The Informed Life

Kourosh Dini is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and productivity expert. He is the author of an excellent book on how to take smart notes using DEVONthink, a personal information management tool. In this conversation, we discuss smart note-taking and how DEVONthink can help us work more effectively.

Show notes

• Kourosh Dini
• Being Productive
• Taking Smart Notes with DEVONthink by Kourosh Dini
• How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens
• DEVONthink
• Zettelkasten
• Niklas Luhmann
• Evernote
• Notion
• Roam Research
• macOS Finder
• Craft
• Markdown
• BBEdit
• iA Writer
• Typora
• Scrivener
• Keynote
• Ulysses
• OmniFocus

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My guest today is Phillip Hunter. Phillip is a strategy and innovation consultant focused on conversational systems. He has a long trajectory working on such systems; among other roles, he was head of user experience for Amazon Alexa Skills. In this conversation, we focus on conversation itself, and how to design systems that converse.

Listen to the show

Download episode 49

Show notes

• Phillip Hunter on LinkedIn
• Phillip Hunter on Twitter
• Conversational Collaborative AI Services (Phillip’s consultancy)
• Brenda Laurel
• Don Norman
• Google Assistant
• Amazon Alexa
• HomePod
• Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCullough
• Wizard-of-Oz testing
• Adobe XD
• Voiceflow
• Botmock
• Google Dialogflow CX
• Alexa Skills Kit
• How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation by N.J. Enfield

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commissions for purchases made through these links.

My guest today is Alexis Lloyd. Alexis is VP of Product Design at Medium and co-founder of Ethical Futures Lab. Previously, she led design and innovation work at The New York Times, Axios, and Automattic. Alexis has been thinking about the future of media for a long time. In this conversation, we focus on the evolving ways we consume and produce media.

Listen to the full conversation

Download episode 44

Show notes

• Alexis Lloyd
• @alexislloyd on Twitter
• Research & Development at The New York Times
• Axios
• John Maeda (MAEDASTUDIO)
• Automattic
• Medium
• Ethical Futures Lab
• The future of news is not an article by Alexis Lloyd
• Ted Nelson
• Project Xanadu
• Quotebacks
• Link to Text Fragment Chrome extension
• The Informed Life Episode 6: Beck Tench on Tinderbox
• Tinderbox
• Zettelkasten
• Roam Research
• DEVONthink
• Building a digital garden by Tom Citchlow
• Pinterest
• Are.na
• Dropbox Paper

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

My guest today is Peter Morville. Peter is a pioneer in the discipline of information architecture. Among many other distinctions, he co-authored with Lou Rosenfeld Information Architecture for the World-Wide Web, the classic O’Reilly “polar bear” book on the subject. This is Peter’s second appearance on The Informed Life podcast. I asked him back because I wanted to learn more about his recent call for practitioners to emancipate information architecture.

Listen to the full conversation

Download episode 47

Show notes

• Peter Morville on Twitter
• Semantic Studios
• Intertwingled.org
• Information Architecture: for the Web and Beyond, by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango
• The Informed Life episode 10: Peter Morville on Seductive Information
• Emancipating Information Architecture by Peter Morville
• Don’t Think of an Elephant! by George Lakoff
• Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star
• Pema Chödrön

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commissions for purchases made through these links.

My guest today is Dr. Jeff Johnson. Jeff has been applying his background in psychology towards designing better human-computer interfaces for over forty years. He teaches computer science at The University of San Francisco, and has written several influential books on UI design. Among these, he co-authored with Kate Finn Desiging User Interfaces for an Aging Population, which is the focus of this conversation.

Listen to the full conversation

Download episode 46

Show notes

• Jeff Johnson
• UI Wizards
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cromemco
• Xerox
• GUI Bloopers 2.0: Common User Interface Design Dont’s and Dos by Jeff Johnson
• Designing With the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Guidelines by Jeff Johnson
• Conceptual Models: Core to Good Design by Austin Henderson and Jeff Johnson (My notes on Conceptual Models)
• Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population: Towards Universal Design by Jeff Johnson and Kate Finn
• Tesla Model S Interior
• Google Maps

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.