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. In our previous conversation, I interviewed Peter about a big change in his life. In this interview, we turn the tables: he interviews me about a big change to this show.

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Transcript

Jorge: Peter, welcome back to the show.

Peter: So happy to be here.

Jorge: I’m always happy to talk with you, and especially so soon after our previous conversation. To remind folks, and maybe folks who haven’t heard that conversation, in our previous interview on the podcast, I asked you about a change in your life where you have transitioned from a long and fruitful career in information architecture consulting to what you’re doing now, which is managing an animal sanctuary and writing.

An Announcement

Jorge: And that conversation was structured as something of an exit interview, right? Like, when I first reached out to you about that, I thought it’d be fun to ask Peter to reflect on what he’s learned now that he’s closing this chapter in his career. And I reached out to you to record this conversation because I’m also contemplating a change. And I’ll let the cat out of the bag now by saying that I have decided to end the show at the end of the year. I was hoping that this would become like an exit interview for the show and have you do the asking of the questions, and I’ll be on the guest side this time around. Does that sound good?

Peter: That sounds great. And I was looking back at your list of podcasts, and it’s quite a body of knowledge. You should feel really good about all the folks that you’ve talked to and the interesting topics that you’ve helped people to understand.

Jorge: I appreciate that. It’s been a real treat for me to do the show all these many years. And again, there might be an opportunity here to compare notes with you and your change. I get the sense from our previous conversation that you were ready for this change that you’ve undertaken. And I’ll be very frank with you, I am not sure about this change that I’m doing, right, because I do love doing this show and I love talking with people. Particularly, you’re calling out the scope of folks that have been guests on the show. It’s something that I look forward to, having these conversations.

But I feel like I’ve reached a point where I’m not getting as much joy out of it as I was at one point. It’s starting to feel perfunctory, and I would rather go out on a high note when I’m still feeling good about it and maybe a little anxious about ending it than pulling the plug when I’m completely just at wit’s end, like “I can’t do this anymore!” So, yeah, I’m a little sad to be doing this, but I think it’s time.

Origins of the Podcast

Peter: Okay. What’s interesting is that endings and beginnings go together. And so, let’s go back to the beginning and tell me a little bit about why you did start a podcast in general. Why did you pick that kind of format? And then why did you start this podcast?

Jorge: I had been attracted to the podcasting medium for a long time because I listen to podcasts myself and I have learned a lot by listening to podcasts. I think it’s primarily because I enjoy walking a lot. Walking is my primary form of exercise. And listening to podcasts is something that I do while I’m walking. So I’ve always associated podcasts with learning while taking care of my body. And I have, like, positive feelings for that. I also thought that it would be a medium that is relatively easy to produce. When I say relatively easy, I mean as compared to video, right?

Peter: Yeah.

Jorge: Video takes a whole different set of skills. Now, little did I know when I was getting into it that it’s much harder to do this right than I had assumed.

Now, the question about why this podcast in particular. That, I think, merits delving into, and the topic for this podcast contains the seeds for its ending, actually. So I had the idea for doing this podcast in particular, The Informed Life, when I was finishing writing my book, Living in Information. I had really enjoyed the experience of writing that book. I had really enjoyed the experience of collaborating with you and Lou on the fourth edition of the Polar Bear book. So at that point, I knew I really liked writing, and I like writing in long form. And I had already started thinking towards the end of Living in Information about what I might write about next.

And I had this idea in mind that it might be fun to delve into information architecture for personal stuff. You and I have been practicing information architecture for a long time, but it’s been primarily information architecture for things like websites and products and things that are used by a lot of people who are not us, right? But in the course of doing that work and in the course of just being a knowledge worker in general, we have to learn to organize information for ourselves. So I thought that there might be something there.

And I pitched the idea to Lou to do a book on this subject. And I remember he came down to California. Whenever he does that, he’ll send an email to his friends and say, “I’m coming, and let’s go to dinner,” that kind of thing. And I showed up to this dinner with him, and I remember having the conversation with him where I said, “I want to do a book about this, and I want to start by doing research for the book because I don’t want it to be just about how I organize my information. I want to learn about how other people organize their personal information.” And I remember saying to him, “I think I want to have those conversations, record them, and release them as a podcast because it would help… First, it would help me get the research that I need for the book, but it would also start building, hopefully, momentum for this idea of a book about organizing information for yourself.” So that was the genesis of the idea. It was actually meant to be a podcast about personal knowledge management with a very kind of information architecture lens to it.

Peter: Yeah. You’re giving me flashbacks. I’m remembering a lunch with Lou in Ann Arbor where he told me he was thinking about starting his own publishing firm. This will be 2001. And I said, that’s a fantastic idea, and you should call it Rosenfeld Media. And he’s like, “I don’t think that’s a good name. We’re going to research names.” And after a bunch of research, he ended up with Rosenfeld Media.

Jorge: Well, that was a good suggestion there.

Peter: That name just popped into my mind as the most obvious. I think he was nervous about using his name and making it too much about him, and so he needed someone else to sort of push that.

Jorge: And I think that the choice of the word “media” as opposed to “publishing” or something like that, it’s open-ended. And, anyway, we could explore the genesis of Lou’s publishing empire, right?

Peter: Yeah. It’s interesting because the times when we have these transitions are actually relatively rare in our lives. That was over twenty years ago, and he’s still on that journey that started there. And so, it’s interesting to think about your moment of transition now, and this might be the beginning of something that you’re doing twenty years from now.

Why Now

Jorge: That’s right. And part of the reason for ending this now — and, I have to say the podcast has been going now for five years. I think that’s longer than most podcasts go for. I don’t know what the average is, but we have 154 episodes. This is the 155th episode. That’s longer than most. I’ve also been very consistent with the release schedule. So the podcast started in January of 2019, and I’ve published a new episode every other week, ever since. I haven’t missed a single slot. And this was in part an effort to see whether I could build those particular muscles. Building the ability to do the work that is required. Because it’s not an inconsiderable effort to put one of these things out. But to do it with regularity, I think, is only something that you can work at. Like, you have to practice. So, for me, it was very important to develop that particular muscle.

But—and this goes to your point about perhaps starting a new twenty-year journey—one thing that I’m not very good at is letting go of things. I think that I stick with things far too long. It’s one of my weaknesses. And that keeps me from experimenting more. And I feel like, at this point, I’ve built the kind of publishing muscle for the podcast. I know that I can do that. But a) I’m not getting the joy that I was at a different point in the podcast’s trajectory. And b) quite frankly, the growth of the podcast has flattened.

And I wanted to mention that because in our last conversation you talked about not targeting growth as a measure for the sanctuary, right? But I am interested in having the things that I’m putting out grow. And particularly if you’re doing something like a podcast or a YouTube channel or a newsletter, you wanna see that the audience is growing. And, I feel like I might have reached the limit of the people who wanna tune into this particular subject.

Peter: Yeah, yeah.

Jorge: Like I said, when I started this podcast, I conceived of it as a way to do research for the book. And the book came out earlier this year, right? So I kind of accomplished what I set out to do with this podcast. So it’s almost like its mission is now accomplished. And if it’s not going to grow and I’m not getting as much out of it as I was at an earlier stage in its development, then again it might be time for me to move on and experiment with other things.

And, and the other thing is that the first few episodes of the show were very much on target with the whole, “How do you get your work done” and that kind of thing. But what I discovered after about five or six of them was like, people are mentioning the same things over and over again, and if this is what this becomes, it’s not going to be very interesting. And I thought, maybe it’s because I’m interviewing my colleagues and friends, and these are all people who are in the same world. So we all have pretty similar techniques.

So I reached out to folks who were doing very different things. I interviewed Ariel Waldman about an expedition she did to Antarctica to photograph microscopic life up there. And I wanted to learn about how she categorized her media footage and her photographs and stuff like that. And there were a couple of those that had interesting things come up that had not come up before.

But what I gravitated towards after a while was to say, “Maybe this podcast isn’t so much about organizing personal information. Maybe I just expand the scope and make it about topics adjacent to information architecture in some way.” I think I came up with the slogan pretty early on, this notion of, “How people organize information to get things done.” And the idea there was to make it very open-ended so that it could be conversations about personal knowledge management or it could be conversations about organizing websites and apps and that kind of thing. And that made it interesting for me. It made it possible for me to get a very wide range of guests. But I suspect that it might have made it confusing for listeners because they never quite know what they’re signing up for.

There’s a podcast that I sometimes listen to called EconTalk, where the host, his background is in economics, and my sense is that podcast started as a podcast about economics. But at this point, it’s like it’s just this person interviewing interesting people who have written interesting books in all sorts of areas. And because economics is such a wide field, it’ll always have like economics flavoring, right? So I thought, after the first couple of years, I thought, maybe that’s what this becomes. It’s just an ongoing conversation with people doing all sorts of things. And inevitably, questions about organizing information are gonna come up because it’s such a broad subject.

But again, I feel like, at this point, I’ve had the conversations that I was hoping to have here. And it’s starting to feel like… I recently heard a clip from David Bowie, and it must have been a clip from an interview, and he said something like, “Never play to the gallery.” Never play to what your audience is asking of you. And I feel like, especially—I would say especially over the last couple of years, I’ve started doing a lot of shows about user experience design. Even the conversation prior to our previous conversation here, I interviewed my friend Joe Natoli about the UX Team of One, the new edition of that book. And it was a fabulous conversation, right? But in listening back to it, I was like, this is really getting away from the IA stuff, right? It’s just like a general UX thing, and it’s starting to feel like it’s getting away from me, in that sense.

Peter: Yeah. So I feel like we could build up the suspense, but let’s not torment the audience. Tell me a little bit about why you’re ending the podcast, I guess with a lens more on what are you hoping to do next? What is it making space for?

Future Plans

Jorge: Yeah, I think I want to focus more on the things that I got into this for, right? The, “How do we actually organize information?” Maybe something more focused on information architecture. I’m super excited about the AI stuff, as you know, and I’m working on a couple of things that I’m not ready to make public yet in that space. And I’m also in the process of doing a new podcast, actually.

Peter: Okay.

Jorge: So this, again, I’m considering it an experiment. It’s one of those things where I don’t know where it’s going to go, but it’s going to be very different from this show. And I’m very excited about that because I’ve learned a lot about podcasting and I want to continue doing it. I just want to have a different focus with it.

Peter: So that’s intriguing. Can you talk a little bit about what the focus of this might be?

Jorge: So the idea is it’s actually very similar to the genesis of this show. This show, like we were saying, originated with the notion of what if information architecture, but for personal stuff. This other show is kind of in the opposite direction.

The things that folks like you and I deal with in doing the work of information architecture often touch on highly strategic decisions for organizations, right? I often have the impression when I’m in the room doing a workshop with stakeholders that we’re doing some kind of organizational therapy in having those conversations. “Let’s figure out how the website is organized” is like a MacGuffin for who do we want to be in the world. So this new podcast, I think it’s going to be much more oriented in that direction. And it’s less targeted at practitioners—at our peers—and it’s more targeted at, I would say, folks in positions of leadership—folks who are in positions where they have to make decisions that affect other people, that affect their own careers, that affect their organizations. And the question is, can the things that we’ve learned in doing this kind of work help those folks. And I suspect that they can, right?

The format of this show is going to be different from The Informed Life. The Informed Life is an interview show, so every episode brings a new guest and we talk about what the guest is focused on. This other podcast is not going to be an interview show. It’s a conversation show, and it’s a conversation with a co-host. And we’ve arrived at a format that I think is super interesting. And it’s different; I haven’t heard any other shows use it. I’m not going to say exactly what the format is. I’ll leave it to folks to tune in and see if it’s intriguing to them. But I can reveal that my co-host is our common friend, Harry Max.

Peter: Oh wow.

Jorge: Who also has a Rosenfeld Media book. It’s a book on priorities, so it’s much more clearly targeted at the audience that we’re talking about here. So, yeah, that’s one of the things that I’m looking to open space for.

Peter: That’s exciting. How would you, do you have a, the sort of elevator pitch or the three or four-word phrase that would characterize the topic?

Jorge: The focus is on getting results. The idea is to use the kinds of techniques and the kind of mindset… Harry has a different background, but in my case, the lens that I bring to it is how does the experienced information architecture consultant’s worldview help folks gain traction, get things done, progress with things that they might be having trouble moving ahead.

Peter: And is that strongly enhanced with kind of what’s going on with AI right now and you’re working that?

Jorge: I expect that we’re going to be talking a lot about AI, but we haven’t made AI central to the premise of the show. I don’t, I think that AI is a tool, and we’re going to be using it in our work to do these kinds of things, but I would not want to build a podcast around AI right now.

Peter: Yeah.

Jorge: I’m subscribed to a couple of podcasts that are oriented around AI, so I can see the need for them. It’s just not my thing.

Peter: That’s interesting because about ten years ago, not quite, you gave a keynote at the IA Summit, in which you talked about the transition from being an architect of physical buildings and spaces to being an information architect as being catalyzed by this sense the zeitgeist had shifted, right? The zeitgeist had been in that world of physical buildings and physical architecture as you were growing up and learning about that field, and it’s what propelled you into architecture.

And then when you got there, you felt like the zeitgeist has gone, it’s moved into the digital world. And so you follow the zeitgeist. I was curious in this conversation if you were going to say that you thought the zeitgeist had shifted from information architecture to artificial intelligence. So it’s interesting to me that you’re… I think the phrase that you’ve used in the past, you said you were doubling down on information architecture. I think that was a phrase from that keynote. And it sounds like you’re sticking with it, but looking at a more strategic way of practicing it. Not so focused on crafting user experiences, but on helping people to use organization and classification and more holistic systems thinking to inform decision-making.

Jorge: That’s exactly right. I thought that you were asking about AI in the context of the podcast itself. But you’re right, it is one of the catalysts. I am contemplating change in the sense that I can see the writing on the wall, right? A lot of the craft aspects of the work… and information architecture, in particular, but user experience design more broadly, a lot of the craft aspects of it are going to become more automated with these tools.

And the question is, where are you providing value? And when I ask myself that question looking back at the work that I’ve been doing, particularly over the last ten years, much of the value is in things like modeling and the conversations that lead there. Getting in the room with stakeholders and having them express these things that have often been under the surface, right? They’ve been implicit. But then you bring in a consultant and you splash bright day-glow pink paint on the elephant, right? There’s a lot of value in that. There’s a lot of value in clarifying the vision of where we’re going. And in some ways, this reflects a move on my part to transition my consulting work to be a bit more strategic.

Peter: Yeah, it makes perfect sense to me. If I think back to the 1990s, probably as early as 1995, Lou would talk about information architecture as the tail that wags the dog. We had that sense that the kinds of conversations we were having with stakeholders were strategic. And I had the same experience working with the Understanding Group with Dan Klyn and Bob Royce on performance continuums and getting a bunch of executives in a room and having them try to tease apart where they think the organization is today and where they want to see it. And then seeing the degree to which they agree or don’t agree—are they even on the same page?—is a tremendously valuable and strategic conversation that has much bigger impacts than just the website or some software that they happen to be working on at the time. So I’m a big believer in the strategic potential of information architecture, and I can imagine that AI can add some really interesting new ways of exploring that, also with a little bit of sex appeal that will get people excited to try it.

Jorge: Absolutely. I’m thinking, in hearing you talk about it, that there’s an echo here with our last conversation. Because you spoke of timeless wisdom, right? And when mentioning that keynote that I gave all those years ago at the IA Summit, yeah, I did shift careers. I went from architecture to information architecture. But I feel like, in many ways, it’s like I shifted the focus of attention. I’m doing the things that I was trained to do. And I feel the same way about this.

When we worked on the fourth edition of the Polar Bear book, that was one of the themes that we said we were going to emphasize: the notion that a lot of these practices transcend whatever the tools and interface du jour are, right? I remember writing an introduction where I referenced the I Ching, this very ancient Chinese book. And it has this image of the well, right? And they say that the town may change around the well, but the well itself doesn’t change, right?

And there are these insights, this timeless quality to the work of information architecture, that I think is going to be relevant and is going to be generating value regardless of what the technology is doing, right? So in that sense, I am definitely doubling down on information architecture, just applying it to different kinds of problems.

Peter: Yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting. I feel like our interests are going to have some overlaps and intersections going forward that we might not have anticipated in the past. Because I’ve been getting interested in what I’m calling natural information architecture, which is oriented at information architecture for understanding and thinking. And when I think about what you wrote in the Polar Bear book around the information architecture of chess, it’s that way of thinking about information architecture that I think we both at the moment share a common interest in, in terms of how we see potential. I’m not interested in stakeholders and companies and strategy. I’m more interested in individuals thinking more freely and creatively. But I think there’s a lot of overlap in terms of our areas of interest and probably things that we’re going to be reading and thinking about going forward.

Jorge: Absolutely. How we categorize the world basically informs our relationship with reality.

Peter: Yep.

Jorge: And we’re seeing that play out in the news. I see it play out personally. And it’s an evergreen topic. I don’t see us as people who are beholden to any particular technology. I think that the ground for this practice is in distinction-making, and that is an ancient line of thinking.

Peter: Yeah, and not only tied to thinking but feeling as well. That’s something I want to try to tease apart more as I go forward.

Jorge: Absolutely. It’s part of our sensemaking system, right? Our gut tells us something, and you’d better listen to your gut, right?

Peter: Yep.

Closing

Jorge: And my gut has been telling me now for a few months that it might be time to wind this show down.

Peter: Yeah. Well, as I think I mentioned to you when we talked briefly after our last conversation, I really encouraged you to trust your gut and follow those instincts. And I think it’s a tricky balance between staying where you are and making the most of what you know, what you’ve been working on and moving on. And I, too, tend to be someone who sticks, who persists, and stays. And I think there’s real value in that. I wouldn’t diminish the value of that. But at the same time, it definitely sounds like the time is right for you to move forward. And I’m excited for you.

Jorge: I’m excited as well, and I’m very thankful that you agreed to do this. I have to call out the very first interview on this podcast was with Lou, and the very last interview is with you. So there’s a kind of symmetry there, which I find very appealing.

Peter: Polar bear bookends.

Jorge: That’s right. Thank you, Peter, for agreeing to do this and for helping me to have the show go out on a high note.

Peter: Happy to, and thank you for all your contributions to Information Architecture so far, and for the contributions to Information Architecture to come.

Jorge: Thank you for that. I look forward to continuing to work with folks in the field.

Peter: Sounds great.