Season 2, Episode 5: Marsha Haverty
Marsha Haverty has been working in the field of information architecture since 1999. She has presented at UX Week, Information Architecture Conference, Google Design Speaker Series, Fluxible, CanUX, IxDA Seattle, and was named among 15 Women in Data to Follow on Twitter (2014) by Center for Data Innovation. She has special interest in bringing thinking from ecological psychology to design.
Dan Klyn: Hey friends, welcome to, welcome to Sunday. I have Marsha Haverty here. And I'm so excited to hear from her. And, before we got started, I got to know Marsha through a conference called the, it used to be called the IA Summit, and now it is called the IA Conference. And we were commiserating about our, this conference has been moved online as many conferences have, and, it was supposed to be in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago. And, I fucking need it. I need it. I have come to realize I've been going for more than 10 years, I think. And I had a really hard time. Last, last week I had like a little mini breakdown and, as a way to order my world that I, I want to be in the world. I want to be in is information architecture world. And that is an invariant that now is flopping all over the place. So, we're doing what we can. And so, this week Marsha is going to, share some new work at this virtual conference. And I'm so excited to see that. And, I'm curious, how, how willing are you to steal your own thunder and to spoil what you have to share this week? Marsha?
Marsha Haverty: I can share a couple of things. I'm I'm going to, I'm going to draw some boundaries. I'll like, I'll put a few things in place and see how that goes. Are we starting there?
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Why don't we, yeah, so what’s, what are you bringin’, and why did you choose to, to talk about what you're gonna talk about?
Marsha Haverty: Well, I'm going to share my screen because by the time this is a radio thing on your website, there will be a link. So I'm not cheating for the people that can only listen, ‘cause they will not only listen, they will [inaudible].
Dan Klyn: Yep.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah, I'm going to jump around on some slides…
Dan Klyn: Awesome.
Marsha Haverty:…So that'll be exciting for you. okay. So I think the key piece of this that really boiled out what cadence layers became, even though I've been kind of thinking about the role of time and what it, what kind of material impact it can have really. So, so digging into that, I think it's the idea that it's timing and it's not just certain aspects of time, the passage of time, the way that feels, those are important in certain situations, but it's timing. And I fell into this radical reading all about social rhythms and timings, and then bringing that back to design and thinking about, it's the rhythms of action that materially impact experience, and there's all sorts of implications there. ‘Cause I had been thinking about, about it from information as a material point of view, but there's also the performance of information. So there's when we sort of look at all the different forms information can take, visual language, audio, all of that stuff, there’s a lot going on there. And then there's the performance piece. And I think before this, I had only really talked about whether…are we relying on information to control our actions continuously over time? Or is there sort of this conducting nature of it, right? And that's the only really aspect I got was continuity. But now this point of view of timing unlocked a whole bunch of other stuff. So this is why I'm sharing all the other stuff. ‘Cause I got a little pocket of other stuff to say about this. So, let's see. I think I'm going to jump to a few things, cause I'm not going to show you everything. But I think the key thing is defining it from an embodied cognition point of view. And to say that timing is the way in which agents, cause I'm including non-humans in there, align their actions with dynamics in this room.
Dan Klyn: Okay. And you can ask me
[Zoom Crasher]: Hey-yo is this Mr. Johnson’s class? Is this, this is Mr. Johnson class?
Dan Klyn: No, this is, something different [laughs].
[Zoom Crasher]: Oh my bad, my bad.
Marsha Haverty: Oh, we got it, My first soon crasher! That's cool.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Yeah. There's no password. So welcome everybody.
Marsha Haverty: [Laughs].
Dan Klyn: If you don't know what this is, this is information architects talking about information architecture and welcome.
[Zoom Crasher]: Oh, that’s really cool
Dan Klyn: You’re welcome to stay with us. but Marsha is getting into some stuff here that is blowing my mind. So, microphones off. Let's get back to class. Professor Haverty, please continue.
Marsha Haverty: I'm interruptable. Well, it's fine. Okay. So, Hey, someone wrote—
Dan Klyn: Oh, geez. No, that's not, no—
Marsha Haverty: Let's not do that. Kicked out.
Dan Klyn: Who is, who is, who, can we see who the…
Marsha Haverty: I’m going to stop sharing till we can get rid of that.
[Other Participant]: Martin? I think Martin.
[Zoom Crasher] I didn't do nothing.
Dan Klyn: What was that?
Marsha Haverty: That was our Zoom bomb.
Dan Klyn: That sucks.
Marsha Haverty: I know.
Dan Klyn: Wow. Huh. Well, I guess I'm going to have to lock it down.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. I guess that's a thing I hadn't experienced that yet. So now we have.
Dan Klyn: Ok, so those of you who are here, we're locked in. Okay. Please continue.
Marsha Haverty: Oh, he’s back.
Dan Klyn: Oh geez.
Marsha Haverty: [Laughs]. Should we do a new Zoom with a password?
Dan Klyn: Yeah. But if I, I don't know how to share that in a nonpublic way that would let everybody in without bombers. Oh, that must be the guy. Okay. Huh. Pollution in our semantic environment.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: Okay, well, Juris, I don't know how to say your name, but, I know everybody else here except for you. So would you like to stay, or is there a, a need for you to, express yourself in an inappropriate.
Juris: Hi, hi, it’s Juris and yes, I would like to say to stay. I am not bombing you guys.
Dan Klyn: Thank you very much. And I'm so sorry for what just happened there.
Juris: Ah it’s fine. First time for me as well [laughs].
Dan Klyn: Asinine. So. Okay. I think we're good now. And I'm going to put out a note on the Twitters…
Marsha Haverty: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: About us being locked.
Marsha Haverty: Okay. So let's see. So if we define timing as the way in which agents align their actions with dynamics in their surroundings, I think what happens is we see that there are many more aspects of time that we can look at that, and that are participating in creating these rhythms of action. And so, I mean, for me, it was easy to just say, ‘oh, there's just a few aspects of timing, duration, tempo, sequence, things like that’. But when we factor in things like form, there are many more structures of rhythm than sequence density, right? Simultaneity is one piece, but there are many other aspects of density, trajectories, transformations, consumption, all of these different kinds of, ways in which, your actions change over time. And then even perception modes are, have timing and have rhythms. So if we think about exploring, we're in a very different rhythm in timing than we are when we're converging, right? Observing. Relaxing, all of these things. So that alone, I thought, unlocks a lot of things because I suddenly started looking at all of these different rhythms in our designs and saw how much we use clock time, clock timing, timings. We quantify things. We look at amount of time passing. We look at frequency, duration. How can we have notifications that aren't remind me at noon, right? There's a lot of other timings that we could have participate in that. And I tell that story here and give you lots of examples. So that may sound abstract and hard to follow, but I don't want to, I don't want to tell the whole story. I want to kind of let that happen on Tuesday.
Dan Klyn: Oh, well, there's, there's a lot already popping, for me here. And, and one of the things is, there’s this saying that Richard has ‘everything takes place someplace.’ And, when I think about the difference between clock time and timing, it seems like timing is placeful in a way that clock, clock time is just a… I dunno, it's it's, it's a, ‘cause we were at the top, we were talking about my, my need for this timing of this conference.
Marsha Haverty: Yes.
Dan Klyn: And that is a place that is held that is more than X, Y, Z coordinates in spatio-temporal…Yeah. I don't know what I'm saying here, but—
Marsha Haverty: Well, we can, we could actually model the timings that we evoke for each other at the IA Conference, IA Summit back in the day and look at how our normal day workday timings are very different and they dampened us, right? They interfere. And so we have to then we have to protect those somehow. And I think that's why, you know, I love that we're having the conference and it's digital and it's available in, in some fashion. And it's really hard to have all of the rhythms and timings actually be performed because we need that continuity. And you know, so I think it's both, we're, we're getting it and we're, we're also not fully getting the rhythms. So I think there's a whole modeling exercise that could be done with that. And I think, so, one of the things to think about with clock time is it's a tool to coordinate complex social rhythms. Like we have to have clock time to align both people spread out in different geographic locations. And we have lots of different rhythms that we have to engage across our personal and professional lives and using clock time as a tool, but it can be overused and we fall into traps of valuing units of time above all these other rhythms. And for me, it's, it's thinking about how can we inject some of these other kinds of timings back into the equation so that we're not always boiling everything down to clock time. So I think that's one of the pieces that this isn't even about cadence layers yet. Right? Like this is one of the things that sort of came out as I was going down this path. So it's just, it's really interesting to think about clock time in this way. And there's a ton of stuff to read about this. It's just like, I fell into a whole other discipline of readings and it's really fascinating, so.
Dan Klyn: In, in developing these ideas, did you…good continuation is something that I—
Marsha Haverty: Dan, I know you want to hear about it [laughs].
Dan Klyn: That I have not yet my head around. And when you gave your closing keynote at the IA Conference in, or that was the IA summit, I believe that was the last one. Right?
Marsha Haverty: It was the last one.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Yep. So when you gave that talk it was a, that was a new thing that I had never heard of before. And the way that you paired it with a, what Wurman says about performance, really started to give me those goosebumps of ‘oh, this is a new way of thinking.’ So, so tell me about what good continuation is and how does it, is that how you got into here?
Marsha Haverty: There’s no linear for me, Dan. I'm sorry. It's like all over, well it’s not. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what the order of events was for those thoughts, but, good continuation is a huge factor in building the cadence layers. And that's the piece that I need to take a lot of this talk to tell that story. So that was one that I'm, I don't feel like I want to just summarize it.
Dan Klyn: Ok.
Marsha Haverty: So I'm going to ask you to wait until Tuesday for that one [laughs].
Dan Klyn: Ok, it’s gonna be, it's gonna be hard, but I can do it.
Marsha Haverty: But I do, I hope I explain, kind of give you the detail that you're looking for and if I don’t, ask me a million questions and make me unpack that for you…
Dan Klyn: Ok.
Marsha Haverty: ‘Cause I, I definitely want to. I also try to keep this short because I know, you know, watching these Zoom videos, it's, it's harder than in person. So I, I didn't unpack some of the things to the degree that I would have liked, but I'm going to do other stuff to unpack them. So I want this to just kind of be an overview and, you know, see, see the whole scope of it. And then we can, I will unpack it in other forms too.
Dan Klyn: I'll just have to be patient.
Marsha Haverty: Well, I, yeah, and I'm not trying to be mysterious.
Dan Klyn: No!
Marsha Haverty: It's just like, there is actually a big chunk of the talk.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, no, it’s—
Marsha Haverty: [Inaudible] recording at that point. But so I think the other piece to highlight here is, well, yeah, there is kind of the story next to it. Let's see. I'm just going to go into that. Oh, not that one. This one. Okay. So without building up what a behavior setting is, and that is the construct that I talk a lot about good continuation and how we align our actions with each other and coordinate behavior, which, I want to leave that for the talk, but if we look at a domain that we're designing within, right? Like for me, I work at Autodesk. I look at product design and manufacturing a lot. That's a space I spend a lot of time in and if we model that domain, we can see all these different behavior settings that our actors dwell in. Performance, and it's sort of drawing a line and it's almost arbitrary because we Zoom in and out of these things. And you know, sometimes our actors are worrying about modeling geometry. Other times they're worrying about evaluating the performance of the thing that they're designing. And other times they're worrying about documenting their intent. You know, there's all these different, modes of dwelling that they get into and all of those have their own rhythms within. Okay? And so, so we can think of that, I just call that task cadence. It's sort of cadence within some of these. You can think of them as activities, I guess. But there's more to it to draw those lines, but just for now, just for now, we'll think of them as activities. But what else we have new? Not so much new but I think when these reach signal strength, things like automations, we do little automations now. Like even, even for ourselves, we said, you know, I'm trying to learn something on an app. You know, remind me at this time to do that, right? Or other little automations, like Slack has little automations. All, all these tools are starting to let us do little things that we repeat and just offload that, and automations are getting and will get more and more sophisticated. So then I'm actually offloading potentially an entire behavior setting. Right? And so I am phase shifting the actor, instead of performing within a behavior setting or an activity they're choreographing across. Okay? And so you're nodding your head. So I'm just going to keep talking.
Dan Klyn: Yep. And these pictures are really helping as you, as you're saying these things as my eye moves from the inside within to among and then across. Yeah. And these are all spatial.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. And, and so as automations rescale, I mean, we use in, in, in the, domains that I work in, we use automations a lot, our, you know, they're super helpful. And as we have intelligence in them and scope increases with what they can do, what kinds of things we're automating, not just these little administrative tasks type things, but real things, you know, with some intelligence in there, It’s really important for the actors to not just, you can't just set that stuff and walk away. You need to, you need to somehow engage with it, if only just to tweak it or see even how it's doing, is it even doing what it's supposed to do. But is it performing in the right way? Is it, is it moving the field toward something better, right? And so I'm using a rhythms lens, a timings lens to say, we need to infuse our automations and intelligence systems with not just do XYZ, but they have rhythms. They have cadences that we can then, we can see those, right?
Dan Klyn: Yep.
Marsha Haverty: And then you think about, what, whatever people want to define AI as, or something like that, but something where we are actually changing the understanding of what, what are fields, what the key concepts in relationships in our fields are about. Right? Radiology, these trained algorithms can see things that will turn into illnesses that really, you know, scientists and doctors do not understand, but they're ranked, okay? So what can we see how they're doing that? We may not understand conceptually what they're visually seeing on the scans, but is there some rhythm or timing that we can pick up on for how they're performing with these things and sort of see those pivot points and nudge them so they don't go in a bad direction. So I know that’s very abstract without examples, but, that's kinda, that's kind of what I'm getting at with the cadence layers is we need to worry about the cadence of how are our domains are shifting paradigms. We need to worry about the cadence of how our actors are not just acting within a setting, but choreographing across because we're letting these agents and intelligence systems perform with us. And some of that, we can't see. But we need to somehow perform with them. And I think a timings lens is an interesting way to look at that problem.
Dan Klyn: When you, when you anticipate, maybe you're not there yet, but to the degree that you can anticipate applying this in, in how you do your work. One of the things that I wonder about is if this way of thinking and modeling and doing analysis means that what, the whats now have a, a when, and that whatness has to be encompassed also in terms of when-ness. And, and my tools that, whatever it is, knows how to do clock time. And it knows how to make certain kinds of whats invariant. But this sounds like a way of seeing where all invariant whats now very in terms of when, that everything is—
Marsha Haverty: And, and they can vary, but they come together, right? It's certain, there’s certain…
Dan Klyn: Yeah and certain convergences of what and when then, then mean the properties of, of what is possible in that setting are now different.
Marsha Haverty: Yes. Absolutely.
Dan Klyn: And now I can see where your work on, phase states of information, how is the flow of information happening in those settings?
Marsha Haverty: And I consider, so it's so fun. Once you start modeling what I call timings right too, to see how, so timings influence each other. So you can't just have like one generic set of timings that apply to all situations and you have to get into the granularity of the particular. I call it behavior setting. You'll see what that is later, but like the activity space or whatever. And now you're seeing that the mode of information creates its own rhythms too, it participates in those, the ultimate rhythm. I know this is so abstract without the slides, but.
Dan Klyn: Well, no, I'm again, thinking about you as somebody who is helping to design the software that engineers and industrial designers use to do to, to, to, to all those things… I don't know where I was. I had an idea that I was attaching to that. Something about the way that you represent the work that you do being, I don't know, I’m going to have to let that one go, but back to the, back to the behavior setting and, meaning modes of information, and if the way that information is flowing in a, in a, in a context is too viscous by your way of analogy, of, of, of the ways that information can be like water or liquid, that, overly or underly viscous flow of information inside of a behavior context, can be the improper rhythm. It could be the, like when you're on a trampoline and your asshole neighbor waits just before you hit and then like shoots you off to the moon.
Marsha Haverty: That is a perfect analogy. Yes. I love it.
Dan Klyn: Yep. Yep.
Marsha Haverty: That is yes, yes, that is. And that's the whole thing is to curate rhythms by adjusting what timings are, are participating.
Dan Klyn: And timing is flow in, in, in a way.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. Yes.
Dan Klyn: Wow.
Marsha Haverty: Love that stuff. Yeah. And yeah, because there's so much to worry about with, you know, as we get more complexity in what kinds of participation our tools can do with us. Like, we're not just the dictators saying, ‘do this, system’ and it's doing exactly that. There's a lot of room for imprecision there in the good way, meaning that that thing can come up with all these sorts of different options and we have to nudge it, and I just want, I want a lot of ways to do that well.
Dan Klyn: Yes. And, and that makes me wonder, did this, did some of what provoked these ways of thinking come out of the environment that you're in at Autodesk with, just like, ‘I don't, I can't do my job without coming up with a new way of thinking about it.’
Marsha Haverty: No, no that, yeah.
Dan Klyn:[Inaudible] a failure of something you couldn't do that you need this in order to do.
Marsha Haverty: I think, well, a lot of it. So in my particular role, a lot of what I'm doing is looking in the future and sort of saying where do we want to go and backing up to say how do we get there? And looking across our, how we carve out our products, because there's a lot of, you know, these spaces are gigantic. Product design, manufacturing is gigantic, and that's a lot of, business units and software and platforms all rolled into one to facilitate that entire space, architecture and construction, like all of that stuff. And so one of the things we're trying to do is look across and, you know, help our actors, which I like to call them, not have to just, they're putting their stuff in one tool and taking it out and putting it in another tool and taking it out. How do we help them across, right? So there's a lot of choreography that is being thought out there and plus automation plus knowing where we are going in the future, which I can't give examples about. All of that together is where I do feel like I needed new tools to help, help deal with this. And there's a huge emphasis on analytics, and I want to use analytics well, you know? I don't want to just count the number of times we're doing things, there's so much that that pattern, those patterns can give us. And especially if we classify the areas of our products. I mean, these are not websites, right? Like these are, these are products that have been around for 20 and since 20 years and since 1982 and other crazy time periods. And they're, you know, if you look inside what's going on there, no one is thinking ahead about, ‘oh, we're going to need to do analytics.’ So all of our stuff inside here needs a classification by what role it's playing in sporting activities, right? So a lot of it is sort of, thinking about how can we not just say, ‘oh, this command got used 20 times in this frequency’ or whatever, but look at how they're being used together and how they’re, I guess performing together and the fact that even within one product, these are gigantic products that facilitate a lot of activity, and some of them they're doing every day, these are career tools, right? Some of them of them they need to pop into depending on the product phase. And so I'm trying to give you an example that's about analytics to say that we can't put the same metrics around all the different activity spaces within our products. We need to understand the rhythms in which people are in one aspect and popping over to another. And, and also, you know, optimizing how that happens. So it's both for making it better. Making things discoverable in these gigantic, wonderfully powerful, and sometimes illegible, you know, things that people can do because they grew over decades. So it's both kind of to help us optimize how people are flowing through these tools. And then have smart metrics to say we don't expect people to be analyzing all the time, unless that's the ethic of the company, like analyze first, simulate first. So we have to, we have to have a way to model all that, I guess so my long sprawling answer to your question.
Dan Klyn: [Laughs] Thank you. The longer and the sprawlier the better as far as I’m concerned.
Marsha Haverty: But I think it's definitely part of being immersed in the, the domains that I am in at Autodesk definitely is prompting the need for some of this stuff. Yeah.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. One quick observation, based on what you just took me through is it seems like because you're working in the future that one of the aspects of good continuation, you know, I'm going to keep like—
Marsha Haverty: That's fine [laughs].
Dan Klyn: [Crosstalk] Predict if you can pull off good continuation. It seems to me that predictive talking about these tools as agents who are in an environment with us in order to help us do our work. That, in order to predict based on cadence of what's transpiring in a, in a behavior setting, for me as the human I'm trying to get at something like good continuation to have a continuity in my, my process and my thinking and wholeness in my making, even maybe aspirationally. And so in order, just that concept. It kind of begs a, well, if your model can get, can, can, can show you what good continuation starts to look like, then it could, and it's anticipating what's going to happen. It's it's a predictive artificial intelligence ultimately.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. And I think that's true for the system itself and for imbuing into the design that these people are creating because they're, you know, they're sort of in that world too, where they're designing, you know, products, buildings, physical structures around the world, and those have to sort of be open to possibilities, like parametric possibilities and have that be part of their design too. So there it's, it's so meta, because they're worrying about that same thing within their design and we're worrying about it to help them.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Wow.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: How do you, that made my head hurt just there about the nestedness of those worlds of the, the person who's using the software, and then your world around that. And then that you're building that out into a, an event horizon that's beyond what, what is shipping or on anybody's actual backlog, like—
Marsha Haverty: And just for fun throw in the fact that a lot of our brilliant actors are coding, you know we have an AP, you know, API and logic and all this stuff in there. They're coding pieces of this too, helping us see where that goes. And yeah. Yeah.
Dan Klyn: Wow
Marsha Haverty: There's a lot to think about.
Dan Klyn: So, how do you, how do you deal with that? That’s, that seems like you would need some practices in your life to offset what you want to be able to do in your role, in your job. Like, that amount of nested meta everything. And then coming up with your own bespoke frameworks in order to understand like, that is, that takes a lot of power. And so I'm curious about if you have ways to monitor your power levels and, and replenish them, and, just curious, how do you, [crosstalk] what’s the offset to all of that don’t you have one? Are you, are you like that all the time?
Marsha Haverty: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There's, you know, we're not, we're not always in that space and we're also supporting the designers, doing the, you know, the current things and keeping, keeping things going and all of that. And there's a lot of, I think for me, I'm deriving energy from mentoring a lot of the designers and spreading architecture at the company. ‘Cause there's not, you know, it's a, there's a small number of people that do the information architecture. Right? I mean, we have taxonomists and things like that in other parts of the company, but in the product groups, so for me, I, I draw a lot of energy from working with the designers and just sort of spreading architecture thinking and yeah.
Dan Klyn: How about fine art and other ways of nurturing yourself. What’s, what, what is the, is there a, a diet that you look to keep up on with ideas or art or things [inaudible] Autodesk, things that you make?
Marsha Haverty: Yeah, well, I mean, you know, Autodesk is a business and for me, part of how I do that is follow my little thread of curiosity through information modes and embodied cognition. And that's very, that is very satisfying to me. And, you know, I almost went down an academic route, so I feel like there's a bit of that, that I, I want to keep a little toe in if I possibly can, not to necessarily publish articles, but, to satisfy my curiosity without the constraints of business prioritization, right? And at the same time, I'm influenced by that what we're trying to do. So I can always bring that back and use that. And so fine art, I used to sketch a lot, but I haven’t, I mean, I sketch diagrams all the time. I, I have written some, stories, so like fictiony type stuff. And, I think just getting, getting outside, I live in Oregon and there's beauty all around and getting away from the city and just being out in nature is an enormous part of what I want to be doing to satisfy myself.
Dan Klyn: Nice. How, how has it been, how has the COVID situation changing life, where you live?
Marsha Haverty: So we are sandwiched between the two early hotspots of Seattle and parts of California. Oregon, for some reason, never quite got the spikes that those two places got yet because of those influences our governor sheltered in place early. So, you know, we were, I think we were a bit fortunate. We were the ones mailing our shipping to New York, our extra [crosstalk]. Because we felt like we weren't going to have a hotspot. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, everybody around me is feeling the, the neighbors reaching out and, you know, my, our business closed our office very early as well. But our, our local sites, so we have our Portland office, really mobilized to, we deliver food to the responders and, you know, use whatever…
Dan Klyn: Wow.
Marsha Haverty: Resources we have at our, you know, our office to help.
Dan Klyn: Wow.
Marsha Haverty: PPE and…
Dan Klyn: Yeah, holy shit.
Marsha Haverty: …and we're just, ‘okay, what can we do?’ You know, that's, that's all, that’s what we're looking at.
Dan Klyn: That's great.
Marsha Haverty: But I, you know, I'm, we're very fortunate here to not have had an enduring, a spike, like, some other cities.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. And, the way that you work, did you do a lot of remote work from home types of things or, or how, how different is your work day?
Marsha Haverty: So the word co-located does not exist in Autodesk. So my team is in Shanghai and Singapore and Novi, Michigan, and California, and all over, all over. So I'm on calls at 10 o'clock at night and six in the morning. And you know, so my, my life was sort of weird like that anyway.
Dan Klyn: I'm hearing a lot of, I think that, maybe our field was somehow prepositioned because of the us being one of my, I don't know if it's universally true, but it seems pretty truthy that people who do IA work go horizontal. And to the extent that co-location is happening in a vertical way, it may be just the nature of in order for us to do good work we have to go sideways. Maybe that's positioned us a little bit more early and often as remote workers.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, there were like the remote part didn’t, there was nothing new. Right? The only thing that was new is my kids took the, the sort of, what would be the officey parts of the house. So I was kind of like a wanderer wandering around trying to find a home. And I finally found, finally made a makeshift place to be.
Dan Klyn: Well, I'm, I'm curious if, any of our lucky, talk about lockdown. This is the first lockdown Zoom call I've been on, to have to protect ourselves from the disease of fucking idiots. So, so we're locked in here with some nice people. And I'm curious if the nice people have, have any questions for Marsha based on what you've heard, or not based on what you've heard so far? Just what, if you've got questions.
Marsha Haverty: I see, Ronen has been giving us some nice links over there. So thank you.
Dan Klyn: Yes.
Marsha Haverty: Thank you, Ronen.
Dan Klyn: Ronen, how’s Romania dealing with COVID.
Ronen: I have no idea. I've been living in quarantine here basically for 10 years. So to me it's not much of a difference.
Dan Klyn: Is your household, well, are you healthy?
Ronen: Yes. Very good. Yeah, if my microphone's on, I’ll just offer a kind of question comment. Like when I hear, smart people like us talking about rhythm and cadence, and using like, like people like to use live metaphors with jazz and stuff. So I was like wondering, if you really want to experience it, what about playing drums or dancing or like, how to embody the ideas rather than just, PowerPoint them?
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. Well, and, and that's, that's one of the points I make in the talk is we don't have the right tools to simulate this stuff, right? Like we need to, you can make your domain models and you can model rhythms with arrows and boxes and all of that. But we don't have good tools to make things move. So, there's one tool that, Nicky Case made that's online called Loopy, and I've been having fun playing with that ‘cause it, It’s, It's like, it's a, it's a charming little too that's trying to teach a little bit about system dynamics, right? And so they're sort of influencing the loops and you can stimulate something and hit play. And so I put a few of those in the top just to, just to let things move a little bit, but, I think we need, we need better tools for that. Anyway, your music reference is really interesting and there was a talk at the IA conference earlier that uses lessons from jazz and improv and structures from jazz to apply to, I think it was user research. So, so that was, that was really interesting.
Dan Klyn: What I heard in my, the ear, the mind's ear—why does that feel so odd when the mind's eyes seems so right, but, the idea of a, of a, of a click track. I was picturing your behavior contexts and that inside of each one of those there's a click track and some of them are [claps slowly] four, four, and some of them are [claps quickly] and some of them, change. And just, how as a, again, back to how you frame this, how do actors align themselves to the context of behavior drag?
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Klyn: And, and, and, and, I'm working on an app right now that is, we're proposing any number of, of new ways to move the stuff around, to re-situate the offering of, of this thing. And, I'm thinking about the different ways we've apportioned the stuff. We put it into new places. And, and we, and yeah, was that is part of what's driving that a sense of ‘yeah ‘cause this place goes [claps slowly] and this other place goes [claps quickly]’ and my gosh, Grant, if we could somehow make that tangible to ourselves when we're working on stuff and to be able to give feedback to each other about the, ‘yeah, you just did the trampoline thing and, it was supposed to be nice, but it's kinda like.
Grant Carmichael: Yeah.
Marsha Haverty: That’s where I think just naming the timings for yourself, even just, just coming up with a vocabulary around that is super helpful. And then you start drawing the relationship. So, I mean the other piece is that, timing will influence other timings within its reach. And so you can kind of look at the reach of your timing and how it influences the other ones around it. And, and like I said earlier, make them super specific to the granularity of what you're worrying about. Right? Like I think that's the art of it is the domain model captures all the different behavior settings, but what granularity are you going to draw the boundaries of the behavior setting? I mean, that's like a system modeling problem, of course. And then within that. You've got all these different timings and they have their own granularity and they influence each other. And I think just writing those down and just, just even deciding on the scope of them is really illuminating. And I'm starting to do that on a future vision thing that I'm working on with a content strategist. And I think just having that conversation is super Helpful.
Dan Klyn: Are you at liberty—you probably aren’t—can you, can you share a name for a, for a timing?
Marsha Haverty: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Let's see. I think I have a screenshot.
Dan Klyn: ‘Cause I was thinking about, yeah, how do you give a name to an interval? There's all of the language of poetry to talk about a meter and rhythm. And so it seems like there are taxonomies and then something that just popped up about, talk about giving names to time and how these structures you're talking about these times structures are spatial is bullet time. And, what is bullet time? It's not just, the hallucinatory slowing down of what's going on. It's the, what happens in bullet time. It's, it's a, it's a rotating of space while the interval of perceived time is changing. So, word vomit from me about giving names to time.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and this is something that I keep every time I look at another space to try to think about modeling timings. I change how I think about timings and I'm trying to have some, some rough buckets of them that I make sure that I address, because I think that there's influences that unless you're specifically looking for that kind of timing, you may, you may not include it. So I think where I'm at now is, there's clock time. Right? And so those are all sort of quantifications and, what role do those have? You know, schedules, duration, speed, frequency, things like that. But then there's things that are more relative like tempo and intensity and, regularity, eccentricity. You know, I don't even know all what all the words should be for that one, but then there's, there's a sort of form aspect of time. And so you can think about, is there symmetry, is there a sequence? What about spacing? What about array? What about, you know, continuity? Contextualization? Maybe, like, I don't, I'm still struggling with where these things should go. And then trajectory has a ton of potential timings that we may not think about, things like, you know, acceleration, deceleration, transience, permanence, maturation, right? Like the whole trajectory of maturation. There's, there's all these rhythms that come out of that. And looking at, refinement and, yeah, I, I can't think of all the rest of them. And then perception mode I realize is the timing in and of itself because you think about the perception modes you fall into when you're in the exploring phase, like associating and, and then you start seeing how all these things play in. Like there's a simultaneity there and there's a density and there's a, there's an intensity and tempo and you start kind of modeling all of them together. And then I also want to start bringing in some of the, sort of the effects of the mode of information, like the viscosity piece and the, there's kind of the tolerance of in precision piece. And I mean, you can overload it, but, yeah, those are some examples. So for now I just have these, you know, how is, what trajectories are involved? What perception modes are involved? What pastes, for lack of a better word? What density, what form? And then the clock time stuff, like how are we using clock time?
Dan Klyn: Wow.
Grant Carmichael: I love the idea of naming these things and looking at a way to audit a direction to go with them. Like almost like, ‘okay, let's take all these things. And what does it mean for this place we're making, and what are the like maturation—we know that users go through a learning process,’ that’s one level, I guess. But just then that's really powerful. The idea of like naming it, then you can point to it and then say, ‘I am now considering it.’ So that's a very powerful thing.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. Just making, making those intangible things explicit, like, like we do, right? That's what we do.
Ivan Wilson: Also, one thing one realization is that, and I remember this because I was talking to members of, I worked, I used to work on your UX team and part of the team, we had, three, four people were doing user research and part of the research we were going through was how users are going through the product and go through all these tasks and one of the things we took account of was hesitation, when someone's going through a task, let's say if they're going through the first time as a patient, they’re trying to sort of more or less thinking about, okay, he'll say ‘so figure out stuff.’ And if they're really more experience that they can do it rather quickly than not, they'll have that little bit that sort of, you know, if they took account of it in terms of the whole testing process, because it is sort of, for us, for us, it was more or less like a, can you say like an additive…I can say it was, it was almost like a property in a way. If I could use that terminology…
Marsha Haverty: Yeah.
Ivan Wilson: In that, in that you re-you know, you naturally, you want something. If you want to build a new UI or five of those cases with this, here's a search filter. Want to do it in a way that doesn't require hesitation, but sort of, you want it to sort of be intuitive, so, yeah, that's it. So that's another way of thinking about it or at least one aspect of it.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. And that, that is one area that we're looking at is, I mean, these tools that we're, that is in my world at work, they're not easy, they’re difficult tools to learn how to use. And so we want to bring people in and figure out those timings of, you know, that beginning part. And then you're sort of developing your sense of place. And then you're normalizing and now you're elaborating and refining what you're doing. Right? And those all have very different timings. Duane Degler at the conference had a talk where he, he was talking about easing people unfamiliar with a domain into the domain and, you know, the rhythm of that. And he's using the sort of consistency to give them confidence and bring them in and then deliberately have these sort of spikes of different, so yeah.
Ivan Wilson: Yeah, yeah. It was unusual, it was unusual because they were using it to sort of differentiate how someone was, was finishing a task because it was like, if they, like it's one thing to finish a task, but if is that sort of between, okay, they finish a task, but based off hesitated for a long time [inaudible] get themselves situated or they hesitated or there’s short time, they were able to finish the task, but quietly, maybe a shorter rotation. So it's all like, it's like, it was, it was, it was a finished task. But it was sort of like, okay, it was finished, but maybe not as quickly as you want to, or, or maybe something that it could be hiding something that we need to fixed.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. That's a, that's a, there's all sorts of scenarios, right?
Ivan Wilson: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: Well, and what, and Ivan what you're describing makes me think that the, in our practice, where is the, where is the stuff that is already this user research and thinking about the world of end use in terms of timings and time, that's a thing, but the what's so disruptive, at least to me, I don't know about for you, but what's so disruptive and exciting about what Marsha’s, digging into here is that it's, something for designers to use as material. Knowing stuff about time as a phenomena in the, in the world of end use. Yes, we have some of that and, and it seems like there'd be some ways to leverage and learn from, from things that are already there. But I, I certainly haven't had a time as a material other than clock time.
Ivan Wilson: [Laughs].
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. And for me—
Dan Klyn: Marsha you’re putting handles on these things. It's like, I don't yet know how to use these, but I'm excited that there's a hand that there could be handles.
Ivan Wilson: Yeah.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. Yeah. And, and like I said, I don't even have, like, I was going to show you my mangle of terms, but it [crosstalk] show you that yet. It's just a mangle of terms that I'm, I'm starting to gather as I start modeling timings for different things that were, you know, at work and otherwise. And I think, yeah, like I said, I think it's, you have to have to create this very specific timings contextually with respect to what it is you're modeling, right? Like there's not going to be some, ‘here are the 10 timings that we model with.’ Like, it's not going to be that. And, and that's where I'm trying to say, what kinds of timings are there so that I don't forget to model something that has a really important influence that you don't pick up on. Right?
Dan Klyn: Ronen, I’m curious if you would say a little bit about your inner rebellion when it comes to naming and in this dimension of time, it sounds like it might be a particularly, itchy for you.
Ronen: Yeah. So, I remember back when I was involved in trying to create and design software, you know, there's fundamental architecture, architectural dilemma between, have I got all the fields in the forum, which limit what people can express versus this open text box where, anything can be expressed. I feel there's something happening in the conversation where there's an excessive effort to capture something, which to a certain extent, needs to stay chaotic. So it's to be mindful of it, but I'm hesitant of the effort to name it too elaborately. There is, there is a rhythm out there, you know, acknowledging it and catering to it. So leaving the space for it, rather than trying to figure it out. There's something there. I don't know if my comment is helpful.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. Well, I think that also goes to the fact that we don't design experiences. We, we design structures that facilitate things, and we hope that those are good performances. Right? And we've learned a lot about how to do that and how to use our materials. But I think you're right. I think there’s, in the performance there's an openness to that. Yeah.
Ronen: There’s the human biological aspect of timing.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah.
Ronen: There’s a, like, like when you say you're taking calls at 10:00 PM at 6:00 AM, right? I, yeah, I, I, as a person who's like primarily devoted to my rhythms and wellbeing. Like I cringe at a priority there that we make, right? That we, where do I allow my timing to be, compromised, and how does that feed back? Like, I feel that there's, there's a reality to timing and rhythm and, and, and all these words, which exists before we've, intellectualized and conceptualize them. And if we don't and if we don't come into, into tune with that, there'll be friction. There'll be, something will be, the timing will not be right on some level, but.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. And I think you're right. Barbara Adam, I read a lot of her. She has this book called Timewatch and she talks a lot about the distinction between these biological rhythms and how, overusing clock time and time management and these frequency things is, is disrupting our natural rhythms. And, yeah, I mean, I think. Well, how you say, having meetings at different times? Yeah, we have to have, if we’re gonna live like that we have to have other strategies to protect ourselves. Right? And I don't have those every week, but I certainly have them and I do struggle. And everyone at my company that works globally struggles with that. And yeah, we, we’re constantly creating strategies to create, you know, time for exploration and creating. And like, I need, I need certain rhythms to be protected if I'm going to do this. Kind of like when I'm thinking hard about a diagram for something or a talk or whatever, a lot of what I'm doing is guarding those timings first. Right? That’s a lot of the work.
Ivan Wilson: Yeah. Yeah, and I’ve, it’s, Ronen, you know, you're in Romania is Eastern European, central European time. Now I worked at a job where, you know, I, the main office was in Sydney. So Australia still the time difference is just, off. I mean, you have to really work around on the, almost sending, but, for this job, we had, a group of employees that were in India. So, I mean, it comes a real hard job, trying to sort of, not just finding a time but finding certain parts of the day where we can at least align and sort of, kind of get that, I won't say center point, but just an alignment point where we can say ‘this is where we want to meet’ and then from there on you can self go your own way, but you're still in some sort of meaningful context that…
Dan Klyn: Well, I like that some of the words Ronen is putting into the chat and thinking about that challenge, Ivan of, when you talk about when it isn't working, it's, it's, something is off, the rhythm is we're not jelling and that, that's about we’re, we're, working cross-purposes. And that seems to have, you could see timelines colliding when we use sort of ways of speaking like that. I'm curious about the, back to the, the, the rebellion that, that, Ronen feels about naming, naming, naming the, the structures of time. I'm curious if you, what your thoughts are Marsha and also yours Ronen. I know Ronen through the work of Christopher Alexander and both of us are involved with the building beauty program. And when I think about your work on cadence layers and the things that we've talked about today and what good means and thinking about those different behavior contexts where agents are doing things and the click track. And [claps in rhythm] how would, you know, if it was at the wrong tempo, if the default settings in a context are wrong, that the, that we're not in tune, that the rhythm is off? And, and so the names of the kinds of time wouldn't help you with that, you would need, descriptions of, of good, of what good means. And I'm thinking about Chris’s 15 properties and, alternating repetition, roughness, levels of scale, echoes. These are all temporal…
Marsha Haverty: Yeah, yeah.
Dan Klyn: Descriptors. And, and what Chris says, which people have a lot of, talk about inner rebellions, outer rebellions is, that you could say that there are, there are ways to describe the structural reality that you made, or that is in the environment that you come up on that are more and less, that are, that are, that are better than others. That the presence of roughness, because lots of becauses, but I'll throw it out there, our human imperfection. When roughness, and in a time structure, I would think that that would be a, an inopportune or an unplanned, a wiggle that that's roughness and that's good because the, the evidence of imperfection allows us to engage with it more meaningfully or echoes that, that there was a, there was a rhythm to how I did this part. And now I'm kind of, it's a, maybe you don't even notice it, but, but me as the creator, I want there to be a callback to some rhythmic experience, some other, so that's echoes. And so I'm curious about describing temporal structure and evaluating its goodness.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. Ronan said ‘amen to you.’ I think that's super interesting. Now I want to go back and look at Christopher Alexander's stuff and sort of look at the things that I've already modeled and see am I breaking those heuristics? Am I in line with those that, that’s okay.
Dan Klyn: Well, it's funny. It's funny because he, he says that they are geometric properties. And some of the, some of them were not as meaningful to me until I read how he studied them through antique super and old carpets, from the, from Anatolia, from the whatever century that, that the geometric interrelations of knots in a weave have the properties that are the same properties that help you make a 40 hectare campus of a school be good that the unit that you're operating on is as small as a knot, and as big as a 40 hectare campus and that there are ways of describing the relationships and he says, it's geometry. But if we set aside the, what we think of as geometry, it's relationships, these relationships exist in time.
Marsha Haverty: Yep.
Dan Klyn: So you could run through all 15 of those and say, levels of scale, a good shape of the void, a deep interlock and ambiguity. These, these seem relevant.
Marsha Haverty: No, no that’s awesome.
Dan Klyn: Love to see what you’d do with them.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. Thank you for bringing that up. That's blowing my mind now.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. So, so there's a lot of work to be done still.
Marsha Haverty: Oh yeah. I’m not saying ‘here’s everything about time,’ I’m saying [laughs].
Dan Klyn: Oh no, we don’t even know what this idea really is yet. So a lots of work to be done there.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: How about some of the, the meeting, meaning modes? In our practice at TUG ee talk about it all the time. I'm curious, ’m curious if you seen it show up in places and that peculiar thing of, I made a thing and other people use it.
Marsha Haverty: Well, so I've been talking, I'm applying this stuff at work, you know, as much as I can because it it's partly coming from those problems. And partly coming from, just following that line of curiosity saying, oh, if meanings like this, that means this about our materials and I can't, you can't not go down that road.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Marsha Haverty: So I think where I’m seeing it show up at work is kind of this distinction between some of our, so all of, all of our products to some degree have people model geometry, right? In 3D and things like that. Whether that's for a movie or it's a building or a product or a machine or whatever. And, some of the things that we do with the geometry is really about, I just, I'm making a decision I say ‘on this place, I want this kind of geometric behavior or feature or whatever.’ And then you do that. But other things like, for example, automotive surfacing, these, these designers are in there actually moving these little, this material made of math, they're moving it all around and deciding how these little vertices are going to influence each other mathematically. And so there's a, there's a continuity to how they’re needing to rely on information that even though you look at the other things our other designers are doing, it looks like there's a continuity ‘cause they're touching the model and they're moving in and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, they're just kind of assigning things and they can do it really quickly, but it's different than literally moving things around. So, so internally I think that distinction has been, I may not have heard other information architects kind of popping that up, but yeah.
Dan Klyn: Ronen has a blue hand
Marsha Haverty: Oh.
Dan Klyn: Speak to us.
Ronen: Yes. So Marsha, you gave like two examples and, like in my mind, the first one was somebody who's, you know, modeling the piston in the engine. Right? Which is like it's as if that's a mechanistic thing that, is less, artful or, and then somebody is actually working on the texture of the car. And to me, there's a shared thread there. And this is where I sense, rhythm and cadence is neither of those are true. If, if, if you, and this to me is the whole in this aspect of Chris' work. If you think you're sitting on Autodesk and you're modeling a piston then you've missed the point, you're contributing to an effort of making a car.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah, yeah.
Ronen: And the reason you don't have a rhythm is you forgot that you're making a car, right? You think you're modeling a part. And that raises the question of wholeness and rhythm to another level of like it isn't how I click like how I click the mouse in Autodesk. It's how, how am I participating in making something?
Marsha Haverty: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yes. Yeah. That is a huge piece. And, and in fact, I mean, even if that's one car that's, that's different people within the same machine that gets physically extruded into the world, but then we have these things of we've got physical buildings and we've got machines that, provide a service to the building. So somebody over there is doing all the little pieces. And there's multiple people doing the little pieces that they have to think about the piece itself and the system that is the machine and the machine that is performing as the system of the building. So it's like, yes, there's no, there are many, many scales of having to zoom in and out of what's immediately in front of you and its role in the rest of the system. Yeah. It's a good point.
Ronen: Dan, when you asked about, when you talked about that Alexander and the 15 properties, the image that came to me from both of the things you said, and that Marsha said was that, like when I think of the business environment and the mechanistic world of creating things, I see people stumbling over each other, you know, it's like, instead of dancing gracefully together. It's like really, as if you're stepping on our feet and the question of cadence is how do you, how do you make that better? And, you asked something Dan, like, how do you know? And I, when you, when you asked about Christopher Alexander, the answer that came to me was from Prince: ‘f you need to ask it isn't funky.’ He used to say something like that, you know, he has this song where he’s like.
[Marsha, Dan, and Ronen Laugh].
Ronen: How do you make it funky? How do you bring this work of sitting across from a CAD tool to a place where I'm, and this to me goes to the heart of Christopher Alexander's challenge about architecture and making buildings and making anything, how do you bring everybody back to a sense of making a wholeness and not creating separate parts? How does this stumble? How will you stop step stepping on each other's feet and start dancing together?
Marsha Haverty: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even just to carve out the concepts and build out, you know what I mean by good continuation and behavior settings and how those all work at different layers, I think there is so much more to unpack which Ronen you're getting at, which is, you know, I sort of describe the path in which it's sort of aligning and these things are, you know, I'm picking up on these rhythms and I'm participating in them. And yet I'm sort of both in training and innovating. There's like this tension and openness. And I think what you're, what you're, bringing up is a really good point that we don't want to constrain the performance to that degree, that they don't have that openness, and rough, and you know, I can't wait to go look at all that stuff.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, no it's going to work. It's going to just Tetris right in, Marsha.
Marsha Haverty: It's gonna, I’m going to have to rerecord my talk tomorrow.
Dan Klyn: [Laughs] no!
Marsha Haverty: Thanks a lot [laughs]. No, but yeah, I just, I, I'm really, I really appreciate your points Ronen about like the, the indescribableness of some of it. And we want to leave it like that. Models are, you take a slice of the world and we all know they're like lying because they're just highlighting a few, a few things and they're not complete. And so let's take it in that way. And yet also say we haven't fully mapped every possible rhythm and sense of timing that's gonna come into play. We're always learning.
Dan Klyn: Well, I'm, I'm thinking about the stories that Greg, that, Greg Bryant tells about working with Christopher Alexander on a software application called Gate Maker, which was, it exists. Greg uses it with, What's Greg, did I get Greg's last name wrong Ronen? What's Greg's last name, Greg…crap. But anyway, this lovely man, he, he built a piece of software with Chris and you put in a picture of the place you want to make a gate, some sort of a gateway, and then the software helps you make decisions that add up to something that, that, that would be whole and beautiful and alive is the, is the goal. And Chris’, insistence, I think he learned it from studying carpets that if you flip a carpet over, there are ways that the weavers can sort of be even more whole and beautiful and alive and what they're doing by minding what it looks like on the underside. And so Chris cared about what the code looked like and he cared about the UI. It's all one process ultimately. And I think what you're working on Marsha is consonant with what Chris was trying to do with that software because of the importance that he ascribes to feeling. In the human being, who's operating the software, and to the extent and, and, and Ronen, has a lot of experience with breathing as a practice and rhythm and time, and our heartbeats and our breathing is about as essential to our humanity and our feelings as we can get. So I'm hopeful that if there's software that helps us use rhythm as the way in, that that might be closer to our humanity than clicky clicky or whatever the other ways in are.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: But I'm, I'm an optimist, of course. And, and so that's how I'm, I'm thinking about some of the challenges that you've brought Ronen is, could, could this software to the extent that it engages us in terms of this human thing about cadence and rhythm, that is not the pretend construct of, of clock time. Would the users of Autodesk software be able to use their feelings more and better as part of their design process by having access to time in the way that you're thinking about it, Marsha, and I believe the answer is going to be yes.
Ronen: I remember, Marsha, maybe it's like, maybe if you were, if you were doing this in a conference, you could actually do this. But, I had an experience once in a, in an improvisation dance workshop. So the teacher puts on this track, you know, some kind of, rhythmic, you know, boom, boom, boom dancing thing. And inevitably everybody in the room starts doing this together.
Marsha Haverty: [Laughs].
Ronen: Right? And that's it. That is, it is so simple, but it is such a powerful outcome. Right? And, in a way that’s what's missing, right? It's like, it's like a bunch of people rowing a boat, but there isn't the guy that's going like, rhythm.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah.
Ronen: It’s like, how do you bring that to everybody who’s trying to—
Marsha Haverty: Well, and unfortunately, all we have is a bunch of metronomes, you know, it's like, ‘csh, csh,’ they’re just like insensitive to other rhythms.
Ronen: Yeah.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah, yeah. We're missing that, that pace setter or rhythm setter, you know, whatever you call it. Yeah.
Ronen: And it isn't regular. That's why I really—
Marsha Haverty: Oh, we lost your audio.
Dan Klyn: Oh, crap. Ronen your audio just—
Ronen: It’s okay. Yeah, that's why I really recommend watching at least the trailer for that movie in YouTube, cause he's a, he's a drummer that warns against regularity. You said no, two, no two heartbeats are regular and like, like you work with a metronome, something dies, right there.
Marsha Haverty: [Laughs] Yeah.
Ronen: And I've heard a lot of podcasts of, of audio editors are warning like everybody today uses computers to regulate the rhythms and old schoolers would not use that. Right? It’s like, there's an, like, I've heard a drummer complain that he actually has this, he has this like this perfect offbeat that's his like his signature thing. And that's recording to the computer and then the computer fixes it, right? And it's like…
[Ronen and Marsha Laugh].
Dan Klyn: I was trying to do something there.
Ronen: Yeah, so…
Marsha Haverty: I know.
Dan Klyn: And then the paperclip, ‘it looks like you're trying to remain on rhythm.’ Let me [crosstalk, laughter] to timeline better. The revenge of Clippy, but now Clippy has a, has a Baton.
Marsha Haverty: Well, and that's the example I'm trying to use about automations like notifications and when we engage with users in the products and we're, we're really insensitive to rhythm, really insensitive and, and all we have right now—well, there are other examples. I try to give one in the talk, but, we just, we use clock times so much that we are, we really. We need to find a way to unlock these other, these other pieces and not, and I'm with you, Ronen, regularity is arhythmic in a way [laughs]. Yeah. I mean it is. It's so rhythmic it's arhythmic. Yeah.
Dan Klyn: Amazing. Juris. Do you have any questions or objections based on anything that you've heard so far or based on anything else for that matter?
Juris: Not really. I know too little about the subject to meaningfully contribute to the conversation—
Marsha Haverty: Me too! [Laughs].
Juris: [Laughs] but still like it’s super far away from the concerns I have for my, on the databases, but it was super interesting to, to hear you guys and, like I can reason about some of the, I dunno, topics you touched like automation and how you, how you try to explain artificial intelligence and what these algorithms are doing but…
Marsha Haverty: Did I do that? [Laughs].
Juris: But still, still, I know too little to speak about it.
Marsha Haverty: Well I’m, yeah, I’m just sort of—
Dan Klyn: You’re in excellent company here, Juris. Yeah. Our, our field is so young and, I'll just stop with that. Right? Our field is so young and, and we've relied on in this field in particular conferences as the way to generate knowledge and to share it and, that’s, that's the, that's the big thing that I worry about with the, all the enthusiasm of ‘oh, hey, you can just do conferences online now. It's great’ is, um, hm…
Marsha Haverty: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: Richard Saul Wurman, said that there is no better way to fail publicly than conferences. And, certainly the Ted that we all know today, you would never see that in, in the Ted of today. But, but when he, his approach is to you need, it's, it's the, it's the, it's the bad talks that make the good ones so good. It's the back to the variation in the signal is how you even have signal. Yeah, I, being wrong, being able to be wrong and, talk about it together like we're doing here is, crucial and I'm so grateful that you were here to do it, together today in spite of our, vandalism experience. That's terrible. I feel really badly 'cause typically, on these calls people join, you know, the, it's Sunday. So people just sort of, so there are probably 30 people who would like to have been here. And I'm gonna have to find some way to do registration now and ‘ulgh’. And so I consider myself fortunate to be in here with you all in lockdown.
Marsha Haverty: We're in lockdown two over.
Dan Klyn: Yup. And, so I'm curious, do y'all have further, would you like to take further advantage of Marsha being here with us to ask questions or to, share thoughts? Otherwise, we return to our regularly scheduled Sunday.
Ronen: I really appreciate that you, Marsha, bring this dimension, of, yeah, for me, rhythm is a living, is a living thing into the conversation. And, it reminds me again kind of why I left the field. ‘Cause I felt that it was too dead. And so, I appreciate that.
Marsha Haverty: What year did you leave the field?
Ronen: Sorry. What was that?
Marsha Haverty: What year did you leave the field?
Ronen: Depends on when you count it, ten to twelve years ago.
Marsha Haverty: Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, I think all of us, we're just trying to have meaning feel good, right? Like we can, we can do what we need to do in many, many different ways, but we want them to feel good and clear and do them in a way that we're getting better. Right? And so you just start saying, okay, well what's the material we have: it's information. Okay. How do we derive meaning from information. And then that opens up all sorts of questions about, oh, there's all these different modes of information. And they, they make meaning feel different depending on what combinations of them manifest, and then, and now at the time sense. Right? And thank you for hearing my early explorations in this and, you know, asking questions and showing me things that I need to look at and consider. I really appreciate it.
Dan Klyn: It’s a joy. I, so can't wait for, is it Tuesday? When does this, when does this, is it Wednesday? When does this recording?
Marsha Haverty: May sixth. I think that's Tuesday.
Dan Klyn: Good. Yeah. Well I’m, I’m so pleased that you chose to do this today. Grateful.
Marsha Haverty: And thank you for inviting me.
Dan Klyn: And I'm still really not okay with missing our a once a year occasion to be together…
Marsha Haverty: I know…
Dan Klyn: Audience in a place. And, we gotta find a way to fix that.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah.
Ronen: I wonder what's going to happen next year.
Dan Klyn: Well, Euro IAA might be virtual now. And, it's so unclear the path forward, but there's this, there's this community that I need to be with in my body. And, this, this gives us a lot, but this, this modality isn't isn't good enough. I, yeah.
Marsha Haverty: Yeah, you can't turn a conference online. It just, you can't, you can put talks online, but…
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Yeah it's the spaces between the talks. It's the hallway conversations. It's the, yeah. So until, until, until that beautiful day, when we can embrace in our physical bodies, let's, stay as close as we can through these things and, and good luck with the, do you have an AMA next week as part of the fun?
Marsha Haverty: Yeah it’s also Tuesday. So it's 4:00 PM Eastern, I believe.
Dan Klyn: Okay. Well then I'll see you on there.
Marsha Haverty: Okay.
Dan Klyn: And, Ronen, I know, I know, that your image being part of a broadcast is, is not okay. So, I'm going to make the recording of this will be available after the fact, but no pictures and, and I'm so grateful to have had this conversation with you all. So Marsha, if you'd like me to, it's not going to come out until after your thing comes out. So, if I was that fast I would self-embargo, but I won't be that fast.
Marsha Haverty: [Laughs] okay.
Dan Klyn: In a week or two, the recording of this and some kind of transcript will, will appear. Oh, yeah, no that's fine. Yeah.
Dan Klyn: Awesome. Oh, well, thank you.
Grant Carmichael: I’m really looking forward to it.
Dan Klyn: And Ronin I'm, my breathing is nowheresville, so we're going to have to start over from zero. And I look forward to that so much, ‘cause—
Marsha Haverty: Oh we should have started with that. Ronen could have eased us into the—
Dan Klyn: It’s, it's I, I, I’m, I’ve become aware of how anaerobic my mode of coping is. And it's, it's no good. And, and, I saw a little glimpse of what a discipline of around breathing would give me through Ronen’s teaching and, it's incompatible with my lifestyle and I need to change my lifestyle.
Ronen: I, I'm, I'm a hesitant and shitty self-promoter, but since we've talked I’m now offering an introductory free online course. So if anybody's interested in getting to know their breathing.
Marsha Haverty: Oh, good! Give us the line.
Grant Carmichael: I’ll try it out.
Ronen: It’s in the chat.
Marsha Haverty: Okay.
Dan Klyn: Thank you, Ronen.
Marsha Haverty: So are you going to keep all the links in the chat?
Dan Klyn: Yes. Yes.
Marsha Haverty: Because otherwise I’ll click on them or they’ll disappear forever.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, no, it'll, it'll download to my Zoom and then I will, make that, I'll email it to you immediately. And then, if any of y'all want it, send me, send me an email, Dan@understanding group.com and I'll, I'll give it to you as well. And then it'll be in the show notes or whatever we call these things.
Marsha Haverty: Ok.
Dan Klyn: “Show notes.”
Grant Carmichael: Perfect.
Dan Klyn: You know, I've not made this an actual podcast yet. Kind of in a rebelling way, cause like, I could, but there's something about being, my purpose, mostly is to be here in real time on Sundays with real people. And then the idea that you could, that this shit would just show up somewhere and somebody would listen to it for a little minute and then not. So, so, so far, this is not a podcast. These are recordings and transcripts on webpages. So, and I think that has something to do with time and rhythms and things and not wanting just a clock time thing around this, but a purposeful ceremony of some sort around it, like I'm gonna have to go to a damn webpage to listen to this.
Ronen: For what it's worth, Dan, something that's happening in a lot of the podcasts that I've been listening to is that they've changed from, speaking to, to conversational spaces and something that happened in this, in your call today that is different from other calls, which makes it less podcasty is, it is in that spirit. It is less of a frontal off bringing and more of a participatory, and so.
Dan Klyn: Well, it's more fun this way [laughs].
Marsha Haverty: Yeah, yeah.
Ronen: ‘Cause it's more alive! Yeah! Let's let's just sit down and ingest it passively as a podcast. So that, that makes sense on some level.
Marsha Haverty: Well, in all the things that you and Ivan and Grant have injected is that you shaped it. So that's great.
Dan Klyn: It’s fun to do things together. Let's do it more.
Grant Carmichael: Yes [laughs].
Dan Klyn: Thank you all. And my apologies for that vulgarity at the top. Makes me sad for our world and, there will be a remedy of some sort like a registration. Blech. Okay. Thank you all.
Marsha Haverty: Thank you, bye everyone!
Grant Carmichael: No worries. Thank you! Bye bye.