Episode 15: Jorge Arango on Architecting Experiences

Follow the Surfacing Podcast: Apple | Spotify | Google | YouTube | Amazon Music | Stitcher | RSS | More

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to Surfacing. In this episode, hosts, Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak to information architect and educator, Jorge Arango.

Announcer:

This episode saw a discussion of digital ethics and roles that designers, business leaders, policymakers, and ethicists play in keeping digital spaces safe. Jorge considers the responsibility associated with architecting online experiences, and offers insight into the dynamics that come with the long arc of technological innovation.

Jorge Arango:

Hello.

Lisa Welchman:

How are you, Jorge?

Jorge Arango:

I'm doing all right, but I can't quite hit those notes, Lisa.

Lisa Welchman:

I was expecting a singing response.

Jorge Arango:

I'm getting over a cold and my singing voice, what little there is of it, is not here today.

Lisa Welchman:

Are you a singer?

Jorge Arango:

No, I'm not. I'm a bad karaoke singer.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, but do you enjoy singing? Not, do you sing professionally? How good are you? Some people sing and some people don't.

Jorge Arango:

I have a really pernicious combination of enjoying singing and having no shame. So, yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

Oh, that's fantastic.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. That's a rare combination.

Lisa Welchman:

That no shame part, I like to sing and have been trained as a singer and have sang professionally when I was super young, and whatever, but I never had this brazen shamelessness that comes along with it, which I really envy people. When I see that, it looks so joyous to just really not care and be like, "I'm doing this because I love it." Right?

Jorge Arango:

Well, I'm not going to say that I don't care. It takes practice. I think it's hard to not try to take yourself too seriously. But I think it's important, right?

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, I'm still learning that at my old age. So thanks for that wonderful reminder. And thank you for giving us some of your time today. We really, really appreciate it.

Lisa Welchman:

When Andy and I decided to do the podcast, we say this a lot, so it might sound disingenuous, but it is true in your instance and true every time we've said it. We had a list of people who we would want to interview and you were on the first wave list. So we're finally getting a chance to talk to you, in particular. So before I start asking questions, because I think I get to the first question today, why don't you just tell people a little bit about yourself? How would you like to describe yourself? We were all over your blog posts, and we were just saying, "He does everything, he thinks about everything." So we're going to let you frame who you are, other than a reckless, abandoned karaoke singer.

Jorge Arango:

It's funny, I think that there is a relationship there because I think I think about everything in much the same way I sing at karaoke, which is to say, without too much self awareness, and very unselfconsciously, I do like to roam as widely as possible. But to answer your question, I am an information architect. I have been doing this type of work now for a long time. If I say how long, I might reveal my age, which is not something that is well regarded these days, apparently.

Lisa Welchman:

That's a part where I don't care. I'm like, "I'm 57, and I'm owning all of it, every single year."

Jorge Arango:

All right, I'll say it. I've been doing this for over a quarter of a century. Gosh, I feel old. And that means that I am one of the people who got into what we now call user experience design fairly early on. I was drawn to the field by the appearance of the first web browser. And I come from a background in architecture, and I left my career in architecture basically when the web came out.

Jorge Arango:

I had this moment of insight, I guess you could call it, where I realized that this was something that had ... I was going to say, I realized that it had the potential to change the world. I think it was more than that, it was blindingly obvious that this was something that was going to radically transform how we live. And I wanted to work in this space. And I also had this insight that somehow my training as an architect would be useful. And that has proven to be the case. So I'm very glad to have had the opportunity to have this career in making information easier to find and understand. And that's how I understand information architecture. That's what we do.

Lisa Welchman:

Thanks for that. I'm going to take this first question. The reason why we've wanted to talk to you is, Andy and I, the reason why we even have this podcast is, we're going to write a book about digital safety. The working title was Designing for Safety. And we thought that the combination of my skills as a governance person, and Andy's skills as a designer and as a design leader, would be two good inputs for thinking about safety.

Lisa Welchman:

And quickly the way that my head went, when thinking about safety was, "Well, what else do we care about the safety of, right? So what do we already know? Let's not invent this from scratch." And so I very quickly landed on looking at, particularly in the US, because that's where I am at the time, consumer product safety, like the baby stroller, the car, the fact that if you're in California and now almost anywhere, you have to screw your tall furniture to the wall, so it doesn't fall over during an earthquake. Things like that.

Lisa Welchman:

And so that understanding of making corollaries between the physical world and the digital world on the product level seemed very similar to the corollaries and some of the things that you were talking about your book, Living in Information, which, by the way, is one of my favorite books, right? I really enjoy talking about that. And this idea of places, right, and thinking about designing for places, human spaces that people inhabit online versus transaction, services, little tactical things that we have happen.

Lisa Welchman:

And so yes, you've written an entire book about this. But it's been a bit since you've written the book, we've gone around the block even harder than I think you alluded to in that book. We'd already done the 2016 election in the US and seen that, but it's just gotten even more, all the more and all the more interesting even globally. I think today, the day we're taping this, we found out that I could be wrong about my facts, but I think Nigeria is shutting down Twitter, or something today, because they don't like what's going on.

Lisa Welchman:

And so, that's a very long wind up to ask you a question of what are your thoughts on that right now, particularly add social media as a public sphere, right? Social media is that place where people gather and talk to each other. What is your updated thought on that since you've written the book? I'm sure you have many thoughts.

Jorge Arango:

Yeah. Well, thank you for that prompt. You mentioned consumer products as things that we regulate for safety. Architecture is one of the things we regulate for safety, right?

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah.

Jorge Arango:

It's actually one of the oldest, I don't know if it's the oldest regulated design discipline in that the code of Hammurabi speaks of penalties for architects whose houses collapse, right?

Lisa Welchman:

That's right. Yeah.

Jorge Arango:

So it's pretty old. And the interesting thing with the internet and digital things is that, they are, in many ways, a new type of thing in the world. And we, in some ways, you see our language grappling to try to describe what these things are. And we talk about analogies, metaphors, we think of a lot of the things that we're making as product or as tools. And even in my book, we think about them as places, right? But in many ways, they're none of those things. They are a new type of thing that we don't have really good language for yet. And all this stuff is evolving. Which is to say that, we must acknowledge that as a species, we don't have much experience dealing with these things. And whenever a new thing like this appears in the world, which is not often by the way, I don't think that there are many things as different as the internet and the web that we've invented in a long time.

Jorge Arango:

Whenever new things come into the world, it takes a while for us to come to grips with what is the best way for us to make use of these things without causing harm. It's an interesting fact that this is happening at a time when everything seems to be speeding up. So as we record this, I think that product cycles are getting shorter in some ways. And the thing that comes to mind is this app Clubhouse, which feels like just a few months ago, was a really hot thing, right? And now I barely hear of Clubhouse, right?

Lisa Welchman:

Right.

Jorge Arango:

It's like this thing emerged, it looked like it was about to take off and take over the world, and everyone was using it, and all of a sudden, it's like, wow, people barely talk about this anymore. And it seems like everything is speeding up, right? These cycles are speeding up. And I think that one of the things that happens in our sped up culture is that we develop expectations for how long things should take. And I think that we have expectations that somehow these processes of acculturation of something like a radical new technology would operate at the same speed that we expect other things to operate on. And I just don't think that we have good evidence for that.

Jorge Arango:

I think that it's going to take time, it's going to take time for us to figure out how to do these things. And my concern, I don't know that it's an easy thing to start promulgating specific, let's use the word regulations, which is what at least went to my mind when you were talking about this. I think it might be early days for this, in that, in some ways, regulation is in tension with the pace of development of the technologies themselves, and the internet and digital technologies more generally, are still changing quickly enough, where the processes that we have in place to regulate them might take longer than it takes for new technologies to appear that somehow skirt those regulations or render them moot, right?

Jorge Arango:

And the example that I use for this is, our current interactions with things like social networks, or even what we're doing now, right, talking through Zoom, are happening, mediated through an interface that even though it's relatively new in the big scheme of things, still has been around for a while. Namely, I'm looking at a computer screen, I have a keyboard and trackpad in front of me, I'm wearing a headset and have a microphone in front of me. And these things, we've known how to interact with these things for a while. But there are new technologies coming, well, I wouldn't say they're coming to market just now. But they're at least in the labs, for doing things like direct neural connections to your brain and stuff like that. That renders a lot of the interface that we're using right now, I would imagine that it renders much of it obsolete. And I wonder, when we talk about these things, are we trying to specify guidelines or regulations for a moving target somehow?

Jorge Arango:

So I don't think that it's an easy thing to solve. And I think that it forces us to go back to first principles to ... And I'd be very curious actually, to hear from you all, about safety and what does safety mean in this context. Because we could have a conversation, right, about what first principles are in that regard.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. Just to follow on to that. That's a really rich answer for me, because you're touching on my area of expertise, which is governance. But when you start talking about policy and regulation, and I don't disagree with you, I have a similar talk, we can compare notes on this, maybe even now about just the lifecycle of technology adoption. And so I agree that the pathway towards any new technology coming into the human system is similar. It happens, somebody invents it, or it's discovered, however you want to describe that event. People do crazy stuff with it to figure out what to do with it, right? It causes a lot of harm, folks get up in arms, we decide that we need to do something about it. And then we messily get from that point to some set of regulations or constraints or an agreement about what we do and do not do with that technology. And that path can take 80 to 100 years, right?

Lisa Welchman:

So that is my perspective on that. So I don't disagree with you. But one area, I'd just like to push on a little teeny tiny bit when you said it's early days, I don't think it's early days to consider the framework of governing these spaces, and to begin to articulate and understand the harm, right? So I always use this reference all the time, early automobiles, a lot of the safety features that weren't mandatory until the 1970s, 80s and later and still not in some countries, were invented early on in the product lifecycle, they were invited in the 1920s, 30s, 40s. So, we had three-point seatbelts, we had safety glass, we had a lot of different things. And then we just had to have the will or the reason or the rationale to decide to regulate around that. And so I just wanted to add that, yes, I agree with you, it's early days, but it's not too early to start considering the nature of the harm.

Jorge Arango:

Absolutely. And you've articulated it much better. But that's what I meant by first principles, right?

Lisa Welchman:

Okay, cool.

Jorge Arango:

Trying to think through. The thing that concerns me is that, we might be tempted to lay down, let's call them rules, that are much too granular or much too tied to the interfaces we know now, right?

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, fair.

Jorge Arango:

That I think, would be a mistake. But definitely, we need to think about what we're doing on first principles basis. So for example, without thinking about specific UIs, right, what kind of interactions should these things accommodate, right? And something that is a particular interest of mine, it's like, what business models make sense for which types of use cases? Because they're not all the same, right?

Lisa Welchman:

Nope.

Jorge Arango:

Let me back up there. So right now we have a situation where search engines and places where we catch up with our friends and family, let's call them that, right? Both of those are using the same business model. And I don't think that those are the same types of things, right? And I don't know that the same business model is equally applicable to both without leading to some harm, let's call it, right, or to negative effects.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, no, that makes sense. Because even in our definition of safety, we talk about how you can only minimize that, right, you can't completely eliminate it. But with these business models that are being generated, and maybe it's speed, or speed to market, or not thinking things through that are really helping piggyback business models off of other, what feels similar at the time business models.

Andy Vitale:

The thing that you touched upon that I really want to dive into a little bit more, I'm thinking here is, time. So you were talking about it might make sense to regulate things in terms of principles, rather, so much than being really granular in the process. And I think that one of the things that I struggle with, or I see a lot of designers struggle with, and Lisa will debate me on this all day, it is those regulations that are set, and then they become too old, and they still don't change.

Andy Vitale:

So in thinking about what to regulate, when and why and how to adapt those. How are the business models that you're describing fall into place in that situation? And then beyond that how granular or how non-granular should we get to regulate things like principles in the beginning?

Jorge Arango:

Yeah, I'm not an expert on this thing, but I'll tell you that, my sense is that ... Well, first of all, I think I agree with you, Andy in that we cannot overly specify things like I said, especially in a field like this which is changing so quickly. And I actually don't even know if I advocate for regulations per se, of things like these fundamentals we're talking about, because I don't know how that can be done.

Jorge Arango:

The type of approach that I would prefer is almost like a cultural approach, where what we do is, we help clarify and articulate a set of values that becomes widely adopted by the culture. And those values are what give then rise to things like regulations. I think it was Drucker that said that culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? And we need to be clear on what our values are. That's what I meant by first principles, right? And that's a conversation that I don't see happening as much. I see a lot of conversation about regulation, which is why I brought up the word, right? It's like, let's break up Big Tech or whatever, or let's regulate what they can or cannot do.

Jorge Arango:

And there are all sorts of conversations happening about this both on the left and the right, right? I think that Florida just recently passed a law that constrains what social media companies can do to politicians' accounts, right? So I think that there's a recognition in society that these online experiences or, well, I thought I'd use the term in the book, these information environments, these places where we're having these conversations have an important civic role, and they're becoming something of a political football, right? In that, folks with different persuasions will want to regulate them to benefit their worldview.

Jorge Arango:

And the conversation that I don't see happening is one where we talk as a society about what values we would like to make manifest in these things. And I think that they're not values that are necessarily tied to digital experiences. They're wider than that, right? What we're doing is, we are in the process of moving so many of our long standing human interactions to these things. We're shopping, we're learning, we're working, right, especially during the pandemic, there's people meeting their mates online. These are things that human beings have done for a long time. What's different is that we're doing them in this weird new environment that we don't fully understand yet. And I think that we have to be very mindful with how we approach the guardrails that we put in place. That's how I would characterize it.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. So I'm realizing, as I'm listening to you talk that we have this incredible opportunity to have a conversation with someone who actually would like to have this particular discussion I'm interested in, which is, everyone wants our online world to be better than it is. A very few people are content with it. Whatever your political persuasion is, and wherever you are geographically, sometimes it's fundamental when we're talking about online, it might be something like access to the internet, people want faster, more consistent access to the internet, or even access to it in the first place, all the way to this extravagance of me with this really high speed stuff going on. But there're features that I want, right?

Lisa Welchman:

And also within the maker and community of people that contribute to the making, and design of online experiences. All of those contributing factors, and one of the things that Andy and I talk about a lot is, whose job is it to make sure that we start to address these cultural aspects as you describe them, which then do get translated into actual business objectives and goals and experiences, and family experiences and things and places. It contributes to the establishment of these places online.

Lisa Welchman:

So, I have written down some players that I think are in this field. And of course, the answer is all of them, right? We can just probably cut to the chase and say, it's not like there's one sole role that's responsible for getting this done, but we've got business. So these businesses and their business models, that's one set of people. Then we have academia, this more academic, esoteric bent of ethicists, right? People who may or may not have experience making things online, but are used to looking at things through an ethical lens and looking at that arc and often have it in a historical context, right? Then we've got the design community, from the very tactical pedal to the metal and I mean design in the broadest sense, right? So anybody that is contributing to the making of these online places.

Lisa Welchman:

And then we've got in this fourth pod, I'm going to call it policy. But I'm putting into that regulatory compliance, these state rate things, people who are trying to make laws and an overarching broad geographic rules or vertical market rules that will actually control what gets done and doesn't get done. So one, who am I missing in that pod of players? And then two, what do we do?

Lisa Welchman:

So one of the things that I've participated in softly as a lurker is the University of Amsterdam has developed a platform for ethics and politics of technology, right? And it's led by academics, and they've drawn in, it's multi disciplinary, but it's multi disciplinary within the academic community, right? And one of my first criticisms and I should have got a non-answer from them was, where's the business school, right? It was all philosophers, and I think maybe they had some legal people in there, but nobody from the business school. And I was like, "They are usually causing a lot of the problem or contributing to it a lot."

Lisa Welchman:

So these things are starting to happen. And so that's me talking a lot and broadly of just, what do you see in that space? And I know you probably don't know the answer, but how might that be engineered? How might we collaborate to have a more unified, comprehensive discussion about making these places safer?

Jorge Arango:

I love that question. And I do have an answer for you. But I want to circle back to something you said earlier, which is that, you said that people want access to the internet. And when you said that, I think that you said that people want faster connections or whatever. Where my mind went when I heard you say that was the jobs to be done framework, right? Like the Clay Christensen thing. I wonder if people want access to the internet, or if what they really want is to be able to shop on Amazon, or to pay their taxes or to file an unemployment claim or look for a job, right? It's like, the things that people use the internet for. So I don't think that people go on the internet for the sake of going on the internet. I think that they go on the internet for all these things that they can do online, right? Which is increasingly, like we said earlier, it's increasingly encroaching upon more and more of the things that we do in physical environments, software is eating the world thing.

Jorge Arango:

And the reason I mention that prior to actually tackling your question is that, to me, the answer to that is, the change should be led by the institutions that provide that type of value to people, right? So you mentioned business, you mentioned academia, I-

Lisa Welchman:

That made you laugh.

Jorge Arango:

Well, it made me pause, because I don't think that they provide the same type of value, right? I think that-

Lisa Welchman:

But they think they do.

Jorge Arango:

Well, I must tread carefully here because I am in academia myself. I teach, but I'm well aware of the fact that the work that I do with businesses has a different type of impact on society than the work that I do teaching students. It's not that one is more important than the other, because the students that I'm teaching are going to go on to help design the experiences that businesses put out into the world. So there's a huge leverage there, right? But they definitely have different scale. I think that many more people engage directly with the work put out by businesses than they do with the work put out by academia. I believe that to be the case, I might be wrong.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, that's fair.

Jorge Arango:

At least here in the United States. And I must make that disclaimer because I have had folks write in from other places saying, "It's not like that here. We have a much larger civic sector or a much larger nonprofit sector or what have you, right?" But here in the US business is a huge, huge part of it. I think that civic institutions are a huge part of it. And I think that religious institutions are a big part of it. All of the actors that have informed human societies, have a role to play in doing this. And one of my hobby horses, is encouraging all of us to think more broadly, not just in terms of our interests, but also in terms of our time perspectives. We are very present biased, because of what we were talking about earlier, the speeding up cycles.

Jorge Arango:

That causes us to, perhaps not pay as much attention to or not value as much the structures that our work rests upon. The things that we're working on did not emerge overnight, they've been built on a scaffolding that has been put into place for good or bad, right? Some of these things might not be positive. And we might examine the infrastructure and say, "Hey, this needs changing." And that's happening, right? Those conversations are happening, but for the most part, I see us being a little short sighted there. So, I think that taking a look at the institutions or the organizations that have informed society traditionally for a long time, is important.

Jorge Arango:

I'll add one more thing. You mentioned the design community. And I think that you said, I wrote down here that, the designers as they contribute to the making of places. I question the degree to which designers are really influencing the shape of the places we make. And I'll circle back to your question earlier about what has changed for me since I wrote the book in my understanding of these things. This is perhaps one of the main things that has changed in my mind. I wrote that book, primarily with designers in mind, thinking, designers must know about these things, because we are in this position to change things. And today, I am less clear on the degree to which designers have real influence here. I think that the design profession has painted itself into a corner, by not embracing the full complexity of the systems that we're designing into.

Jorge Arango:

And designers, a lot of designers, I'm not going to say all designers, because I don't think it's true. But a lot of designers have set up this duality in their minds that they that design is somehow about standing up for users in distinction to those evil doing business people or what have you, right? There's this duality that's implicit there. I stand for the users is the motto, right? And it's not that it's bad to be the user advocate, I think it's central to the work we do. But if you think of yourself somehow, as an actor within the system, that is here to upend the system as a whole, you're going to have a hard going of it. You're going to have a hard going of having the influence that designers actually aspire to.

Lisa Welchman:

Say that in a different way. I'm not sure if I understood that last point. Say that in a different way.

Jorge Arango:

Well, there's the old cliche about designers wanting a seat at the table.

Lisa Welchman:

Yes.

Jorge Arango:

Right? By which they mean, this is my interpretation now. We want to be seen as more than people who make widgets pretty, right, or who make things more accessible or more engaging. We want to actually have a say in the strategic direction that things take. And I think that it's important that designers aspire to that because design is not just about making things, it's also about helping us determine better, new ways of being, right, by prototyping, by trying out new things. And it's a method of making that involves practically putting things in the world and seeing how the world responds. And that's a very different approach to making things than modeling results in a spreadsheet, right? So that's the value that design brings to the table.

Jorge Arango:

But if we are perceived by the other people around the table as not being team player somehow, as being there to not support the directions that the organization wants to go towards, then I think it's going to be hard going to get that type of influence. It's a tough problem to solve because, you might look around you and see that the decisions that are being made are contrary to your values. And that might be a very difficult situation for someone to be in. I can think of few things more frustrating for someone in their career than to be working in an environment where you feel like you're supporting things that are contrary to your values.

Jorge Arango:

And if your values are somehow contrary to the values of the business that you're working for, that's going to manifest and it's going to come across to the people that you're working with. And you're not going to have the degree of influence that you expect. So not just, are you going to be frustrated because there's this misalignment, you're going to be frustrated because you're not going to have real agency. So that's something ... Yeah, go ahead.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, you said a lot of things there. And I don't disagree with any of them. But at the same time, I feel like the spaces that I've seen and how designers have evolved into being part of the strategy in places where they're just seen as beauty falls a lot on design leadership and the people that run the design teams, and it's their job to figure out that momentum and expose that momentum and build upon that and share that and drive influence through changes that have been made.

Andy Vitale:

But there are instances where design is low maturity in some organizations. And at that point, that team is definitely at a place where they can build that trust and build that relationship and build that influence by going with the flow rather than what you said, being the ones that feel like they're the ones advocating for the user going against the business. Because that's not set up for success anywhere. And I think that's just low maturity in somebody's career, right? It's noble to say, "Hey, I'm going to go work at this company to completely change the way they do things." And the way to actually make changes is to do that is to be in the weeds and help drive the change. But it's about the relationships that you build with people to gain that influence.

Andy Vitale:

That was just my thought there. The question I have though, is around people working in a place where they don't agree with the values of the company. Right now in this market, there are more people than there are jobs available for them or opposite, right? There's a million jobs, but there's a million people. So, if I'm someone that's like, "You know what, I really hate the automobile industry. I don't even give a shit about it." Why would I apply there? It just doesn't make sense.

Andy Vitale:

I know that happens, but the thought of people are going to go work somewhere that completely frustrates them, I know it happens, but it's crazy to me. I would never go apply or go to work for a company where I didn't feel that I could provide value, have input, start to shape things. But again, you and I, we're both involved in academia, and we teach students and a lot of them getting their first job is like, "I got to get my foot in the door and it's so hard." So sometimes they do fall into that space. But, I'm just thinking, "Why do people do that? Why do people set out to frustrate themselves?" Let's look at even architecture, as we try to architect our own career, what are some of the ways that make that a little bit easier for us, especially earlier on in our careers?

Jorge Arango:

I'll say this, speaking solely from my own experience, because I went through that process as well, myself, and it's especially true of architecture students. Again, I'll speak for myself, but I left architecture school with an incredibly inflated ego. There's a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, I'm not going to describe a comic strip on the radio as they say, but I might send you the link to post it. But there's this general perception in the culture that architects are very confident of their opinions, let's say. And you have to be if you are going to be making such a radical intervention in the world as a building, right?

Jorge Arango:

But I remember leaving architecture school with a very outsized impression of my own knowledge and abilities. And I remember hitting the job market, like being in a job after that, and having to very, very quickly come back to a healthier engagement with the reality of the expectations of the job, the business I was working for, the society where these things were going to be deployed, right? The word that I would use for that is humility, right? Having some humility to recognize that we might be excited and we might have a lot of energy and a lot of learnings and a lot of ... We might have this impulse to want to change things, but there is a limit to what we know and especially today.

Jorge Arango:

I keep a journal, and one of the things that I write down on my journal every day is, what did I learn yesterday? And there's so much. It's like, every day, there's something. It's like, "My God." If there's anything that I'm becoming aware of every year that is growing is, my awareness of my own ignorance. And the more I discover my ignorance of things, the more I realize that I must be very mindful with the degree to which I express certainty in my opinions. And I think that one of the effects that social media has had on us is that it's given us these incredible megaphones that amplify our voice, and we are so ready to use them to express certainty that I think that for the vast majority of us is unmerited. So I would say that humility is something that we all need to work on a lot more.

Andy Vitale:

I agree, 100%. My first design jobs taught me so much humility, thankfully for the person that set me aside and was like, "You know what, you may think you're doing a really good job, but there's so much that you don't know and I'm going to spend some time to show you." And I think as a design leader, you can see as the team gains in confidence, the hardest part is to throw in some opportunities for them to learn, continue to learn, make sure they realize they're not the expert in everything. And those opportunities help them gain humility. But the thing we don't want to do is conflate egos, but we also don't want to hurt confidence in it.

Jorge Arango:

Absolutely. You must do it compassionately, with a compassion that comes from having been there yourself, right? You would not be where you are today. If you hadn't had mentors who had helped you understand the limits of your own understanding, right, in a way that didn't alienate you, that didn't turn you away from the work because ultimately, there this is a discipline. And by the way, I think that that word discipline is very important, and it's a craft, right? We can talk in the abstract about these academic principles and all these things, but ultimately there's a craft to design. And the way that, again, going to this idea of looking at the past, the way that design disciplines were traditionally thought was with this apprenticeship model, where if you were a person who-

Lisa Welchman:

Guilds.

Jorge Arango:

... guilds, right, and you were new to the field, and you would work in the studio of, the word that was traditionally used was master, which is a word that we must look beyond because it's problematic, right? But this relationship where you understand your relationship, if you're an apprentice, you understand your relationship to the person that you're apprenticing under, right? And there is this understanding that what you're looking to do is to develop this craft, to develop this mastery of the thing that you do, right? And with the sense of mastery comes pride in doing a good job, right? There's the desire to do the same for others. So the awareness that as you advance in your career, you are responsible for helping the people who are coming into the career, right? And that's something that, I know Andy, you teach as well, and I don't know, Lisa, do you teach?

Lisa Welchman:

No I do an incredible amount of mentoring though.

Jorge Arango:

There you go. So same thing, right? But I think that the three of us then are aware of this idea that as you progress in your career, you have a responsibility to the next generation to pass on what you have learned, right? And to me, that's a, I'm not going to call it a natural progression, but it's certainly a progression that has stood the test of time, right?

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. I'm really listening to you and not disagreeing with anything. But I just think I have to add, as the woman and brownest person on the podcast, that, I so much agree with the two words you said, which is humility and discipline. But I think it's important to say that some of us culturally are forced into a position of humility, right? And in fact, that I think, is the value that women of color in particular, bring to the table, women and women of color, people of color, I guess, I should say, bring to the table, which is that, there are a lot of extremely highly competent, humble people already, right, who oftentimes don't get placed in a job or don't get considered because they haven't mastered that loud swag or because they're just flat out objectified, and not assumed to be in that spot.

Lisa Welchman:

So I don't disagree with what you're saying but, how that resonates in a person's career, right, is very, very different based on who you are and what you look like. And I'll stress again, that the strength in a human being who has spent a large portion of their adult life and including myself and just others, knowing already, that their opinion is not the last word. There's a whole set of people who already occupy that space, who don't have to learn how to do that. They were brought up in a way and in a culture that forced them to know that, "You know what, what I think maybe isn't the thing, right?" To the extent that the design community and broadly, the maker community, can include those people, right, I think will be of tremendous value for all of humanity. So that's my little comment that I really wanted to make.

Lisa Welchman:

And then the second thing I'll say is, something that Andy and I have talked about before, which is, practicing. So much of the design world, just looking at it from the outside, if we're talking about UX design, right? That's not something I do. But just looking at designers as a community and makers as a community in digital spaces, there's just no time for practice. Everybody's a fricking order taker, right? It's just like, "Do this, do this, do this, do this."

Lisa Welchman:

And so this idea that you get to go out, fiddle with something, make mistakes, see what would happen, we've talked about it before in previous podcasts, almost any other artistic sports, other types of teams, they practice for the event, right? They probably spend way, way more time in practice than they do actually doing the thing, right? And when we're recording this now, they just started the Olympics. And the internet is full of Simone Biles doing amazing things as a gymnast. And she's put in some hours, right, so that she can get that few minutes right. And I'm just wondering what your thoughts are about practice. Do designers practice? Do people who are making these places actually get any enough practice? And what that might look like?

Jorge Arango:

Yeah, it's a great question. I do want to circle back to the point about greater inclusion, especially of people who have been traditionally misrepresented or underrepresented. I definitely agree with you, Lisa. And I think that one of the things that gives me hope about our current time, is the fact that we have so much more awareness of that issue. And I see so many people working to correct for that imbalance. I even put brackets around the word master for this very reason, right? Even our language is permeated by these structures that we traditionally haven't paused to question, right? So, yeah, it's a tricky challenge. But I do see it as a very positive sign that there is greater awareness of the issue, especially that people are very consciously working to ameliorate the situation.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, I'll just tack on to that. I know you're moving on to the next one, but I just want to say, just in hearing you feed that back, I'm very centered around being a Black woman because that's my experience. And as Andy knows, I'm on my way to moving to the Netherlands. And one of the most humble experiences for me, is that I don't speak the language, right? And so I had to sign a lease, I had to fake out a Dutch lease. And I had this all of a sudden, visceral experience of what it's like to be a really intelligent person who is used to having a lot of agency all of a sudden have to not be able to do the basics. And it made me really think about people that come to this country, doctors and lawyers who are driving around in cabs. And so I just wanted to say that to even broaden that comment even more. There's a certain humility that's forced on you in that type of situation as well. And so when you talk about inclusion, I think it's important to be richly and deeply inclusive, right?

Jorge Arango:

I wholeheartedly agree, I am an immigrant myself.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah.

Jorge Arango:

And I came to this country speaking the language, so I did have that advantage. But as an immigrant, you face all sorts of challenges that nobody else even thinks about, right? So yeah. I believe that we thrive in diversity and in bringing as many viewpoints as possible together to work on moving things forward. Anyways, we have so much more work to do in that regard. And that could almost take up an entire hour, that conversation. But I do want to move on to your question about practice, because I think it's very important. There's a couple of angles there.

Jorge Arango:

One angle has to do with the degree to which we are happy with our jobs, and excited to do the type of work that we do, all right? And I'm going there first, because I recently ran a poll on Twitter, which I know is not in any way a scientific survey, right? It's almost like a self selected samples. Like, "People who are on Twitter, maybe are not happy with their jobs or whatever." But the question I asked was, and I'm going to have to paraphrase, but the gist of it was, how do you feel about the concept of having a job? In other words, not how do you feel about having a job? But how do you feel about the idea that you have a job, right?

Jorge Arango:

And there were four choices going from I love it to I like it, then I tolerate it and I hate it, right? And something like 75% of respondents said that they either tolerated it or hated it, right? And that to me, let's just say that it made me sad, because we spent so much of our lives at work, right? That if you are merely tolerating what you do, I don't think that you're going to be motivated to put in the type of practice that is required. Because practice, as I understand it is not just about the time you devote to something, it's also about the quality you bring to that time, the quality of your engagement with the activity, whether you are willing, for example, to go beyond the ask to investigate the foundations of what you're being asked to do.

Jorge Arango:

Let's say that you're a very junior person in a team. And what you're being asked to do is to manage the part of a design system where, I don't know, buttons are documented or what have you, right? You can approach that as something that you must check off on a to do list and do it competently. Or you can take it as an opportunity to learn about how buttons work, right? I just said it and it sounded pretty to me. It's like, "I don't want to tell anyone what to do, I just want to illustrate the fact that we bring different levels of engagement to our practice, all right?" So that's one thing I'll say about that.

Jorge Arango:

The other thing I will say is that, we have a problem in designing for digital environments in that the craft aspect of our work, changes very fast. If you were someone, let's say in the 18th or 19th century, who was apprenticing to become a master carpenter, right? Someone who could make a beautiful piece of furniture, you would be working with tools and practices that had been honed for a long time, for many years, right? I think that you could have a certain degree of confidence that the people that you would be mentoring would also be using similar tools and practices.

Jorge Arango:

I think that that is not the case for the things that designers working in digital environments are facing. Our toolset changes very fast. I'm old enough to now have experienced several toolset transitions. And there are things that I brought from previous tools that help me understand the new ones, right? If you were doing this type of work in the 90s as I was, you probably at some point used a tool called Macromedia Director, right?

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, I remember that.

Jorge Arango:

And Director had this conceptual model that had you dealing with certain objects and things. And the things that I learned in Director helped me learn a tool called Fireworks. And Fireworks helped me learn Sketch. And Sketch helped me learn Figma, right? So it's not like there's a radical break in that type of toolset, but they are different. And it's possible to become really adept at one of them, and have that knowledge go away when something better comes out.

Jorge Arango:

But I'm also thinking of tools like, gosh, consider the impact that artificial intelligence could have on our work. A lot of the very granular, let's call it screen level design work that we do today, I think can be fairly competently replaced with systems that are good at analyzing patterns of what works, and then recreating those patterns in a user interface. I think that that's coming, right?

Jorge Arango:

And that to me, suggests that the practice that we should be thinking of when we think about practice, is at a higher level. It's not the same practice that someone who learns to play the piano does, right? It's like, we're not going to get familiar with playing the piano, we need to get familiar with composition and reading music and understanding what makes music work. That's the level at which we need to be thinking of. And what that translates to in design is, what I've been advocating for the past few years, which is working at the conceptual level. It's like, rather than working at the UI level, spending more time honing our skills at thinking about conceptual relationships between parts of the environment and the objects in the system.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. I'm going to interrupt you a little bit only because you're talking to a piano player. So that's a great analogy, it's spun off a lot of things in my head and so, I don't disagree with you, and I think it's an and, and there's a value in both.

Jorge Arango:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

You're going to be a better conceptual person, you're going to be a better composer, if you're composing for the piano, if you play it, right? And the better piano player you are, the more likely, I'm not saying that you can't do decent composition for the piano, not playing it, but I just can't put away the fact that if you've got fingers on keys, even if it's something like, let's talk about tools, understanding the way your fingers work on keys, and what your hands can and cannot do easily from a transition perspective, right? I see a lot of people who don't really have a rich understanding of the systems and technology that they're designing for, writing impossible to play piano pieces, basically doing the equivalent of that, something where you need three hands, right? And so I just wanted to stick that in and say, I think it's an and, right?

Jorge Arango:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

Andy and I did designers learning to code, Deep Dive or whatever. So I'm not talking about that. But I'm in that area of, the more you know, the better type of creator that you can be. And we started off this podcast with you talking about all the things you do, I don't know if we had hit record on it before where you were saying, you do so many different types of things. And I'm completely convinced that that richness, all of that richness, allows you to do your main job better, because it means you're more engaged in the world in a lot of different ways. So I just had to interrupt you and say that.

Jorge Arango:

I love it. And I don't disagree with you. To be clear, I don't think that AI is ever going to replace all of UI level design, right? In much the same way that, let's call it canned music, it hasn't fully replaced few tools of playing or people who are doing beautiful work in the piano, or, and I'm going to here tie it back to the carpentry thing that we talked about earlier, it is still possible for you to buy beautifully handcrafted furniture, but the vast majority, I would guess, the vast majority of furniture that people buy today is not made by craftspeople, right?

Jorge Arango:

You were talking earlier about the, I'm going to bring it back to the beginning of the show, the regulations around strapping furniture to the walls in California. I'm in the process of strapping some IKEA bookshelves today in my home, right? And those were not produced by a master or a craftsperson, they were clearly made by a machine, right? In order to design something like that, I would expect that you need to understand the properties of those materials, but you also need to understand the properties of the machinery that are going to produce those things, right?

Lisa Welchman:

Right.

Jorge Arango:

And that's what I mean here, that we need to think as designers at a higher level. And i just wanted to make that point, because I think when a lot of people think of practice, they think "Well, I need to roll up my sleeves and fire up Figma or whatever, right?" And yeah, it's important for you to do that. It's important for you to know that level. But I think that designers who want to be positioned for long careers in this environment, need to be practicing also at a level above that. That's the, yeah.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. Jorge, that makes total sense to me. The thing that I think about though, I've seen these user interfaces that are built by AI, and I've seen some of the capabilities of what they can do, but I do agree that that level of thinking just needs to be there. Some of that thinking, and this is the question that if I didn't ask, people would be like, "Why didn't you talk about information architecture in much detail?" So when we talk about a high level of thinking, but we also balance that with speed. And we talked about speed earlier. But when it comes to speed in creating products, it seems like some steps are skipped. Sometimes it's like, we know enough, do we need to do more research? Or, for example, the one you're closest to, information architecture. I often see the information architects are struggling to get involved in a product, they're almost having to spin up their own, epics or big things that they can go after and tackle.

Andy Vitale:

So as you co-author the most recent editions of the book on information architecture, what shifts are you seeing? Are you seeing that IAA is this discipline that's almost becoming forgotten or swallowed by UX? Or are you seeing pockets of IAA, that are really truly able to solve big problems and deep information and drive those relationships of how information is translated to the product roadmaps? What are you seeing as you work on different iterations of this book and the evolution of the discipline of information architecture?

Jorge Arango:

I think that information architecture is less well known today than it was, say, 20 years ago, within the field of design. And I also think it's more important than it's ever been. I would like to believe that it is on an upswing. And I'm just saying that because I do see more posts being written about information architecture, more chatter in the social networks, about information architecture. And few things would make me happier than for people to start acknowledging this more.

Jorge Arango:

I will also say that I think that there is a fundamental tension at play here. And it's not a new tension, but I think it's coming to a head now. And the best way to talk about it, I think, is as a tension between top down and bottom up, right? And you talked about speed, Andy, it's not just speed, per se, it's speed in the right direction. It's possible to go nowhere fast is what I mean, right?

Andy Vitale:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

Or the wrong place.

Jorge Arango:

Or the wrong place, exactly, right? Even worse than nowhere. You end up in a bad place, right? So the question is, how do we go as quickly as possible in the right direction? There's a fundamental tension there in that there's an implication that there's some kind of agreement on what the right direction is, right? But that must be counterbalanced with the fact that you have to have some humility, you do not know everything needed to get there from the get go, right? So you can think of top down as knowing where we're going, right? And you can think of bottom up as being able to sense your environment to make the adjustments necessary to keep us on target. Or perhaps, to determine that, "Oh, my gosh, there's a cliff here, let's go some other way, right?" You need a balance between the two.

Jorge Arango:

And I think that part of the bad rap that information architecture has gotten in the past is that there seems to be this awareness or this understanding that information architecture is all about top down directions. And it might be that a lot of people conceive of it like that, but my understanding of information architecture, is actually heavily informed by Lisa's work in governance. And whenever I teach information architecture, that's always where I end, I end with governance, because it's not just about setting a top down direction, it's also about setting up a system that will allow the structural constructs that you're proposing to remain relevant, functional, valuable in the long term.

Jorge Arango:

And you we can't have the arrogance to think that the thing that we're designing now, is going to be useful 5, 10 years from now, especially not in this field that is changing so fast, right? So we have to do a better job of, again, humility, right? Thinking, we're doing the best we can with what we know now, and that includes setting up the systems that are going to keep this thing fresh and relevant and valuable. And that's where I see governance coming in, right? That entails creating structures, which is what information architecture does, designing structures, but it's designing structures at the level of the ... It's like we're designing the thing that designs the thing, as opposed to just working on the thing, right?

Lisa Welchman:

Well, I'm not going to disagree with you. Anyhow, I think we might be at time.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, unfortunately.

Lisa Welchman:

Which is shocking, because there is just so much more richness in this conversation, which means, at some point, you'll have to come back again, or selfishly, I see a meal with either a couple bottles of wine or beverage of anybody's choice that the three of us could have at some event, where we are, and enjoy this conversation some more.

Jorge Arango:

That would be lovely. And now, it's seeming more and more feasible, right?

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, at least for those of us in places where there's a vaccine and I know the pandemic is just still raging in huge parts of the world right now, but I feel very, very grateful to be fully vaccinated and able to get out and about in the world again. So, yeah.

Andy Vitale:

Exactly.

Jorge Arango:

Yeah, it's a real privilege and it's been a privilege talking with both of you. Thank you

Lisa Welchman:

Thank you.

Andy Vitale:

Also. So Jorge, before we let you go, how can people get in touch with you or find out more? Obviously you keep a journal and you blog quite often. So, how do people stay in contact with you?

Jorge Arango:

The best place to contact me or find out more about me is on my website, which is at Jarango.com. So J-A-R-A-N-G-O.com.

Lisa Welchman:

Wonderful. Thank you.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, thank you so much for coming on.

Jorge Arango:

Thank you for having me.

Announcer:

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Surfacing, please rate, review and follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Also, consider supporting the podcast on Patreon at patreon.com/surfacingpodcast. If you have suggestions for guests for a topic you'd like to hear about on Surfacing, please reach out via the contact form found at surfacingpodcast.com.