Episode 17: Peter Morville on Farming and the Future of Information Architecture Part One

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Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to Surfacing. In this two-part interview, hosts, Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak to information architect and author, Peter Morville. In this episode, they discuss Peter's recent move to a farm in Virginia and the steep learning curve of becoming a farmer. Peter offers his perspective on the state of information architecture and talks about his methods for tackling IA projects with clients. Peter also considers some of the challenges that a new generation of designers and information architects face as they endeavor to build impactful digital experiences.

Lisa Welchman:

So you did actually move during the pandemic Peter, is that true?

Peter Morville:

We moved twice during the pandemic. After 25 years in Ann Arbor, Michigan, we moved twice during the pandemic from Ann Arbor to Charlottesville, Virginia, to a little rental home in the woods, last August.

Lisa Welchman:

That's right. I remember seeing that on Twitter.

Peter Morville:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

I remember. And you started doing these epic hikes.

Peter Morville:

Yeah. That's one of the reasons that I picked this region, was the Appalachian Mountains and the wonderful hiking. And then just about five weeks ago I think, we moved from the rental to what is hopefully our forever home, a 48-acre farm in Scottsville, Virginia.

Lisa Welchman:

Forever home, I love that. What does that mean?

Peter Morville:

That means I want to die here. If for no other reason, then I don't want to ever move again.

Lisa Welchman:

So the rental home was sort of a trial to see if you actually really wanted to be in the area or...?

Peter Morville:

It was, it was more of it's a lot easier to look for a home when you're physically in the area.

Lisa Welchman:

Oh.

Peter Morville:

Especially now when you need to move so quickly, but we wanted to get a feel for the area, a sense of which part of... We were sort of centered around Charlottesville because my wife really wanted to have it... We lived in Ann Arbor, which is this wonderful college town, and Charlottesville is also a wonderful college town.

Peter Morville:

So that was kind of the anchor, but we didn't know which direction we wanted to be, and how far from Charlottesville we could tolerate. So we're about 25 minutes from Charlottesville now.

Andy Vitale:

Nice. I've been to Charlottesville. I've flown on this plane that I was on. It was like the little hopper propeller plane. And I had the first row and I thought this is a great seat, but it happens that you're facing everyone else. It's almost the flight attendant seat.

Peter Morville:

Oh, wow.

Andy Vitale:

So I was knee-to-knee with the person in row two. And it was a really awkward flight, just staring someone in the eyes for 45 minutes, but I love that town. But a 48 acre farm...

Peter Morville:

Yes.

Andy Vitale:

Are you actually farming on it or is just a house on some farm land?

Peter Morville:

It's a bit of both. So Virginia... I guess most States have some version of this, but there's sort of this notion of land use. And if you're using your land for a government sanctioned kind of supposedly good for the people purpose like farming, then you don't have to pay taxes on that portion of the land. So there's a very strong incentive to farm the land one way or the other.

Peter Morville:

And so, we worked out in deal with a local farmer. It was one of my favorite people we've met down here. And so, he is growing hay in the 18-acre field to feed his cows. He's a cattle farmer. And then literally later today, he's bringing two calves over here and they're going to be in the field right outside our house. And we're just going to look after them for him for a while.

Lisa Welchman:

And let them graze, so the...

Peter Morville:

Yeah. So we're pretty excited to have our baby... I fear that we're going to get very attached to our baby cows, but...

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. It's like this is a cattle farmer, and you're a vegetarian.

Peter Morville:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

How does that work in your mind?

Peter Morville:

According to our 19-year old daughter, we have become evil and complicit in the beef industry at this point, but I'm able to rationalize it a little more. First of all, I'm not actually fully morally against eating animals. I'm against industrial agriculture and factory farming, and the cruelties to humans and animals that are part of that industry.

Peter Morville:

But small farmers, and I'm sure it varies by farmer, but a lot of small farmers care about their animals and do a pretty good job looking after them. And they're the other ones with the happy cows, right? That at least when they're alive, they're getting to hang out in the field and graze, and be with each other.

Peter Morville:

And so, it's not all bad, but these cows sort of have their own destiny. We're just going to look after them for a little while.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, and hopefully nicely. And yeah, maybe you'll be friends when they're alive, and...

Peter Morville:

Yeah. And it's not impossible that we will. I don't even want to put it in... speak it into the world, but I have envisioned a scenario in which we end up buying them from the farmer, so we'll see.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, your daughter might be out with some protest signs...

Peter Morville:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

So you'll have to see how that works. So this is like, it's...

Andy Vitale:

It's hard to not get attached though. So where I live, there's a little bit of woods in North Carolina. I'm on the outskirts of Charlotte, but we've got chipmunks that have dug holes and moved into our yard.

Lisa Welchman:

Or you had them.

Andy Vitale:

Well, we saw them again, thankfully.

Lisa Welchman:

Okay.

Andy Vitale:

But they just had babies. And all of a sudden, we saw a five-foot snake come and move into the chipmunk hole, but the chipmunks got out and they come back, and we haven't seen the snake. But once I saw that snake, I was like, "You know what?" We're going to go ahead and redo this whole yard. We're going to make it gravel instead of these hills that are there with the pine straw that they could dig into."

Andy Vitale:

And we planned that chipmunks eat from the bird feeder, like the birds throw out some seeds. So we ordered this four-foot planting tray so that the excess bird seeds would fall into a tray that the squirrels and the chipmunks could eat. And the snake won't live in the gravel.

Peter Morville:

Okay.

Andy Vitale:

But now the snake's gone after we committed to this big investment in the backyard.

Peter Morville:

Right.

Andy Vitale:

But just to prevent it ever happening again, it's like the chipmunks are part of the family now.

Peter Morville:

Yeah, and you're doing your best to be good custodians of the land, but that's harder than it might seem.

Lisa Welchman:

Well, I'm just a city girl. I like being out in the wilderness, but I actually like being out in the wilderness or I like being in a city.

Peter Morville:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

Like two different things. I don't know, did you ever end up going to do the Pixel Up Conference in South Africa?

Peter Morville:

Well, I did it technically, but it was a Zoom conference at that point.

Lisa Welchman:

Oh, it was a pandemic thing or whatever. And I think you had mentioned this Buddhist retreat center that was out in the middle of nowhere, and which was really great. It was a great place to go. I think I got there early and actually spent a week or two in advance of the conference, and then went to the conference and did it.

Lisa Welchman:

And I realized at that time, and it was out, not crazy out in the bush, but it was out there. We got lost trying to get there in the middle of the night. They had to talk us in. It was kind of like, "When you get to the third bush, turn left and then look really hard because there's going to be a little street, unpaved path or whatever," and got out in the middle of nowhere.

Lisa Welchman:

And so I really love being slightly terrified by night sounds and wilderness sounds, which can happen if you live in a city a lot.

Peter Morville:

Yep.

Lisa Welchman:

Where all kinds of just big cats and monkeys, and just stuff that was outside, and insects and giant bushes that looked odd.

Peter Morville:

Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Lisa Welchman:

And just the cacophony, that is what we have now, at least on the East Coast of the cicadas. But it was just every night, there was that much noise.

Peter Morville:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

But there's also just this tremendous freedom of, as a woman, being able to walk alone at night and be safe.

Peter Morville:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lisa Welchman:

Right? In a way that you don't really get in a city.

Peter Morville:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

And so, it's really great that you're kind of out there. There's a freedom that comes with being on that expansive land. And there're dangers that come with it as well, or different types of challenges, I guess, is a more positive way to put it, but it just makes you realize what human beings have given up for the sake of civilizations.

Peter Morville:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

And I'm not negative about that. I'm a city girl, I'm all the opera, the jazz club, the public transportation, I'm all into that kind of stuff, but it's really interesting.

Peter Morville:

Yeah. As I was thinking this morning about this conversation, one theme that kind of popped into my mind that I think actually could be a thread that could tie together our conversations around farming and the wilderness with technology and work, is the theme of fear.

Peter Morville:

And so, I've experienced quite a bit of fear since we moved in here, fear of not being able to actually look after this place and keep up, fear of snakes because we got rattlesnakes and copperheads down here. And we actually have our next door neighbor, you can just about see their house if you look through the right window, but it's through the trees and so forth, that's the only house you can see from here.

Lisa Welchman:

How far is that?

Peter Morville:

They're not too far away, but it's easy to forget they're even there. Mostly, we actually do live in a neighborhood, but you wouldn't know it. And in fact, for the first couple of weeks, my wife kept saying, "I miss living in the neighborhood," as our neighbors would come over and introduce themselves. And she even said it to them and I'm like, "Susan, you can't say you miss a neighborhood to your neighbors."

Lisa Welchman:

That's not starting well.

Peter Morville:

Yeah. They feel that they live in a neighborhood. And so, it's just more rural, but people have been incredibly friendly and welcoming, but our next door neighbor, one of the first things he told... It was actually Susan who went and talked to him. One of the first things he told her about was how his son rides around on the tractor when he's mowing the lawn with a loaded gun in case he sees copperheads.

Peter Morville:

And to me, that's just such an interesting provocative image around that concept of fear, right? Because I can completely identify with fear of snakes. They scare the heck out of me, but I also really empathize for snakes, and I don't condone the just kind of out of control killing of snakes. And so, it's a weird thing where I have these mixed feelings about that.

Peter Morville:

But fear is such a strong driver of human beliefs and behaviors, and a huge amount of the time, we don't even acknowledge it, right? So it's like how people are interacting in a work setting is often driven by fear, but people don't even realize that's what's shaping what they're doing.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. That really, really resonates with me both personally and professionally, relationships decisions that you make out of fear, interpersonal, personal, intimate, romantic relationships decisions that you make out of fear.

Peter Morville:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

But also, when I'm interacting with clients and trying to help them get organized and try to help them make changes in how they collaborate so that they can do what they say they want to do, which is make good stuff.

Lisa Welchman:

And just most of the time, the reason they can't shift is this clinging fear, right? Like, "I'm afraid to make the shift. At least I know the way my group works now. I know the way we're interacting. I understand my power right now. And if I let this go and I actually collaborate with these other people, and in particular, behave in a way that allows other people to have power. If I do that, then what am I going to lose? I'm afraid I'm going to lose something."

Peter Morville:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lisa Welchman:

And sometimes it's practical. Maybe I won't get that race and I really need the money to pay the college tuition. But most of the time, it really isn't that tangible. It really is like in their bone, this power thing.

Peter Morville:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

And I'm wondering just how much do you think that tendency to be afraid has sort of landed us in the complex spot that we're in now when it comes to the design, particularly of... We focus a lot on digital in this podcast, of what we're putting online, particularly as it relates to the people who are making it, right?

Lisa Welchman:

I like to beat up a little bit on designers on this podcast sometimes, but we don't really talk about them as people that much. We talk about them as designers in a functional role, and less as human beings. And I'm wondering just... you've been in this world for so long and helped to shape and form this world of design. And I want to talk about that a little bit more, differences between UX information architecture, all of it, what your opinion is on that.

Lisa Welchman:

But what about the people? How do you think they're doing and what do you think the contribution of their state is to what we're seeing happening right now?

Peter Morville:

Yeah. So it's funny, because the project I'm working on right now, it's kind of rare for me these days, but it's more of an internal knowledge management project. And so I'm working with this big non-profit and I'm working with their legal department. And let me tell you, getting the contract worked out was crazy, but they've been actually wonderful to work with.

Peter Morville:

They're spread out all around the world, and people are... It's one of the most fragmented information environments I've ever seen because every location has its own server, shared server. And so you've got two or three or four people in one location who are sharing files with each other.

Peter Morville:

And then most people who are not in that location don't have access to those files, even within the global legal department.

Lisa Welchman:

Interesting.

Peter Morville:

And this has kind of evolved, largely due to fear of, "These are confidential files. We have to be careful. We have to protect our clients." And somewhat just due to IT inertia, nobody ever figured out a way to make it open by default rather than closed by default. And so, they actually have a really good culture.

Peter Morville:

If somebody from Hawaii emails someone from the Philippines and says, "Hey, can I have access to your server so we can work together?" They'll just be like, "Oh, sure. Let's make that happen." And so they really share well with each other when specific needs come up, but they're completely fragmented and cut off.

Peter Morville:

And so, when I do interviews with folks there and I ask them, "Is searching a challenge?" Their answer is sort of like, "No," because they don't search. They're not able to.

Lisa Welchman:

Oh, [crosstalk 00:17:25] just the foundational things aren't there to allow them to do that.

Peter Morville:

Yeah. Usually on an engagement like this, I would be observing them, search the intranet.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah.

Peter Morville:

And it would be horrible, right? Because the search system is terrible...

Lisa Welchman:

It is the intranet.

Peter Morville:

And the result and the information is out of date, but at least you could watch people failing at search. Whereas here, you really don't even... it doesn't even occur to you to try because you don't even have access to most of...

Lisa Welchman:

So what do they do to look for things?

Peter Morville:

Well, they email each other, they call each other, "Hey, do you know anything about this?" They do all group... They email all... I don't even know how many people there are. "Anybody know anything about this topic, let me know." Yeah. There's a plus to that, because they end up talking with each other a lot across geographies, and getting to know each other. So there's that high touch kind of positive, but there's also tremendous amounts of wasted time and missed opportunities, and just acting based on not having the information, reinventing the wheel.

Peter Morville:

But yeah, fear is a big piece of that, and it's contributed to an incredibly fragmented information environment. When I think about the flip side, which is kind of what you're more asking about, which is like, I think more like public facing websites and people who are designing for consumers or.... And I'm trying to think, what is the role of fear there? I feel like I'm not sure if I have good recent experiences. I tend to think that the problems more come just from cultures where... Everyone talks about user centered design, right? I've never seen user centered design, ever.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah.

Peter Morville:

Nobody does it, right? It's executive centered design...

Lisa Welchman:

Yep.

Peter Morville:

Stakeholder centered design, designer centered design, comfort centered design. This is easier to do it this way. Technology centered design, nobody actually gets even very close to designing for users. And even when they do, doesn't last. Amazon for a long time did a pretty awesome job.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, they did.

Peter Morville:

with their website. And in the last 10 years, it's gotten horrible because they just couldn't sustain that focus. The selfishness kind of came in and the greed, and they have a certain amount of monopoly power. So it's like, "Why do we have to care about our customers that much?"

Peter Morville:

Some of it still, even in 2021, is that executives still don't get the web. I guess executives are kind of like our politicians, they just keep getting older. So we never get to that generational shift where it's like, "Finally, we have digital natives running companies." I don't feel like we're there yet. So some of it, it's just like if you have executives that don't really understand the technology and what it's like to be a user, it's very hard to do good work.

Peter Morville:

And then again, you end up with cultures where it's just everything, everyone's kind of doing things a little more for themselves instead of for the user.

Andy Vitale:

I think cultural is the key there because there's cultures of missing deadlines and moving fast, that fear of not hitting those marks, there's fear of not being first to market. There's fear of failure in some cultures, there's fear of ambiguity, which is another thing I'd love to talk about later on when we start to dive into information architecture and how we can eliminate some of that early on.

Andy Vitale:

But it is, it's a cultural driver, this fear. And the interesting thing about fear is it only takes one person to be afraid for that to amplify, and that fear to spread through the entire team or the entire organization. And yeah, I'm just saying yes to what you said with a couple of extra words.

Peter Morville:

Yep.

Lisa Welchman:

So maybe we can jump into this since we seem to be edging around it a lot. We can just jump into this pool of sort of the state of organizing things in digital spaces.

Peter Morville:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lisa Welchman:

Right? So one of the things, just when you were talking earlier about the farm and how you move there and you got this house first, and you check things out or whatever, it reminded me of your book on planning, was it Planning for Everything?

Peter Morville:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

Right? Or of just sort of like this non-linear way of doing things. I'm planning a move to Utrecht, to the Netherlands right now. It's a huge move for me, and I'm constantly reminding myself that I don't have to stick the landing on the first move. Just get into the vicinity of where you're... get to the country, get your belongings there, and then tune it once you arrive in that place as well.

Lisa Welchman:

And so, just the sense of doing big things that have complexity, and understanding what steps to take and how to take them, in my mind that, married together with what I see as the state of... Let's just call it for lack of something else, let's just call it experience design, because I don't have anything else to call it right now.

Lisa Welchman:

And I know people love to argue about things and I don't really care about definitions, but I'm just going to put the D word in there and put the E word in there, and the complexity of that. And everybody knows you, polar bear book, information architecture, and Andy and I were talking in advance of just how much complexity there is in this system of design.

Lisa Welchman:

There's user experience. There's just pure play design, there's information architecture, there's information architecture with a capital I and a capital A, and a small I, and a small A, and there's big D and little D. And in my mind, and maybe I'm overly simplistic, everybody's trying to do the same thing, which is to develop products and services or create experiences or transactions, transactional possibilities that allow people to interact online, to get work done, or to live, or to collaborate, to enjoy each other's company, whatever that might be.

Lisa Welchman:

What do you see is going on in that space right now? I see a lot of... You said designer centered design. I see a lot of arguing in-house about these things, and not a lot of actually, steps that could be taken to improve it. What do you think is going on in this debate space? Is it a legit debate? Does it matter whether or not we decide on these definitions?

Lisa Welchman:

It's kind of a long question, but you've just been in this space for so long. What do you think is actually going on? And tell us how to fix it, Peter, and then we'll let you go back to your farm and pulling logs out of ponds.

Peter Morville:

Yeah, and why do you think I ran away to a farm in the first place?

Lisa Welchman:

Farming is easier than information architecture.

Peter Morville:

Yeah. I don't know about that actually. I have some appreciation for the challenges of farming already. Our farmer was telling me about the chemistry of farming, and I'm not sure if he has more than a high school education, but he knows way more chemistry than I do. But wow, that's such a big set of questions all lumped in there.

Lisa Welchman:

Sorry.

Peter Morville:

No, it's okay. It's fun. So let me start, I'll kind of start where you started with the planning and moving. And so, one of the themes in a number of my more recent books has been mindfulness, and it's one of those topics that everyone's eyes can glaze over, like "Yeah, yeah. You have to meditate," blah, blah, blah.

Peter Morville:

And yet I think that the key to good planning and good information architecture is mindfulness because you have to be able to step back and be in a calm place, be centered, and think about... with planning, it's like, what are my goals? How do I want to do this? What am I actually afraid of? What am I excited about? And go into it with a certain amount of flexibility and recognition that improvisation is as important as planning and you got to be ready to dance, and that's part of the fun.

Peter Morville:

And then with information architecture, the project I'm working on now, I've done my user research, my background review, my stakeholder interviews. I'm going to shift into analysis next week, and I'm aware that there's probably between five and 10 major categories of things that can be done to try to make things better, and any one of those could also make things worse.

Peter Morville:

And so my challenge is to really try to think through what are the two or three interventions in this very complex ecosystem that are more likely to do good than bad? Because they've already been through years of trying and doing some good, and doing some bad. And now, you've got an organization where people have changed fatigue and just like, "Oh, no, not the next new technology that will solve all our problems."

Peter Morville:

So I think that ability to step back and try to see things as they are, to be honest about our own limitations, right? I don't have the information architect as superhero mental model anymore. It's like the world is messy, these folks are going to end up having to solve these problems themselves. Maybe I can help a little.

Peter Morville:

I think in terms of what's happening in the design world, the corporate world, I guess that's the thing. The design world has become the corporate world, that's how I would put it. When we were first practicing in the '90s, we were doing this cool new thing that no one in business knew about.

Peter Morville:

And they all wanted to hear what we had to say, and they'd pay us to do stuff, but it was usually out of end of year discretionary budgets because they're like, "Let's just see what the heck these people can do. And it was more marketing and brochure websites. And so their stakes were low, and you could actually just do good information architecture because no one was... there was no politics.

Peter Morville:

Now, design is fully embedded in the corporate hierarchy and the politics, and the culture. And so, from my perspective, and I always try to... I hate it when people give conference talks or write books and they just say things in this really definitive way, "This is the way things are," and it's like that's the way things are in one context, right? That's the way things are in startup world in Silicon Valley.

Peter Morville:

But that's not the way things are at the International Monetary Fund.

Lisa Welchman:

Exactly.

Peter Morville:

It's a really different place. But from my limited perspective of getting these various glimpses into different organizations, I just haven't seen much progress for the last, at least 10 years. It's like up until maybe 2010, around then.

Peter Morville:

So we had 15 years of every year you go to conferences and there're new techniques and new ways of doing things, and new people have dug deeper into user research, and so you're learning and it's kind of... I felt like as a kind of a... If we want to call the experience design field,

Peter Morville:

As a field, we were learning and evolving and growing, and I have seen very little of that for at least 10 years. It's like, I don't know if that's just an inevitable kind of... We've basically gotten good enough.

Peter Morville:

I'm not completely sure of all the reasons, but I just feel like I haven't really seen anything new in our field for at least a decade. And it doesn't really bother me so much in a lot of ways. I'm really loving the project I'm working on right now, because... where it's like looking after this farm, I'm a total newbie. I'm like, "I don't know how to look after cows. I know nothing," which is exciting in its own way, but also can be very exhausting and stressful.

Peter Morville:

When I'm consulting, I feel totally confident. It's like I've been doing this for 25 years. I'm really good at this. Everything is unique in one way or another, but I've seen variations on... I'm 51 years old now, and I feel absolutely on top of my game when I'm doing IA consulting.

Peter Morville:

My memory has shifted in some really weird ways as I've gotten older, but in terms of how it functions in a business setting and kind of doing information architecture, I feel like I'm as good as I've ever been or better. And so, it's actually really fun to do consulting right now because it's like, "Oh, I get to go do something I'm good at."

Announcer:

On the next episode of Surfacing, hosts, Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale continue their conversation, as Peter talks about his view on the world of information architecture, and considers why IA seems to be less prominent as a practice than it was in the past. Peter also offers his view on what younger designers and architects need to consider as the baton is passed from one generation of designers and architects to the next.

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