Skip to content

A byte is not a brick

Fatuous arguments and one-liners like the pro-choice statement, “An acorn is not a tree,” and the pro-feminist statement, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” pollute public discourse with nonsense. That such drivel finds an audience is testament to low educational standards established in the spirit of inclusion. Now every dullard is a scholar and, supposedly, has something worthwhile to say.

The blog, bytesandbricks.com, which compares real-world architecture with information architecture, is the author’s self-serving quest to explore her interests and career options. And it is one more such pollutant to our public discourse. I will not call the author a dullard. Her words speak for themselves.

She likens bytes to bricks in her blog, with bytes used to build websites, and bricks used to build buildings. Fair enough, but she also cites words as website building material. Just what is she saying? A byte is like a brick and also like a word? It can’t be both, and you can’t have it both ways. To paraphrase the pro-choice slogan, “A byte is not a brick.”

She has no authority to discuss either (or any of these) topic(s). She is not a published author; she is not an architect or even an information-architect — if you want to call that a profession. This trumped-up “discipline,” is a career-transition option of choice for washed-up technical writers such as herself, whose jobs have been “commoditized” and off-shored. And why not? Anyone can write, and writers elsewhere do it cheaper. Niche Writers India, for example, writes web content for $4 an article.

These former tech writers and would-be IAs, whose skills are on a par with those of a homemaker jotting down a shopping list, hope somebody will pay them to organize and label their website content. It’d be like paying somebody to decorate your house. Decorators have the arrogance to think they know better than you where to put your sofa and what color it should be. IAs and tech writers are just as arrogant and just as useless.

Any kid past the third grade can write. Any kid older than a toddler can straighten his or her toy chest. You don’t need an education to do this “job.” And you don’t need this blogger’s insights to tell you anything that you couldn’t figure out on your own, if you had the interest, and why would you?

I ask you, how can comparisons between structures of the real world — the buildings, streets, and highways that make up the built environment in which we live — and structures of the virtual world — websites that help you find a doctor or book a flight, buy a book or order dinner — benefit you in any way?

You can use these things without knowing anything about them. You know how to use a map, right? You know how to read signage on streets and in buildings to find your way over and through them. You can tell the difference between a church and a courthouse, or a school house and a roadhouse. (Hint: The former is a training ground for the latter.)

You know the difference between a brick, a byte, and a word. This blogger doesn’t. She sees all three as building units. She sees parallel structures in the real and digital worlds. She wants to explore these, and she wants to take you with her.

Don’t let her. Don’t bother investigating the “why behind the design.” Don’t bother learning how design choices affect consumers (that would be you). Don’t bother learning how and why design of the built environment can improve people’s neighborhoods and lives, or how the design of a website can make the site useful and usable or useless. Let this blogger waste her time if she wants. You’ve got better things to do.

Tagged ,
2011 02 07 Pamela Livingston Devil's Advocate
Writing for the Web Comments (3) Permalink

Thoughts on “Words” reading

Zinsser’s chapter on words was a refresher for me. The “bizspeak” I adopted as a technical writer are just as tired as the “journalese” lingo Zinsser described. Owing to a layoff, I was out of the workforce for a while, but I recall terms and phrases I accepted on protest and others that I really hated and did not use. I accepted “bandwidth,” as in “do you have the bandwidth for that?” and “ping” (abbreviation for “packet Internet Groper”), meaning a short query to a colleague. Interesting that while we complain about any assault on our humanity, we willingly accept these dehumanizing terms. I rejected “circle back around” and “at the end of the day” and squelch my anger when I hear them.

Tagged ,
2011 02 01 Pamela Livingston Bizspeak and Journalese
Writing for the Web Comments (2) Permalink

Thoughts on Brevity lecture

This week’s lecture on brevity resonated with me, especially the statement, “when you try to simplify, you often realize just how unwieldy and disorganized your ideas really are.” I have enough experience writing to know that, for me, anyway, no writing assignments are easy. None flow effortlessly, and all take more time than I anticipated. I’ve been interested in architecture and information architecture for some time, but I haven’t pursued that interest sufficiently to understand or defend it. The advice to use the writing process to distill your thoughts, as well as Zinsser’s advice to rewrite, is very helpful.

Tagged ,
2011 02 01 Pamela Livingston Bizspeak and Journalese
Writing for the Web Comments (2) Permalink

Why I’m interested

I’m interested in architecture for the same reason that I’m interested in food and sleep. OK, it’s not essential to survival, but it’s pretty darn close. Caves are in short supply, and I prefer living with a roof over my head, indoor plumbing, and central air. Architecture is all around us, if you include strip malls and gas stations, and I do, because somebody designed these places before building them, and they had reasons, however lame, for the design choices they made. I am interested in the why behind the design―why an architect or other kind of designer made a particular design choice and, more important, how it affects us consumers.

Some places just make me feel good. I like being in a room with a view. I like airiness and light, and I also like feeling sheltered and cozy. Architects like Sarah Susanka, author of The Not So Big House, know this about people and design accordingly. I want to see how architects in my recently adopted hometown of Dallas handle these issues, and of course I want to see where the rich people live.

I’m interested in information architecture for similar reasons. Less about design and more about organization, IA makes information easy to find. You won’t die from exposure without it, but you will waste time and feel frustration. If a website has information and you can’t find it, the information might as well not exist.

I have some experience with IA, both with websites and, sneer if you must, help systems. The former deals with organizing information, including links, headings, body text, and widgets on a webpage. The latter deals with writing and organizing information in an application that users can search or click through. See that little blue question mark in the upper right corner of your Word document? That’s an example of a help system. Mine makes for better reading of course.

Tagged ,
2011 02 01 Pamela Livingston Writing for the Web Comments (6) Permalink

Loves stories, pretty buildings

I’ve always loved stories and as a child made myself a nuisance by begging to be read to or have stories made up for my amusement on the spot. Only my father, at home recovering from cancer surgery, accommodated me with the latter. He must’ve been in a lot of pain, but seemingly without effort spun yarns that had a beginning, middle, and end. I was always the heroine, and the story always had a happy ending. The ending was not happy for him. He died, minus a leg, minus a stump, minus a lung, minus most of his stomach, at age 37 in a Southern city far from his Chicago home.

Known as the “Secret City” for its role in the Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge, Tennessee – final destination for my dad and first for me – was a magnet for young scientists, or so I surmise, because all the dads on our block were. They’d all moved to Oak Ridge from elsewhere, and they all worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Moms mostly did not work outside the home. If they did, rumors flew that the couple was getting a divorce because of the mom’s slattern or spendthrift ways. Dads were exempt from criticism. The cigar butts and empty liquor bottles sometimes found on Outer Drive had been dropped by vagrants (“bad people”) we neighborhood children believed. The unlikelihood of anyone wanting to party in Oak Ridge — dry by county ordinance and not even on a map until 1949 – never occurred to us. We speculated as best we could with our limited experience and examined the evidence by taste and feel to better understand it. Such speculations contribute to a love of story-telling, and examining the evidence contributes to its rigor. That means I can appreciate a good story when I hear or read one. It does not mean that I can tell or write one. But I’d like to.

My dad, a chemist, was among the many young scientists lured to Oak Ridge by a job. I’ve no idea whether he enjoyed his work, but I think it caused his death, Department of Energy (DOE) findings notwithstanding. Making radioactive isotopes or at least working in the vicinity of those who do is dangerous work. There’s the risk of exposure to radioactive material and, DOE planners thought, the possibility of air attack. The DOE didn’t do enough to protect workers from the former – as evidenced by $1 billion paid in claims to employees made ill by working in Oak Ridge nuclear weapons facilities – but they did all that was humanly possible to protect workers and their families from the latter. They had the town painted green! Would-be bombers would have had a hard time telling the forest from trees and cemesto (mixture of cement and asbestos) structures we called home. If bombed, your cemesto house wouldn’t burst into flames as readily as, say, frame construction, and you’d be safe.

I recall adults talking about the possibility of air attack and basked in reflected glory. Not everyone lives in bomb-worthy town. Later, living in Albuquerque, I basked in the reflected glory of the “Territorial Style” of architecture. We lived in a stucco duplex, but I loved visiting buildings in Old Town Albuquerque (founded 1706) and Santa Fe (founded in 1608) for their beauty and history. Much later I lived in Nashville, in a building listed on the National Register of Historic Places. I was among the first to purchase a loft in the former bag factory (circa 1872). Walls were of hand-made exposed brick and floors of oak thick enough for the traffic of heavy wagons. I imagined the workers who had occupied the space that was temporarily mine.

Living in these places and with a dying parent doing his best to share his little time left shaped me and shaped my interest in stories and architecture. Laid off in 2009, I’m struggling to retool and find a career that allows me to pursue my interests. I’m not sure what that career would be. I see parallels between the structure of stories, oral and written, and the structure of the built environment. Both order reality and allow at least the chimera of control in an otherwise chaotic world. Where to focus my energies? Information architecture? Content strategy? Writing? (Is that even possible?) I don’t know. I’m still finding my way.

Tagged ,
2011 01 31 Pamela Livingston Writing for the Web Comments (4) Permalink

Bytes and bricks revisited

I considered starting with a clean slate for my Writing for Interactive Media blog, but didn’t because I’m still interested in the topics of real-world architecture and information architecture. I want to explore how we are affected by both, and I’d still like to try my hand at wielding a hammer and saw (see “Building with words, building with bricks”).

Tagged
2011 01 28 Pamela Livingston Writing for the Web Comments (3) Permalink

Another design, another message

Reunion Tower, Dallas, Texas

If you live and work in Dallas, you may see it in your daily commute, although in heavy traffic, you won’t be able to give it more than a glance. Regardless, you’ll notice that it is distinct in structure and style. The architectural firm, Welton Beckett & Associates, designed the building for an urban redevelopment project. I couldn’t confirm that the building was designed to be used as a radio tower, but that seems a safe bet — it housed two radio stations when it first opened in 1978.  Wikipedia says the two stations broadcast “live 24 hours a day from 500 feet above the city.” Presumably, the tower with a ball on top was conducive to broadcasting, and form followed function.

The Reunion Tower, left, (copyrighted photo by Natalia Bratslavsky | Dreamstime.com), is an iconic structure in downtown Dallas. It gives the city a unique skyline that contributes to the city’s identity. When you see the Reunion Tower, you know you’re looking at particular city, even if you don’t know what city it is.

The ball is covered with lights that are turn on at night. Probably the lights are intended to draw attention to the neighborhood that the city of Dallas sought to redevelop. It is unlikely that they were intended to shed light on the past. But they do.

The Reunion District is named after La Reunion, a socialist utoptian community formed in the area in 1855. The building named after the district, named after a community that no longer exists, has a message: people who shared a way of life once lived here. Remember them.

2010 10 15 Pamela Livingston Information Architecture Comments (1) Permalink

What’s that you’re telling me?

We drive to neighborhoods to find businesses, public buildings, and homes. It’s not something we think much about. We go to websites to find information or buy products, or both. We may like the look of a particular neighborhood, shopping center, house, or website, but we usually don’t ask ourselves why.

Nor do we ask what these structures are telling us. They’re telling us something, and that message is usually by design.  The message may not be obvious, and you may not know you’ve received it, but at some level you have. Either you liked the message and keep coming back, or you didn’t like it and don’t, or else return only when you must.

What’s the building in the photo above telling us? It appears to lean forward. Could that be a message to visitors?

Welcoming and Asserting Presence

In fact, it is. I think leaning forward can be seen as a welcoming gesture, although that was not architect I.M. Pei’s intent. He made the lower stories of Dallas City Hall smaller to make them easier to navigate, Galinsky.com reports. The fewer number of offices on lower stories make offices easier for visitors to find. (That’s welcoming in my book.)

Galinsky.com says that Pei designed the bulky upper stories to “[allow] the relatively low-rise building to ‘assert’ its presence with respect to the cluster of high-rise office towers.” That’s not exactly welcoming, but it could give visitors a sense of the building’s importance and the trustworthiness of city business conducted within. The implied message? You are welcome here, and you can trust us in our business dealings with you.

A Larger Message

Pei had another larger message in mind. He said:

“When you do a city hall, it has to convey an image of the people, and this had to represent the people of Dallas… The people I met – rich and poor, powerful and not so powerful – were all very proud of their city. They felt that Dallas was the greatest city there was, and I could not disappoint them.”

I would not have guessed or understood this message without the help of Wikipedia, which reports that Pei designed the building to meet City of Dallas requirements to change its image after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. Dallas was then known as the “City of Hate.” It’s now proudly known as “The Big ‘D’.” Did Pei’s design change perception? I would say yes.

More Examples to Come, Please Comment
I’ve more examples to show you and will do so in future posts. For now, consider the message of this website, which presenter Jared Spool shared in his presentation at the Big (D)esign Conference, May 28-20, 2010, in Dallas.

What is “Yvette’s” telling us? Please use Comments to express your opinion. I look forward to hearing from you!

2010 10 01 Pamela Livingston Content Migration with CMS Comments (11) Permalink

Big ole breadcrumb: good on the street, but not on the page

Hansel and Gretel sprinkled breadcrumbs on the forest path to find their way home, and it’s a common practice in web design to place breadcrumbs atop web pages to help users find their way. Breadcrumbs display the path that users took to tell them where they are in the website and how to return to previous pages.
© Anthony Aneese Totah Jr | Dreamstime.com 

Street signs serve the same purpose in cities, but not always successfully. For example, sometimes street names change to denote a different city quadrant or to honor a person of cultural or historical significance.

Changes in name or blocked signage can confuse motorists and pedestrians navigating streets. Whether people are driving or walking, a landmark building, such as the Old Red Courthouse in downtown Dallas (see photo above), can help people find their way. I see it as a big ole breadcrumb. Helpful as it may be, it wouldn’t be tolerated in a planned, gated community. That’s because its style (Romanesque Revival Style, circa 1893) is different from other buildings in the neighborhood (e.g., the Bank of America Plaza [Modern Art Deco Style, circa 1985], on the right).

Buildings in gated communities typically have a common look and feel. That unified look contributes to a neighborhood’s identity and is likely a draw for home buyers. Houses in gated communities retain their value better than houses in non-gated communities.

Within a website, webpages typically also have a common look and feel. A unified look on a website contributes to the website’s identity and gives visitors a sense of where they are. If page design departs from site design — layout, navigation, color, and font — visitors are likely to be confused. They may not know which site they’re on, and rather than looking for products or information on the current page, leave the page to get their bearings. They miss any resources the page offered, and website owners miss their opportunity to sell or inform.

Design consistency is important on websites. It helps you find your way. On the street, consistency doesn’t help you. It hinders, in my opinion. On a website, you want breadcrumbs to support wayfinding, but you want them to be consistent with overall design.

Tagged
2010 09 26 Pamela Livingston Information Architecture Comments (4) Permalink

Wayfinding in my neighborhood

Well, it’s not that hard. I say that now, nearly two years after moving here (Garland, suburb of Dallas) from Nashville. I drove some 12 hours with four angry cats crammed into two carriers in the back seat of my small sedan. The cats expressed their fury the whole way and did not relent for several days afterward. Or maybe weeks. The mind plays tricks to minimize pain. And saying “it was easy” is a standard response from people who have been challenged and had a difficult time. That’s the way it is in life. That’s the way it is in usability testing.

Of course the drive isn’t analogous to a test. Apart from plotting my course on an interstate map, my only plan was to “get there” sometime — sooner rather than later, I hoped. Tests require planning, and except for guerilla testing, usability tests in particular require a lot. You’ve got to figure out which product features and functions to test, identify users familiar with or likely to use your product, invite them to participate in your test, schedule those who accept, write the test script, and book and set up your testing facility.

If I had been a test participant testing the usability of my map, my test result would have been an outlier. That is, my test results would have been discarded because even though I plotted my course, the map I used was buried under a pile of necessities that now reside in my son’s three-car garage (I think). I couldn’t find the map, couldn’t use it, and so couldn’t test it, if I’d wanted to. When I reached the outskirts of Dallas in the wee hours of a November night, I drove on and on, looking for any clue on the interstate (see photo above, taken Oct. 3, 2008, by Justin Cozart, a.k.a. “austrini”) that would tell me where to turn off and find my destination.

Driving at a speed commensurate with traffic, signage flew by me uncomprehended. I saw miles of four-lane highways, overpasses, and switchbacks, but nothing to help me. I finally pulled off at a truck stop and called my son for assistance. He was not happy, but he met me so that I could follow him home. On arrival, I released the cats into the garage, where they hid for days and hissed when I brought them their food.

But I digress. Back to wayfinding. Now we’re settled in, and I know my neighborhood well enough to drive to the grocery and back without getting lost. The streets have names like “Bobby Boyd Lane” and “Billie Johnson Lane.” (Bobby Boyd was an NFL cornerback for the Baltimore Colts from 1960 to 1968.” I’ve no idea who Billie Johnson is, but her name sounds Southern.) These names help me know where I am, but they also give me a sense of place, as do the neighborhood’s houses, all lately built by two or three construction companies and all having similar brick-and-stone facades. Builders give you a choice of large to very large with turrets and balconies. I’ve never seen either used, but people must like them, or else they wouldn’t buy.

2010 09 20 Pamela Livingston Content Migration with CMS Comments (0) Permalink