Peter Morville is a pioneer of information architecture. He co-authored Information Architecture for the World-Wide Web, the classic O’Reilly “polar bear” book on the subject. This is Peter’s third appearance on the show. I asked him back because I wanted to learn about his decision to retire from IA consulting. This is the first of two conversations with Peter about navigating big changes.
Show notes
- Peter Morville
- Peter Morville - Wikipedia
- Sentient Sanctuary
- Animals Are People by Peter Morville
- Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango
- Ambient Findability by Peter Morville
- Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville
- Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals by Peter Morville
- Emancipating Information Architecture by Peter Morville
- Ishmael (Quinn novel) - Wikipedia
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Wikipedia
- Louis Rosenfeld - Wikipedia
- A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow
- General Data Protection Regulation - Wikipedia
- The Informed Life ep. 47: Peter Morville on Emancipating Information Architecture
- The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
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Transcript
Jorge: Peter, welcome to the show.
Peter: Thanks. I’m so happy to be here.
Jorge: I am always excited to talk with you. This is the third time that you’ve been a guest on the show. I am a big fan of your work, and we’ve been friends for a long time. But for this conversation, I reached out to you because earlier this year you posted something on social media about a change in your life, and I was hoping you would tell us about it.
Peter’s Retirement from IA
Peter: Sure. What’s interesting from my perspective is it’s a change that was a long time coming, but this year I finally made the announcement. And the short version is I officially retired from information architecture consulting. And I’ve done that in order to start an animal sanctuary and write a book about our relationships with animals and really just to move on with a different chapter of my life.
Jorge: I have the book right here. I have not read it yet. I always try to read books whenever I’m going to interview the author. This one feels special, and I’m saving it for the end-of-year holidays because, differently from your previous books, this is a work of fiction, right?
Peter: Well, that’s a good question. You’ll appreciate this. So the book has not been selling well. And I think a lot of folks have been holding off on reading it for various reasons. And I actually asked ChatGPT this week, “Why is my book not doing better?” And I was impressed by the answer.
The answer came in three parts. One was it was independently published, so you didn’t have a traditional publisher behind you with marketing and publicity. Secondly, and this goes to your question, it’s very hard to categorize this book because it’s part fiction and story and part philosophy book. It’s got a lot of deep and serious philosophy in it. And it’s also got a lot of autobiographical, or at least semi-autobiographical, stories in there. So there’s actually a lot of truth in the book along with the fiction.
And then the third reason that ChatGPT gave me was — and this was one that I already had suspicions around — that people are afraid that the book will make them feel guilty or sad or both. And it probably will to a degree, but my hope is it will also help people feel joy in the wonders of the natural world and our relationships with animals. And then in an important way, really get folks to see Western civilization differently because I challenge really the foundations of Western philosophy. I won’t go on about that book anymore. There is a decent amount of information architecture in that book, believe it or not.
Jorge: I’m excited to check it out.
Reflecting on Influential Books
Jorge: I was gonna say, there’s a couple of books that came to mind when you described it as straddling these categories. One is Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, which is purely a work of fiction, but it’s also philosophical and also deals with animal consciousness. The other one is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
And those two books I’ve read and do feel like these are really hard to place, but they’re also the kinds of books that, because they do have philosophy at their core, they did make an impact on my life in one way or another. So I’m excited about this. Just to call it out for folks, the book is called Animals Are People. The impression I have just from reading the description, is that what you’re alluding to as potentially making folks feel guilty is that this deals with themes around animal sentience and our responsibility to the natural world.
Peter: Yeah. And by the way, I love that you loved those books. Those two books were probably among the greatest inspirations for me in writing this one. And Ishmael in particular changed my entire worldview. And I think of it as the saddest book I ever read. I was depressed for two weeks after I read that book. It was a long time ago. It really shook me, but it showed me the power of a book to affect you and change how you see the world.
Jorge: I had the same experience, especially with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And I’m going to talk about that one because I read Ishmael well… I would say it’s been well over twenty years since I read that book. So the memory of that book is less vivid in my mind. I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in college, but I reread it recently. And I remember it having a tremendous impact on me when I first read it. But in rereading it last year, as an older person, I appreciated it at a completely different level. This, and I guess I’m teeing myself up to reread Ishmael as well, because it feels like these are the kinds of books that you must return to, and you will get different things out of it if you return to them at a later stage in life with hopefully more wisdom.
Peter: Yep.
From IA to Animal Sanctuary
Jorge: And I’m going to use that as a segue to talk about your career transition. This is a pretty major shift, right? You’ve talked about going from information architecture consulting, which entails working with people in either businesses or nonprofit organizations to sort out large information systems, right? So working with people and computers and conference rooms and Zoom rooms and stuff like that. And now, like you said, you’ve moved to and are operating an animal sanctuary and writing philosophical novels. What prompted this change?
Peter: Yeah, my career in information architecture consulting goes back to the sort of early to mid-nineties. I went to library school at the University of Michigan. I bumped into Lou Rosenfeld and together we grew a company called Argus Associates, which was probably the first pure information architecture consultancy in the world.
And together we wrote the Polar Bear book on information architecture with O’Reilly Media that came out in 1998 and really helped to launch the field and the practice. And so, I spent more than 25 years with information architecture consulting as my career and my passion. I did a lot of conference speaking all around the world, which was one of my greatest joys and privileges, to meet folks just all over and talk about these things. And I wrote a number of books along the way.
And so, information architecture was really at the heart of my identity for 25 years or so. So yeah, this was a huge pivot, not just in a practical way of shifting from earning a really good living pushing pixels, to earning nothing shoveling donkey poop, but also just in how I see myself. My own sense of identity has gone through a massive change in the last several years.
The 1990s were such an exciting time for me and really for anyone who was engaged in information architecture because we were in the right place at the right time. There was a significant amount of luck involved in having the opportunity to be a true pioneer of information architecture. And we had this amazing experience of growing Argus from really just Lou and me up to about forty people and nearly $4 million a year in revenues. And it was a rollercoaster ride for sure. It was a lot of stress involved. It wasn’t easy. But you might say it was relatively easy in the sense that the internet was taking off. There was so much interest in what we were doing. We got paid really well to do fascinating work. We had good clients and good colleagues. And we didn’t actually know how good we had it at the time.
And then the same is true with the Polar Bear book. We wrote it, it came out in February of 1998. There was probably about a six-month lag where we just didn’t really know what to do with ourselves. We’d written this book, we were running our company, but nothing had changed. And then the book became really popular, to the point where Amazon called it the number one internet book of 1998.
And that really launched us into what you could call a level of fame and fortune. It really puffed up our egos. We felt famous and we were making good money and, we felt like we were special. And that specialness associated with my place in the information architecture community continued for the next 20 years. I got to go to conferences and have people come up to me and just be really excited to meet me. I went to Japan and had this guy practically jumping up and down just so excited to talk to me. And it’s like you get to feel like this weird version of a rockstar. And, to give that up, to walk away from that, isn’t easy.
And in the world of animal sanctuaries and animal philosophy, I’m a nobody, right? I’m just starting all over. And you can’t just carry your credibility from one realm to another, or at least I’ve found I can’t. And so, I had to be okay with starting over being a nobody and leaving a lot of things. Leaving behind people that I like. I haven’t been to a conference in a few years. Actually, I haven’t been to a conference since COVID. I don’t travel very much. And so lots of folks that I know all around the world that I would bump into at conferences I haven’t seen for a long time. And that’s been hard.
So there have been trade-offs in this transition. And as I said, it really required me to be okay with a change in my identity and kind of my sense of my role in the world.
Jorge: Undertaking such major changes to these aspects of our lives that are so central to our identity, as you’re pointing out, is really challenging or can be really challenging. I guess some people do it more easily than others, but I personally struggle with that. You also alluded to earlier in the conversation to the fact that this is a change that’s been long coming. Why now?
Peter: Yeah.
The Evolution of Information Architecture
Peter: So there was a period of time where I was unusually passionate about information architecture as it’s defined in the Polar Bear book. I spent maybe, say, a decade just exploring that domain in ways that are very practical and were useful to my clients.
I would say that Ambient Findability, which came out in 2005, was probably the first sign that I was trying to find other ways of framing my relationship to information. I wanted to escape what I thought of as a trap of my own creation, right? It’s like you defined a field or a practice, and you spent a lot of time within that framing. And, at that point, I was feeling a little trapped. And so Ambient Findability was a way to continue to explore things that may be useful to my clients and to my career without calling it information architecture and without having the same boundaries.
Ambient Findability I would describe as somewhat techno-utopian. I kind of had a very positive view of the internet and of what we were doing with information technology at that time. And so this really positive sense of the future. I later felt a little guilty about that because I started to see some of the darker sides of what was happening with the internet. And so Intertwingled was a real flip where I looked from a systems-thinking perspective, really tried to look from maybe a slightly more negative or critical view of what we were doing.
So that was one thing is that over the course of that time period, in my writing and speaking, I was starting to drift further away from the core of information architecture. So I felt really fortunate that people would hire me to do information architecture work. And I thought to myself, “I’m good at this. I’m getting paid really well to do interesting work with good people.” But it wasn’t really where my intellectual interests were anymore. And so I used writing and speaking as ways to go outside the bounds.
And then I would say towards the end, though, the last several years, I was really becoming disappointed with, I guess, how the, I mean, I’m using the term internet, but it’s just like how our information and communication environments were unfolding at a big-picture level. But then within the context of practicing information architecture, I was finding it harder and harder to practice information architecture the way that I knew, given the shifting business environment where there’s much more of a focus on short-term thinking within business units or what Lou likes to call silos, right?
The way I practice information architecture is to try to take a holistic perspective of what’s the user experience or the customer experience across an organization, and that, I think, is at odds with how large businesses are mostly run these days.
Jorge: The sense that I’m getting from what you’re expressing here is that the trajectory went something like this: because of your background and your interests, you managed to articulate a set of principles that were just what was needed at the time. But this is an inherently systems-oriented practice. And if you play that out seriously, you end up asking questions like, “What are these structures in service to?” And what I’m hearing here is that as your career developed, you kept broadening the scope of the questions you were asking to the point where you felt uncomfortable with the answers you were getting.
Peter: Yeah. And it’s funny because I came out of library school. And libraries are not a normal part of capitalism, right? Libraries are a place where we share, where things are free. And there was a culture in library school around sharing and providing access to information and helping people without expecting payment in return. And what I saw the internet as at that point in 1993 or so was that we had this amazing potential to create a global digital library where we could all share information and help each other make better decisions and become more informed.
And that was the passion that drove me into information architecture, and in the context of information architecture consulting, what I cared about the most was the user. I wanted to help people to find information, to find what they need, with the least amount of pain and suffering. And that’s very in keeping with the origins of user experience, right? So we’re not just talking about information architecture, but we’re talking about user experience more broadly.
And what I was seeing in the later years was an incredible challenge in actually practicing what you might call user-centered design in an environment where it’s much more common to practice stakeholder-centered design, to design in a way that’s in the interests of stakeholders within the business. Sometimes that even runs against the actual overall profitability and success of the business itself. But you have these fiefdoms within large enterprises where folks are running it for the benefit of their unit, sometimes at the expense of the whole.
But my problem wasn’t even whether or not you’re running it at the expense of the whole so much, it was, “You’re not willing to do what your customers need.” And if you just look at the experiences that we all have with websites nowadays, in many cases, they’ve gone downhill. They’re not getting better; they’re getting worse. Amazon, ten years ago, was so much better than Amazon today, and the same is true with Google. So, weird business interests have gotten in the way of really practicing user experience and information architecture, certainly the way that I wanted to do.
Jorge: Do you think that what has changed is the environment in which these systems are being designed, or has that always been the case, and what has changed is your perception of the environment?
Peter: I think it’s a bit of both, but I think that those of us who were involved in the internet and the, the nineties and maybe early two thousands, we got to enjoy this wonderful honeymoon period where we were building the first websites for organizations and executives were on the fence about whether it was even worth doing or not. It wasn’t mission-critical. It wasn’t considered core to their business. And so we were given a lot of latitude. And so, many of us brought that user-centered mentality to the work. And we were allowed to do it. We were allowed to create websites that were easy to use, where information was findable.
And back then, you’d go to an IA conference, and folks would be excited about the work they were doing, but would be saying, “We need to get a seat at the table. We need to get a seat at the table. We need to get C-level engagement. We need more money and more support and more resources.” And I always thought, “Be careful what you ask for,” because that’s happened now, right? Executives have recognized that digital business is business, right? Your website and your software and those kinds of user experiences are territory worth fighting over.
And so, the kind of profit-oriented mentalities, those existed in the past, but we just had a period of time where we were allowed to coast and do our own thing. But in the last ten or fifteen years, folks who really are committed to the bottom line and are willing to be extractive, to figure out ways to get more out of every customer – you know, folks who are willing to make it impossible to unsubscribe online, folks that embrace dark patterns – have gotten more sway over how the work happens. So, I do think that the environment has shifted. Not necessarily the overall in-business environment; it might have gotten a little bit colder and more cruel and ruthless in the last 20 years, but it was always like that. It’s just that we internet people got to play in kind of a fun space for a period of time because it was so new.
And then, yeah, I used to be very ignorant and naive about a lot of how the world works. And back in the nineties, probably, a lot of folks could say this as they look back on times when they were younger, but it feels like it was so much easier to be naive about the way the world worked back then and to feel like civilization’s good and to buy into what’s called the progress narrative. It was so much easier back then. I think for kids these days, it’s kinda hard. They’re growing up in a world where a lot of the problems are much more visible and hard to ignore. I lived in a happy place back then in terms of these larger systems and the way that companies were run and the way that the world worked. So yeah, it’s both.
Jorge: I was there also during that time. And I’m gonna refer to them as like the salad days, right? Like the earlier kind of halcyon period. And I do see what you’re saying, that there was more experimentation, perhaps a more carefree attitude that wasn’t as profit/metrics-driven, let’s call it. The counterpart to that is, I also remember the spirit of “anything goes” and, a kind of brave new world manifesting in things like John Perry Barlow’s manifesto, basically saying to the nation-states of the world, hands off this stuff, right?
And yet, part of this maturing process has had the nation-states of the world asserting their authority onto these spaces with things like GDPR to protect precisely against the sort of excesses that you’re pointing out, right? So it’s happened on both sides. I think that it’s become more mature from a business perspective, but I think that it’s also become more regulated, right?
Peter: Yeah. Before I forget, I wanted to tell you this quick story about my last consulting project because it illustrates the point I was making. And I definitely will not mention names here, but I was working with a Fortune 500 with a fantastic reputation. I was brought in ostensibly to help with a light refresh of the dot-com website.
Once I got in there, it became obvious that most of the valuable content for this organization and their customers was spread out over more than probably about a dozen major websites, all with different domain names, dot doc and dot dev, and so on. And every major business unit had its own totally separate website with a different navigation system, and even design often. And I did user research with customers, and they’re so confused, right? I don’t know which website to go for which question they have.
And so it turned out my client had an ulterior motive. They slipped me into the organization with this idea of a light refresh, but they actually, they were smart folks, and they wanted me to help make the case that they needed a total restructuring of their web presence aligned with the needs of the business and their customers, not with stakeholders. And so, it was an interesting and challenging project all the way through. But we got to the end, say ten or twelve weeks in, and I’ve talked with all the major business units and I’ve put together recommendations for this major restructuring at a kind of strategic level. And we had the chief information officer as our sponsor, so we had high-level engagement.
So, I’m about to make my final presentation via Zoom, with these major departments, and there’s thirty-five, forty people on the call, and all of a sudden my client, before we can even start, says, “I’m very sorry folks, something has come up. We can’t have this meeting right now; we will have to reschedule. And Peter, can you stay on the line?” And so everyone just drops off. And my client says this powerful executive who reports directly to the CIO was threatened because they had made their career on SEO and optimizing specific sites and specific content. This notion of a whole restructuring was very threatening to them. And they basically sabotaged the whole project. They canceled that final presentation. And I don’t know the details, but I believe they stopped my report from getting to the CIO.
And so my project was just like done at that point. I was fine ‘cause my project was gonna be over anyway and I got paid and everything. But it was a shocking end. And, sadly, I think within the next year my client lost her job there. So like this, was like an executive vice president who was like, I’m gonna like scorched earth. Like you tried to do something that threatened me. And for me, that was like, “I think it’s a good time to get out of this.”
Jorge: I’m gonna take a step back here and try to name something that I’m perceiving as we go through this conversation, which is that there’s an arc to the profession, which I think your career illustrates particularly well because of the time that you’ve been involved. Which is, you got into it, as did I actually, at the very beginning when the web first launched and started becoming popular, and you’ve pointed out that in those early days, I’m gonna caricature it by saying we were starry-eyed, right? Like we had this amazing new medium before us. I think that there were people at that time who could see the potential there before other folks, right? So, it took a while for businesses, governments—let’s call it the traditional power structures of society—to recognize what this was about and assert themselves in these environments. Right?
And there’s been a trajectory from these early exciting days where… you used the word naive. I’ll say it about myself as well. I went into it because I was like in love with the technology and excited about its potential and not really thinking about, “How would it change the world if this thing was available to everyone in their pockets all the time?”
Now that we are here though, now that it is in everyone’s pockets and now that we’ve moved our businesses, governance systems, social systems, and all these things to information environments, we are confronted with the fact that human beings operate in these highly political structures where people are trying to assert control, people are trying to move up. There’s these status games that people play, right? And all of those things have played out for centuries for human beings, human societies, and now they’re playing out in the design and development of these systems. Why is it wrong for the people who design systems that do these things to have to grapple with these kinds of issues?
Peter: Yeah. I don’t think it’s wrong. The best way to describe me is, I was an information architecture pioneer, right? And that word pioneer, we’ve used it a lot over the years, and it has a different meaning to me now when I really look back and I think, yeah, we really were pioneers and it was the frontier and there was a lot of freedom being on the frontier and that’s what made it so much fun and so creative. And it’s not the frontier anymore. It’s the city. It’s the gritty city. And I don’t think there’s a right or wrong in this. It’s just the way that things were gonna play out that way sooner or later. It’s just the way of civilization. I just don’t wanna play there anymore. I don’t like the gritty city. That’s why I’m out in the countryside.
Jorge: I was gonna say, you’ve very literally taken yourself back out to a more rural environment.
Peter: Absolutely.
Advice for the Next Generation
Jorge: Alright, so let’s shift gears here because whenever I record these conversations, one thing that I have in the back of my mind is that there are going to be people listening in who are getting started in their career. I meet people all the time who are excited about information architecture. And I think that this is an important realization that, let’s say the early stages of the development of the profession are now in the past. And we are no longer in those frontier days. A lot of the space is… I was going to say mapped out, although I don’t know if that’s fair because technology keeps changing so much.
Peter: Yep. Yep.
Jorge: But do you have any advice for folks coming in who are going to be working in the city? What should they be on the lookout for?
Peter: Yeah. I struggle with this ‘cause I have two daughters in their early twenties, who are struggling with their own careers, and I feel somewhat helpless in advising them on what to do. There’s so much change going on. There are so many questions around AI and how it’s going to change the world of work. And I feel like one of the dimensions of wisdom, you think about folks in the olden days and you’d have this wise old man or wise old woman who would tell the younger folks what to do, that works in a relatively static world, where the lessons that someone learned over the life of fifty or sixty or seventy years are all still valid.
But in a world that’s shifting so quickly, it’s really… I think that a lot of us who are in various stages of elderhood are left without great answers for young folks. And, I actually really try with our girls not to be counterproductive. It’s easy once you’ve effectively retired to become holier-than-thou about your values. “I’m not gonna… I wouldn’t do that or I wouldn’t do this.” But they have a lifetime of having to earn a living, and they will have to make some sacrifices and some compromises as part of that.
There’s tremendously fascinating information architecture challenges in business and government and nonprofits. I think some of the work that you’re doing exploring the use of artificial intelligence and LLMs in doing information architecture work, right? You’re just scratching the surface. If I was young and a little more naive, I would be all in on that, right? I’m mostly, other than seeing the potential at the very beginning when LLMs started to hit, and I was like, “This is different, this is a world changer for sure.” I saw the potential, but I’ve actually stayed away from it for the last few years.
At the moment, I’m starting to think I might start to explore… I’ve been thinking about analyzing my book with AI, and just exploring like what can you do to analyze and understand and tease apart a book with this technology? So there’s fascinating stuff to be done intellectually. You just have to find some environment that you can feel comfortable in and that will let you do that work.
A few years back, I wrote an article called Emancipating Information Architecture, and that was my attempt to show that there’s a lot of room to practice IA outside of business, to do it for nonprofits, to do it for education, to do it for activism. To use language and classification to change people’s minds. And I don’t know if that article has had any impact, but that was what I was trying to do, is encourage folks to explore IA outside the context of business, because it’s a really powerful way of framing how we engage with information.
Jorge: And, for listeners of the show, I’ll point out that that was the subject of our previous conversation. So episode 47 of this podcast is dedicated to that article.
It’s funny, I was thinking about this exact question. Earlier today, I was on a walk, and I was thinking about this. “What kind of advice can you give people in a world where things are changing so much?” And one answer that came to my mind is that when things are changing as fast as they are now… the faster they’re changing, and the more radically they’re changing, the farther back in history you have to look for ideas that might be worth referencing. Because the older ideas have quite literally stood the test of time, and they have proven their worth. Like the fact that we’re still reading Marcus Aurelius today, that’s a set of ideas that has served human beings for a long time. So I just wanted to put that out there as a possible answer to that question.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah. I think that there are dimensions of wisdom that are relatively timeless, right? Real insights into human psychology don’t change that much. And there are dimensions of wisdom that, as you say, have stood the test of time. You can go back and read a book from two thousand years ago, and it’s got stuff that’s really relevant to today.
At one point when I was writing my book on planning, I thought of it as the information architecture of time. And I think there’s a lot of value in playing with time, thinking about what is short-lived and what endures. And so in the context of your question, one thing I’ve advised our daughters to do is to focus on skills over knowledge. Knowledge, you can read a book and feel like you’re an expert in the subject. But skills are something that take a long time to develop and then endure. Someone can’t go and do a six-week bootcamp and have the skill. And so, one of our daughters is really good at planning and managing and working with people to get things done. Our other daughter is extremely persuasive, right? So she could be in sales or fundraising and get people to open up their wallets.
And so I think it’s important to think about what are the skills that you’re developing in the work that you do. That are going to be a need in the future. And that’s where a technology like AI comes in, because you have to be asking yourself the question of what is AI going to be able to do as well as, or better than humans five years from now, ten years from now? Because you don’t want to develop a skill that’s going to be made redundant.
Jorge: I am currently reading Yuval Noah Harari’s book Nexus. And he makes a point there – and I’m gonna paraphrase this and probably not do justice to what he said, but I thought the idea was pretty powerful – that the sort of diagnosis that a doctor does is easier for an AI to replace than the sort of work that a nurse does.
Peter: Yeah.
Jorge: And nursing is a profession that has lower status in our society. But like being able to use your senses and your your limbs – your body – to help another human being, to comfort them, to care for them, is something that is going to take longer for technology to overtake than the understanding what might be wrong with this person and suggest what they might do about it.
Peter: Doctors have a certain amount of power in society, so they’ll be able to hold onto that despite that fact, but I totally agree with that insight.
Jorge: So that seems like a good, I’m gonna call it like an offering for our listeners. I think that this is hard-earned wisdom of a career that has been… Well, first of all, I’ll, say this as we round things out to a closing. I want to publicly thank you for the work that you’ve done in information architecture. Your work has been foundational to my career. The Polar Bear book in particular was very important to me when I first read it. It was obviously very important to me when you and Lou invited me to help co-author the fourth edition. But not just the Polar Bear book. Like you, you talked about your public speaking and the other books you’ve written and just the way that you’ve brought forth your gifts to the world has been inspirational. So I wanted to publicly thank you for that.
Peter: Thank you.
Jorge: And thank you for this reflection on your career and where you are now. As we move to closing, I want to talk a little bit about what’s next for you.
Peter’s Future Plans
Jorge: You’ve moved to this animal sanctuary that you’re working on. I know that you’re very excited about it, and I know I was telling you before we started recording that I’m living your adventures through the stuff that you’re sharing on social media. What’s getting you fired up these days, Peter?
Peter: Yeah. So I’m in a bit of a liminal period right now. Claire and I have achieved the goals that we set out for ourselves this year of starting the sanctuary and getting it up and running. The mission of our sanctuary is more happiness and less suffering for all sentient beings, including humans. And so, that last part is important. To that end, we have public events like goat walks and farm yoga, where we invite people to come and spend time in nature with animals, and that can be a really calming and joyful experience for people.
And I feel really good about that. And so, we definitely want to continue to do that as well as just looking after the animals. But I don’t have any big growth plan for Sentient Sanctuary. There’s a think tank aspect of it that we haven’t explored much yet, but that sort of involves bringing people into the conversation to talk about how we can improve our relationships with animals and cause less harm.
When I think about my role in the world, I struggle a little because if you get involved with animal sanctuaries, people think of you as an activist. And to be an activist is a warrior. It’s someone who’s willing to fight a battle. And again, I come back to the realization that at heart, I am a philosopher, not a warrior. And I care about our world and animals and people, and I want to make things better. But my role is not to be on the front lines fighting. What I want to do, and I think where I’m best suited, is to be thinking and writing and speaking about what’s going on. And that’s really where my joy comes in.
In information architecture, a lot of my pleasure wasn’t necessarily from the practical work; it was from the philosophy of information architecture. It was thinking about these issues and talking with people about them. And so, one way or another, I’m gonna keep being an information architect and keep being an animal philosopher. And in some cases, there are overlaps between those two. And in other cases, I might go one direction or the other.
The reason why I worked hard, especially the past ten years before I left IA, I wanted to put myself in a position where I had the freedom to pursue my interests. And so, I love being here at the animal sanctuary and getting up every morning and interacting with the cats and the chickens and the goats and the dogs and the donkeys. And it’s a very peaceful place to be. But it’s also really important to me that I’m able to spend a few hours every day digging into intellectual pursuits and some combination of reading and writing in particular.
Jorge: When you talked about not having growth targets for the sanctuary, what came to my mind is that that feels like a trace from that world that you’re trying to leave, right? Like this notion like it’s some kind of competition, like it needs to be the biggest animal sanctuary. It’s like, “No, not really.” Maybe how about this as a reframing: if the goal is more happiness and less suffering, maybe there’s an aspect to this that happens in information environments, right? Where what this is is a signpost for other folks about other ways of being in the world that do not entail the “traditional” approach, right? Maybe it’s about the growth of the footprint of the idea rather than the place.
Peter: Yep. Absolutely. I’m only half joking when I say I want us to be the world’s most philosophical animal sanctuary. I want us to make an impact by getting people to think differently. I tell the story of the girl and the starfish, where there’s an old man walking along the beach, and the beach is littered with thousands and thousands of starfish who were washed up on the shore, and they’re drying and dying in the sun.
And he comes upon a little girl who is throwing starfish back into the water to save them. And he says to her, “Little girl, what do you think you’re doing?” And she looks up and she says, “I’m saving starfish.” And he says, “Look at this beach. There’s thousands of them! What difference do you think you can possibly make?” And the little girl looks at the starfish in her hand and then tosses the starfish into the water and says, “I made a difference to that one.”
And so, that’s how I think about what we’re doing. The sanctuary is the place where we save starfish one at a time. And it’s a small scale, and that’s okay, right? We do make a difference to the animals and the people who come here. But the think tank piece is our attempt to address the larger scale. And it’s totally overwhelming. Whether you think about a national scale or a global scale or whatever, there’s so many problems related to our relationships with animals and nature.
And so, the only way I can do this is to go into it with humility and humor. It’s just a ridiculous thing to try to do, to try to have an impact on a larger scale. And yet we’re gonna try, and that’s all I can say about that.
Jorge: Thank you, Peter, for giving us a glimpse of the ocean.
Peter: Sure.