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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touch if you have any comments, feedback or suggestions for

guests. All the links are in the show notes. Thanks for listening

and see you next time.