Misalignment from stakeholders creates not only differing ideas about structure but also the languages within them. Without proper alignment from the beginning of a project, it’s destined to fail. Understanding must precede action. Clarity at the beginning of a project is attained through stakeholder alignment, strategy, and roadmapping. In/Tension Modeling is one tool that we’ve created and use so that we can discover both the business intent and tensions that exist regarding the website, product, intranet, app, etc.
Read moreSermon for WIAD Bristol 2021
For World IA Day 2021, TUG co-founder Dan Klyn was invited to give the closing keynote for Nomensa’s celebration in Bristol. Klyn’s counterproposal was to preach a brief sermon, to be followed immediately by Q&A with Nomensa co-founder and TUG’s beloved friend Simon Norris.
Read moreTalking about TUG's Information Architecture Staycation Workshop
Dan Klyn has been thinking about how language, structure, and meaning might make digital spaces “good” for over twenty years. What distinguishes Dan from a lot of other thinkers is that he’s comfortable with the fact that figuring out the answer to that question isn’t always simple, and the answer isn’t always a straight line. This has made him one of the most creative and interesting people working in Information Architecture today.
Dan thinks these ideas are best understood through discussion and collaboration, so he created the IA Staycation, a workshop that includes both lectures and direct conversation with both Dan and Richard Saul Wurman. The workshop is unusual, in that it isn’t a simple “skill builder”, but instead brings us around to this deeper question Dan always asks: What is good? How would we know? How do we make that concept something we can use?
Read more"GPS" At The Scale Of Your Living Room - So What?
“GPS at the scale of your living room” means that the location of every item in the environment is established, checked, and ongoingly mapped by sensors in devices including smartphones and smart speakers, and made available for incorporation into products and services. It’s not literally using global positioning satellites: it’s using data collected by sensors embedded in networked devices.
The advent of geo-spatial (GPS-like) technologies at living room scale shifts the conversation from an internet of things, to a matrix of emplacements. And it begs a corresponding shift in the focus of digital product designers from things to systems, and from spaces to places.
Read moreBuilding a Better Agile Backlog With Models
Using modeling during agile software development can help produce better understanding for your clients and stakeholders, and alignment with the business.
Read moreUnderstanding What It's Like To Not Understand
As part of his work researching and writing Richard Saul Wurman’s biography, TUG co-founder Dan Klyn has been reviewing videos from previous RSW projects. This video was shot as part of the promotion of the 2nd edition of Information Anxiety, circa 2000.
Read moreBeing In The Understanding Business
TUG’s been fortunate in so many ways in the 8+ years we’ve been in business. Among the earliest and most substantial has to do with how and where we got our name…
Read moreRSW: Better Is No Longer Good
Read more"In the past, it was possible to get along by doing a much better version of what you were doing previously. In the future, you're going to die on the vine if you do only a better version of what you're already doing. It will be increasingly important to explore alternatives, parallel ways of buying and selling ideas, services, products, et cetera, in brief transactions."
From The Archives: Big Wireframes For Mobile Circa 2011
A photo of the wireframes that we were working on in the Grand Rapids office on June 22, 2011.
Read moreToledo Design Week Keynote
A recording of Dan Klyn giving the keynote presentation at Toledo Design Week 2015.
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