposedly. Nobody knows how to do it. But obviously, if you could do it, it’d be like, “game over” for a lot of vested interests and kind of a groovy way to make a lot of money. And everybody would be energy-independent. You could run your house off of stuff you normally flush down your toilet. And it’s like, “Wow.” And there’s like 80 guys in the world who sorta, kinda know how to do it. And most of ‘em are young, and none of ‘em have tenure.
So they’re like, “Okay, you know, let’s roll up our sleeves here. We’re gonna, like, do this. And instead of doing it the old fashioned way, which involves stodgy bullshit like peer review and having to go to grad school for eight years and all kinds of patent creeps and other icky vermin praying on our brain power, why don’t we start up the cellulosic digg.com? We’ll just, like, Wiki it. We’re gonna get out of the ivory tower here. We’re gonna get down and dirty with some participative information architecture.”
Okay, what’s going to actually happen to scientists who attempt to do this? I mean, they’re really goin’ out there to, like, advance the field. “50 million blogs — some of ‘em have got to be good.” No, no. [laughter] That’s like saying, 50 million toasters — some of ‘em have to fly at supersonic speed. No, no.
Okay, so what shows up on this cellulosic biochemistry digg.com website? Hottest biochemist? Am I a hot biochemist or not? Weird and funny cellulosic biochemistry apps.
Not the ones that are actually important, the ones that are interesting. Is interesting important? No, no. Interesting is interesting, and important is important. They’re not the same thing. You throw stuff into the interesting hopper, you do not get the important hopper out.
Partisan flames.
You’re a fuckin’ liberal cellulosic biochemistry under-professor. Who the hell would ever listen to you and your lame blue-state bullshit? I don’t care about your lab reports. I don’t care what you said. I don’t care about your experiments. In fact, I don’t care about you. You should be destroyed through partisan warfare. You’re a sex scandal. That’s really hot. I hear a rumor that you fondled a teenage boy. That’s enough to drive the board wild. I mean, traffic will swell hugely around an allegation like that.
Watch me kill the head of my department for denying tenure. This will be the absolute number one hit on the science participative open whatever, Wiki, genius, bullshit thing. [laughter] You think you’re setting it up. It’s like, “Oh, boy, we’re going to get Gregor Mendel’s paper on cellulose and peapods.” Alas, Gregor, this humble soul, he’s going to pop out of the background. No, he will be buried even farther from public notice than he was when everything was dull and tedious and in gray paper. It’s going to be a grim tale of little local peaks in performance. As a school of knowledge, it will not advance. It will fertilize eccentric genius, not success. It will fertilize eccentric genius, those who do it for the love of it.
Okay, a method of industry that does it for the love of it will die for the love of it. If the love of it is your metric and your means of production, that’s your Achilles heel, really. Watch and see. Watch and see if I’m not right.
Just imagine the process of success. Imagine it bigger than you can ever imagine it getting ‘cause it does get bigger. It gets bigger really fast sometimes. Man, is that ever going to screw up. Not in ways that are easy to forecast, in ways that we can’t even imagine. Just be ready for that.
I wanna close; I know you are all tired. You’ve been through one hell of a thing here. I applaud the capacity of your frontal lobes. I mean, this. there are few professions who could have taken it as hot and heavy as you people did. [laughter] You’ve got brains of iron. It’s kind of awesome.
I wanted to say a few bits about the building ‘cause it’s kind of an awesome building. I happened to be here when they opened it, and it’s true. The spirit of your conference really is kind of the spirit of the building in some obscure, New-Agey yet touchingly relevant way. [laughter] And it’s clearly a success in many ways. I mean, it’s not information architecture, but it’s architected information. I mean, somebody built architecture in order to, like, shelter and sort of explore the information, and that’s kind of interesting. That’s kind of like the top up, bottom out version kind of…the yin to your yang is some groovy way. It’s a signature building.
It’s like the Gehry in Bilbao. It’s doing for Seattle what Gehry did for Bilbao. It is a pretty heavily foot-trafficked spot, and if you were an independent Republican, it would obviously kind of be on your currency, this building. [laughter]
It’s not an entire success. I don’t think that’s really the point. I don’t think achieving entire success is the point. In fact, I don’t think a building gets famous by achieving entire success. If it actually achieved entire success, it’d be invisible. ‘Cause the thing that really interests me about this is the sort of thorny and indefinable aspects of it that really give it a kind of magic. When it’s working really well, where this building’s kinda like moving along at its smoothest clip, you know what it reminds me of? Microsoft Clippy.
You remember Microsoft Clippy? This little guy from the Pacific Northwest. He’s like, “You seem to be looking for books. Would you like to walk around and around and around?” [laughter] “Here’s some really big numbers. And here’s some graphic design to show that there’s letters here” (and they’re, like, in the floor, which is an odd place to put them, but they’re kind of associated with…), and is kind of annoyingly talkative. And there’s steel. You know, kind of a paperclip-looking thing. There’s odd bits of unvarnished iron running around. It is kind of Clippy.
And then there’s the voids. I don’t know if you’re, like, a Koolhaas fan. I kinda am. I once won an essay in some book of his. I know Bruce Mau personally. So yeah, I know a little bit about Rem, and what Rem is into is the voids. And what are voids? Voids are places in the building where the architecture stops. And Rem’s kind of famous for voids. He’s just like architecting this and architecting that, and then just like there’s some non-architecting.
Okay, well, the biggest void in this place — you like go way up, and you look over that thing that looks kind of like an atrium, except you can’t actually do anything with it. You can’t, like, hang a banner or do any kind of atrium-style thing. It isn’t kind of visually enhanced in any way. It’s just like this huge cavity. And then it kinda like goes up over the side, and there’s this spider web of just sort of open girders there, which any other architect in the world would have just like thrown some sheetrock over and said, “Store stuff on this. This is great.” No. I mean, not Koolhaas. That’s like a Koolhaasian void.
And you’re standing there, and it’s like, “Okay, why is this here?” And there is no reason. There is no reason. There’s never gonna be a reason. You can’t make it have a reason. All you can do is kind of humanly adjust, in your mouse-like way, to this enormous emptiness, this ambience, this raw impossibility.
And do we have one in the room with us? Yeah. Yeah, we do. It’s right under this signature Koolhaasian sloping, illuminated stairway here. Okay, now, under this stairway, there’s like a pie slice, like this. It’s good for nothing. They have, like…somebody, some poor soul stuffed some stacking chairs and some cardboard boxes and some vacu-pack bubble wrap stuff in there. And it’s like a pathetic little tidal clutter, ‘cause it’s not a storage space. You can’t lock it. Nothing is safe in there. It’s not the proper shape to store anything. It’s not designed for storage. That stuff ended up there like flotsam kind of washing up in some kind of obscure corner of Pugent Sound.
That is the most literary space in this room. I mean, that is definitely the most cyber punk space. That is like the wetland of language and the bog of semantics. That is like the indefinable spot where all the cruft and the kind of overlapping areas are kind of like jammed and gently decaying.
And I was really happy to have that in here. I actually think that’s like a mark of greatness. There’s something truly, humanly grand about it because it isn’t like an oversight. It’s kind of like a human recognition that our reach exceeds our grasp.
The majesty of your profession is associated with something like that. You talk about things nobody is ever going to be able to do. Nobody is ever going to be able to do a lot of the things you somehow imagine yourselves doing. You have lacquered over huge voids with a kind of glittering synonymic techno jargon that will never fill those spaces.
You’re gonna try, and it’s gonna be full of stuff like that. [laughter] It’s gonna be a space of failure with maybe some old-fashioned stacking chairs and some empty cardboard and some bubble-pak. That’s what there’s going to be. And you know, that’s what makes you great. [laughter] That is not a lacking. That is what gives you a melancholy greatness. It really gives your enterprise a kind of foggy northwestern grandeur. And I mean it. It is greatness. It is real greatness.
So thank you for your attention. [applause]
The IDEA (“Information: Design, Experience, Access”) conference came to a close with a rousing keynote address from science fictioneer Bruce Sterling. His speech was a truly inspiring, sprawling, hilarious piece of information architecture fiction, and to adequately capture its freewheeling nature, we’ve opted to include it here in its entirety, “likes,” laughter and all.
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