The year I co-organized the IA Summit, we gave folks buttons to trade with one another as an icebreaker. One of the designs was an icon of a tomato printed on red paper. The text read, "Fruit or vegetable?"
When we practice information architecture, we're often navigating complex systems on behalf of the product's users. We become familiar with the context of the things we aim to organize. Then, we decide how best to represent the choices that people will make when using the product. If we're designing for botanists, we'll call a tomato a fruit. If we're designing for home gardeners, we'll call it a vegetable. And if we're designing something that will be used by both botanists and gardeners, perhaps we'll point to tomatoes from both the fruit and the vegetable categories.
But talking about two choices isn't really enough to represent the decisions we encounter in everyday life. The TV show The Good Place, a favorite of mine, points this out. Michael, one of the characters in this show about four humans who learn that they've died and gone to heaven, says:
“Life now is so complicated, it’s impossible for anyone to be good enough… These days, just buying a tomato at the grocery store means you are unwittingly supporting toxic pesticides, exploited labor, contributing to global warming. Humans think they’re making one choice, but they’re actually making dozens of choices they don’t even know they’re making.”
So how do we navigate this complex world? In my experience, research and grace can be our guides. We do the best we can, and we learn from our mistakes, and then we try again.
Two weeks ago, as statements and memes trickled into my feed, I found myself examining what I knew about the place we sometimes call Palestine and sometimes call Israel. I looked up stories and podcasts, and discovered that the language was eerily familiar from the newscasts on the periphery of my childhood: the death counts, with adults and children tallied separately; the wide-angle videos of smoke billowing from high rises; and the feeling of some unknown, far-away people engaged in something seemingly too complicated to really understand.
I encounter the word "complicated" in my work as a researcher and information architect, too. I've encountered it enough that I have a standard response. I tell folks that the system we're trying to fix seems complicated, but if we examine it and sort things out, we'll probably find that it is merely complex. Complexity can be parsed and diagramed and navigated, and, eventually, changed.
To me, practicing integrity in UX research isn't just about supporting our peers in the work that we do for our employers; it is also about supporting the work that we do for our communities. The techniques I use to research the history and motivations behind what's happening on the western coast of the Mediterranean Sea are the same I use to research why people choose to donate to their public radio station. I believe that the same is true even for my peers who don’t identify as researchers.
How we understand the work we get paid to do affects how we understand the lives we live. Research integrity is important to me not only for our users, but also because of how those skills affect our personal and political lives.
To be authentic citizens today, we must purposefully learn things that we haven't been taught. It takes time and patience and research and persistence, and it is worth it.
Mentioned in this issue: The Good Place, specifically Season 3 Episode 11, "Chidi Sees the Time-Knife," and The IA Conference (formerly known as the IA Summit)