Jorge Arango
The promise of computers augmenting our minds has been a long time coming. We're beginning to see better tools for extending human cognition, but good guidebooks for using them have been scarce.
Jorge Arango's new book, Duly Noted, fills this gap elegantly. It shows you how to extend your mind with connected digital notes that capture your thoughts and nourish them in a personal knowledge garden from which you can harvest and share your unique insights.
We talked about:
the motivation for his new book, Duly Noted
how his personal experience with note-taking, the emergence of the digital media, and his background as an information architect converged to inspire his interest in digital networked note-taking
the challenge presented to note-takers by the huge variety of kinds of notes, and his taxonomy of types of notes
some of the history of computers as tools to augment our cognitive capabilities
his concept of the "personal knowledge garden"
his take on Brian Eno's articulation of the differences between architecture and gardening
the differences between thinking spaces and writing spaces
the difference in mental models applied when moving between physical and digital note-taking media
the rise of hypertext-based note-taking tools
how your content-strategy skills around structured content help your note-taking and knowledge gardening
Jorge's bio
Jorge Arango is an information architect, author, and educator. For almost three decades, he has architected digital experiences and made the complex clear for organizations ranging from non-profits to Fortune 500 corporations.
He is the author of Duly Noted: Extend Your Mind Through Connected Notes, Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places and co-author of Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond, the fourth edition of O'Reilly's celebrated Polar Bear book.
In addition to his design consulting practice, Jorge hosts The Informed Life podcast, writes a blog, and teaches at the California College of the Arts.
Connect with Jorge online
LinkedIn
jarango.com
DulyNoted.fyi
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/E8ngDQ33K2c
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 175. Throughout our days, we are all taking note of things for a variety of reasons in a number of ways. A to-do list on your computer. A scribble in the margin of a book. A blog post idea in a Google doc. In his new book, Duly Noted, Jorge Arango sets out principles and practices to create a digital note-taking regimen and then shows you how to connect and cultivate your notes in a personal knowledge garden where you can gather your thoughts and harvest insights.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 175 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Jorge Arango. Jorge is an independent information architect. He's an author. He's an educator, and I asked him on the show today to talk about his new book, Duly Noted. So welcome, Jorge. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.
Jorge:
Hey Larry, thank you for inviting me. I'm very excited to be here. And as you have noted, I have a new book called Duly Noted, and I'm excited about that. As you also mentioned, I'm an information architect. That's what I do for a living, and I have been doing that for a long time, and what gets me out of bed these days is the fact that we have access to all this information in the world, and those of us who work in this space have been part of making it possible for there to be more information in the world than there's ever been before. And that's a good thing, and it can also be a bad thing. I'm very focused on the good... Let's make it good. So that's what gets me motivated and we can talk more about what that means in the context of this book.
Larry:
I see. Well, that leads to one of the... As I read the book - it's a fantastic book and everybody should get it - but one of the things that struck me as I read it, especially as I got deeper into it and you started talking about how to structure things and organize and metadata and all that stuff, and I'm like, "Okay, this guy's an information architect. I wonder if a sales executive or a CEO had had similar insights and written a book, if it would've been different." So do you feel like these are universal, not truths, but insights that you've discovered, or do you feel like your background as an information architect, how do you think that informed the book?
Jorge:
Yeah, that's a great question, and maybe to give folks a bit of background, folks might not know what we are talking about here. The book is called Duly Noted because it's basically about note-taking and you might ask yourself, "What? Really? A whole book about notes?" Notes are something that I think a lot of us take for granted. We've been doing it for a long time. I've been doing it since I was a kid in school, and I think a lot of people started taking notes like that. In my case, I remember the late '70s and early '80s using a, these big three-ring plastic binders to keep loose leaf notes. So it's one of those things where we can take it for granted, and yet, they have tremendous power. And this book is about how to take better notes, but not just any kind of notes. It's specifically about using digital tools to take better notes and focusing on, "What is different about digital?"
Jorge:
So digital is different than those Trapper Keepers that I used when I was in school, and it has some capabilities and some constraints, and we have to understand digital as a medium if we want to make good use of this. And the question, knowing that as a background, then you might reframe the question as, "Why is an information architect writing about note-taking somehow?" And the way that I came to this subject is that I have been taking notes for a long time. Like I said, I started in school, but then in work, I would do things like take notes about what was happening in meetings, for example, meeting minutes. A lot of people do that, and I've been doing that for a long time. And I started taking that kind of notes in paper, much like I did with the school notes, and eventually I moved over to doing it with a computer. And I had this realization that there were things about doing this with a computer that were different than doing it on paper.
Jorge:
And moreover, there were similarities between some of the things that I needed to do to make information more useful when I was taking notes from what I was doing to make information more useful for other people as an information architect. So in some ways, my career as an information architect is about making information easier to access, more findable, more understandable for other people, and this is about doing the same thing, but for myself, for yourself. So there's quite an affinity there, and I had written a book prior to this one called Living in Information, which is about designing and building digital systems, which I called in the book information environments, that better honor people's attention, that allow us to think better using these digital spaces. But it was written for designers, for people who are information architects or user experience designers, that sort of thing. And this book, this new book, I see as a compliment to that.
Jorge:
But rather than being addressed to the people who are designing digital systems, it's more addressed at the users of digital information, people in every walk of life who are interacting with information, perhaps knowledge workers, students, authors, teachers, anyone whose work revolves around knowledge and working with information can benefit from knowing a little bit of information architecture. And that's what this book tries to do. It tries to bring principles and practices from the world of information architecture to managing your own stuff.
Larry:
Nice. The whole intent of this podcast is to democratize content strategy practice and sounds like we're very aligned on that. It also resonates. I had Abby Covert on a few months ago and she was talking specifically about democratizing information architecture. So there's some kind of a plot happening here to get these practices and principles out to more folks. I love that. One thing, as you were talking about the history of your own personal history of note-taking, I was thinking about one of the things that you do really well in the book. I had never really thought about how many different kinds of notes there are and you go everything from to-do lists, hanging a sticky on the refrigerator to class notes or all those things in between. Tell me a little bit about the scope of intent of note-taking and how you focus it into this digital realm that you're focusing on in the book.
Jorge:
One of the challenges with the word notes is that it's one of those words that we use to refer to a bunch of different things. And when you start thinking about it, we talk about... Let's say something like a sticky note. That's a very common note type. When you say notes, many of the people listening in might have thought of sticky notes first. It's a very common use for notes. We also use the word notes to refer to the sort of things that we write down when we're capturing meeting minutes. We use the word notes to refer to the marginalia that we capture when we're reading a Kindle book, for example. We will highlight certain passages and maybe make notes with the highlight and we call all those things notes, but if you think about them, they're very different, both in intent and in form. And one of the first steps in making better use of notes as a means for thinking better, which is ultimately what this book is about,
