ia play

I’ve just read John Naish’s Enough. It arrived on my desk at work with it’s dazzling tag-line “ever get the feeling that you’ve had enough?”. Rather apt timing.

At times Enough seemed like a greatest hits of the happiness & modernity movement, featuring Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow), Epicurus, Martin Seligman (Authentic Happiness), the jam experiment (also seen in Paradox of Choice), and Stephen Johnson (Everything Bad is Good For You). I skipped quite a few bits as a result.

But I really liked the stuff about personal sabbaths. Mine seems to involved baking bread and sitting on top of the rabbit hutch.And it’s got a nice ending. I get very uppity if books don’t end well.

A Economist debate from the Freedom and its Digital Discontents series:

If the promise of technology is to simplify our lives, it is failing

Dick Szafranski (of consultants Toffler Associates) focuses on paradox of choice and surplus complexity. He teeters on technological determinism throughout:

“Technology has imposed the encumbrance of over-choice on us”

John Maeda similarly ascribes motive to technology:

“Technology exists to advance and enhance our world in new ways.”

He makes curious choices of ambivalent technologies; hearing aids , Blackberrys, and cars. He also seems to imply that what we have now is technology, past tools were not technologies, and future technologies will have less problems:

“The bad rap given to technologies today will be only temporary….But we are in a transitional period where technologies are brittle not because they are failing per se – they are just new and experimental.

We voluntarily let technology enter our lives in the infantile state that it currently exists, and the challenge is to wait for it to mature to something we can all be proud of.”

Tim Ferriss makes the point that the question is phrased in the present tense (i.e. “is failing” and not “will fail”) and so votes for Szafranski.

We’re looking a a junior IA this time.

It’s a one year contract and the idea is that the junior would work on series of projects chosen to develop different information architecture skills e.g. wireframes, metadata and usability testing. Enthusiasm and aptitude is more important than experience:

https://jobs.bbc.co.uk/fe/tpl_bbc01.asp?newms=jj&id=21202

DG’s video of Media & Everyday Life represents big media with pictures of the ecclesiastical Broadcasting House. Not sure what David would think of our BBC building, the Broadcast Centre. It looks more like a warehouse than a church. And White City building looks a bit like it should be in Gotham City.

Lego features, of course, in the form of Lego gardens (combining two of my favourite things!) to show the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

And towards the end David talks about Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman and his theory that craftsmanship gives a sense of well-being. The Craftsman has been on my wishlist for a while and I’m having to fight the urge to go on a book buying splurge.

In his Comment is Free piece, Happy Talk, Mark Vernon takes Positive Psychology to task. Whilst it’s not clear if he is directly criticising the work of Martin Seligman he opens the article with

“This year marks the 10th anniversary of Martin Seligman coining the term “positive psychology”.

He goes on:

“Its recommendations do not rise above the commonplaces of “work less”, “stay fit”, “think positively”, and so on”

“The fundamental error of the science - and the reason why so many of its recommendations sound trivial or just confused - is the assumption that happiness is the same as positive emotion.”

“happiness is not about feeling good, it is about being good. ….Happiness is fundamentally a moral matter not a hedonistic one.”

Which makes it seem that Mark Vernon has never read Martin Seligman’s work. Seligman describes three routes to happiness:

• the Pleasant Life, consisting in having as many pleasures as possible
• the Good Life, which consists in knowing what your signature strengths are, and then recrafting your work, love, friendship, leisure and parenting to use those strengths to have more flow in life
• the Meaningful Life, which consists of using your signature strengths in the service of something that you believe is larger than you are.

Seligman is always pretty clear about what he values

“The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There’s no shortcut to that. That’s what life is about. There will likely be a pharmacology of pleasure, and there may be a pharmacology of positive emotion generally, but it’s unlikely there’ll be an interesting pharmacology of flow. And it’s impossible that there’ll be a pharmacology of meaning. ” from Edge: A Talk with Martin Seligman

Vernon says he has read Authentic Happiness and in detail. This is much easier to believe if you read his more considered postings on his own blog. What he seems to object to most is the idea that anything in this space is measurable and therefore worthy of scientific study. That’s a much more interesting and less tabloid debate. Shame he didn’t stick to that point on Comment is Free.

I’ll be presenting at the IA summit in April with Margaret Hanley, Anne Stevens and Henning Fischer on Developing junior programmes in UX teams.

This year’s summit is in Miami. Since last year the conference was in Las Vegas, I can’t be the only CSI fan expecting to hear that the IA Summit 2009 will be in New York.

Stairs Bookcase

via Leeharker

In Slate last month, The Wisdom of the Chaperones was not exactly the first article to suggest that a lot of the rhetoric around social media sites is not borne out by reality. The title however is probably the best attempt to coin a rival turn of phrase.

“Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site’s edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.”

“While both sites effectively function as oligarchies, they are still democratic in one important sense. Digg and Wikipedia’s elite users aren’t chosen by a corporate board of directors or by divine right. They’re the people who participate the most. Despite the fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0, direct democracy isn’t feasible at the scale on which these sites operate. Still, it’s curious to note that these sites seem to have the hierarchical structure of the old-guard institutions they’ve sought to supplant.”

This doesn’t surprise me at all. But that’s because it is more evidence to support my prejudice of ‘new technology, same old people’.

BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed: Hoodies covers the moral panic in the UK around teenagers wearing ‘hoodies’, particularly the banning of people wearing hooded tops from Bluewater shopping centre.

It was interesting to hear about the swing towards positive stories such as the teenager who used his hoodie to save a girl from a swarm of bees. A story which sadly I couldn’t track down.

One typical feature of moral panics is the disconnect between public perception and reality. So youth crime is falling but 65% of the UK public think it is rising. Young offenders commit 10% of crime, 66% of public think it is at least 40% of crime.

Also interesting was the fact that the Trafford Centre banned hooded tops 7 years earlier than Bluewater but generated mere fraction of the publicity. Just like all ideas, all moral panics have their time.

We’re looking for information architects at the BBC. We’re looking for mid-career IAs at the moment, although it is likely that junior and senior roles will follow.

Priorities for us in the next year are search, mobile, contextual navigation/recommendations, an assorted mix of programme-related products (iPlayer, archives, /programmes/) and IPTV. So it is likely this roles will end up working in these areas.

Given the spirit of this blog, I’d be interested to hear from people interested in working from home, part-time, job-sharing etc.

You can find the job spec (search for job ref 297698) and apply at the BBC jobs site. Applicants need to be able to work in the UK already.

(disclaimer: our IA team isn’t responsible for the intriguing navigation design or the search engine of the jobs site)