Countdown

I am terrifically excited to announce that my first book, Everyday Information Architecture, will be released from A Book Apart on April 16.

I wrote this book for designers, developers, and anyone else who works with information on the web—especially if they aren’t or don’t have access to an information or content professional. Working on the web means, at its core, controlling how information is presented and disseminated—which means we have a huge responsibility to be thoughtful and ethical about the design decisions we make around digital content. This book can help everyone do that.

If you work on the web and want to learn more about systems and information structures, how to understand and work with your content, how to build a more strategic sitemap, how to create taxonomies—then this book is for you! Pre-orders will open later this month.

And if you’d like to win a free (!) copy: just tweet about the book with the link above and the hashtag #everydayIA. One tweet = one entry! I’ll pick three random winners on launch day.

Let the countdown begin.

In “How did home cooking become a moral issue?” Vox’s Rachel Sugar interviews the authors of Pressure Cooker: the morality of home cooking. The book sounds phenomenal. I’m interested in anything that exposes the systemic roots of what we are tempted to paint as problems of individual responsibility—in undoing narratives of shame forced onto (mostly) women, especially poor women, especially caretakers. As author Sinikka Elliott put it:

“How Amazon’s Algorithms Curated a Dystopian Bookstore” shines a small light on yet another algorithmic dilemma—the spread of misinformation on science, medicine, and health:

The problem, of course, is that we think of algorithms as “largely amoral,” as the author put it. Popularity-ranking algorithms may be neutral in that they don’t have feelings, but in their neutrality lies an abdication of responsibility; writing them off as neutral, is, in fact, an immoral act. Only when tech companies own up to this—not just in algorithms, but in content review, moderation, and labeling and categorization—will we have a chance at righting the ship.

This 2017 article is no less relevant now (and the industry still hasn’t internalized the lesson): “On Loser Experience Design” looks at patterns that chase engagement by hyping up star users—systematically destroying casual interactions in the process:

Not everyone can be a power user of every platform—nor should they. Prioritizing high engagement like this is unsustainable; but while we wait for things to crash and burn, casual users are abandoned, or, worse, shamed.

Political science professor @mmildenberger penned an excellent Twitter thread exposing not only the logical fallacies behind “the tragedy of the commons,” but also the politics of its author, known eugenicist and white supremacist Garrett Hardin. I’ve seen the tragedy of the commons trotted out as an instructive fable to justify all sorts of oppressive policies, so I’m ready for it to be torn to shreds:

We’d do well to banish the tragedy of the commons from discussions in every discipline, here and now.

I'm a big fan of the organization Donors Choose, which funds classroom-specific projects in schools around the country. (I love making a direct impact! I'm less enthused about the part where our school system is so horrifically broken that teachers must compete for crowdfunding to buy basic supplies. Neat.) Here’s an opportunity to buy books for some middle-schoolers in south Boston. As of my typing this, they only need $246 to fund the project. We can do it!