Today, I'm in conversation with Jorge Arango, an information architect and author of several books. His most recent, duly noted, has just been released. Jorge is a consultant based across the Americas and teaches in the graduate interaction design program at the California College of the Arts.
We talk about why we make notes, the concept of thinking with notes and how connected notes can be used to further your development and personal knowledge. Now, with big data being at the forefront of the current evolution of computing and artificial intelligence, it kind of stands to reason that we should be thinking about how we make more of our personally generated data.
Today, I'm in conversation with Jorge Arango, an information architect and author of several books. His most recent, duly noted, has just been released. Jorge is a consultant based across the Americas and teaches in the graduate interaction design program at the California College of the Arts.
We talk about why we make notes, the concept of thinking with notes and how connected notes can be used to further your development and personal knowledge. Now, with big data being at the forefront of the current evolution of computing and artificial intelligence, it kind of stands to reason that we should be thinking about how we make more of our personally generated data.
**Andy Parker**
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Andy Parker, the UX Coach. And this is where I get to share stories from people's careers in digital design in the fast world of user experience. How do you create the minimum viable note? When can you tell if a note you've even created has value in two days' time, a month's time, let alone years to come?
Today, I'm in conversation with Jorge Arango, an information architect and author of several books. His most recent, duly noted, has just been released. Jorge is a consultant based across the Americas and teaches in the graduate interaction design program at the California College of the Arts.
We talk about why we make notes, the concept of thinking with notes and how connected notes can be used to further your development and personal knowledge. Now, with big data being at the forefront of the current evolution of computing and artificial intelligence, it kind of stands to reason that we should be thinking about how we make more of our personally generated data. Keep listening to find out more.
Tell me where you are today. What have you been doing today?
**Jorge Arango**
I am in Northern California. I'm staying at a friend's house. I'm here in town because the semester started last week, and I teach at the California College of the Arts. And my family and I recently moved away from Northern California. But I will continue teaching here. So, I will be in town several times during the spring.
**Andy Parker**
So awesome. What are the actual topics that you teach?
**Jorge Arango**
I teach in the graduate interaction design program at the California College of the Arts. And I teach one class every spring, and it is the system studio. In the system studio, we teach interaction design students about systems thinking; do you know how to think in terms of systems as opposed to thinking about the whole instead of the parts? Basically, that's that's the gist of it.
**Andy Parker**
How long have you been doing that? I mean, how more importantly, how do you end up finding yourself in a situation where you've got this amazing opportunity to be able to teach at the college and to be sharing that wealth of experience and knowledge that you have?
**Jorge Arango**
Well, I think that this ties back to the gist of our conversation. I have a kind of high-level, loose career plan for myself, where I've been doing design consulting of some sort for the bulk of my career, you know, as as I get older and get into years in my career, I expect that I'll be doing more and more teaching over time. And that's something that manifests through writing, podcasting, and books, but also through actual teaching in informal academic programs. So, I was on the lookout for those kinds of opportunities. A friend of mine was teaching in the program that I'm teaching now. And, you know, we got to talking about this. And he said, you know, let me introduce you to folks at the program, and one thing led to another. And that's how I ended up there.
**Andy Parker**
This is just a part of what you're doing from one day to the next. One of the main things that we're here to talk about is you have been working on a book, which is shortly to be released, duly noted. It's also not your first book. So, what's the process been like this time around compared to the previous? You coauthored a book on information architecture, which is one of my favourites: The Polar Bear. How's that book writing process been? For you?
**Jorge Arango**
Yeah, let's get into that. I'll just say before getting into it that the book has actually been released; it came out on January 2, and we will talk a bit more about what that's about. But to your to your question about the process. When you talk with people who write books or who've written books, many of them will tell you that they'll have stories of trauma, where it really says like, oh, it was horrible. You know, I had to, like, force myself, and you know, it was painful. And you hear all these, these kind of negative takes. For me, it's quite the opposite. I find writing very enjoyable. Like I said, I have this, I think that it's something that I have in me that the whole teaching thing. And writing is one way to go about it. Duly noted is my third book project. The first one, which you've alluded to, was the fourth edition of the O'Reilly Information Architecture book, The Polar Bear. I think that when somebody writes their first book, they come at it as we do, to all new experiences as kind of novices. We don't know what we're doing. We don't know what to expect. I mean, there are guides, you know, you can read books about this stuff there are. There's stuff written on the web about it. But you've never done it before, right? I had the great good fortune that my first writing project was an existing book or updating an existing book, which brought a lot of structure to the proceedings. Right, I was not starting from scratch. I was starting with, first of all, the two co-authors of the first three editions, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morrow, and people whom I have a good relationship with. That's a huge plus, right?
And then you have the actual text of the book. So there was kind of guide rails there, you know, there were there were these experienced authors, there was a text, there was a direction like we knew, more or less, where we wanted this fourth edition to differ from the previous three. So there was a lot kind of built into it, which was really good because it, I think, gave me the opportunity to get my feet wet in a project that had a lot of structure kind of in place. With the second and, and this is also true of the third book, I sought to somehow replicate that experience to the best of my ability, and what that entailed was trying to come up with a structure upfront that I could work against. And I think that this also reflects my kind of information architect hat on. It's much easier for me to start working kind of at the outline level. In this case, I have this kind of two-dimensional outline, which we can get into if you want. But basically, once you have the structure in place, once you know what you want to write about, what the book is going to be about, and what subjects it's going to cover, and you have some kind of structure to work against, then the process becomes one of making the time to do the research, and then sit down and actually put words on the screen. So it's something kind of like, it's not an existential crisis. It's something more akin to a job where it's like, I have a job to do. And, you know, today I have to write, you know, this section, or whatever. And you make time to do that. And, in my case, you know, I'm someone who works most effectively when I have certain routines in my day. I set up a routine where I would wake up every day at a certain time, make a cup of coffee, and then do a little bit of journaling. And then, you know, create the space to sit down and actually put words on the screen. And you do that one day after the next, and then lo and behold, you know, 18 months later, or whatever it is, you have a book.
**Andy Parker**
There's an idea that we are gatherers that go out and we collect lots of different things. And we sort of like build up our little piles of stuff before we look through them. And then there's the sculptor, so the person that has the solid block of marble and then keeps chipping away at it until they get to get to this or the definitive art or the David appears, I found it really interesting to sort of see your process very much being a bit of a eat your own dog food. Like in the book, there's a section where you're showing how you use note-taking to start to create your structures in your categories and how you're going to organise chapters. What's the kind of the broader approach described to us, the way that you sort of build out concepts through this idea of making notes and building that scaffolding?
**Jorge Arango**
That's a good prompt. And I will say right off the bat because folks might not have context on what this book is about. The book is about what I call in the book connected note taking. So, it's about thinking more effectively by using notes. But not just any kind of notes, digital notes, and not just any kind of digital notes, but notes, digital notes that are connected together using various different types of links to create a knowledge graph of some sort. And that's how I've kind of very high level, I think that you might, you might expect, as you might expect, that has applicability to something like writing a book. I hope that listeners who know what information architecture is can immediately recognise that there's a relationship between this notion of connected nodes and the work of information architecture. One way to think about it is that when I talk about information architecture for user experience design, or, you know, for the design of websites or apps or something like that, you're talking about structuring information for other people to get stuff done. Right. As duly noted, I'm writing about structuring information for you to think more effectively. So it's kind of like for your own use. And the starting point there, the starting premise, the thing that the kind of detonating idea, if you wish, is that we don't think exclusively in our meat computer, you know, in the, in the, in the, in our brains, right, our nervous system, I think that a lot of us, myself included, grew up with this idea that thinking is something that happens in the brain. And then you manifest through things like drawing or writing or talking, right? There's research and some theories in the cognitive science space that point to a different way of thinking about how thinking happens. And there's this, this, this theory called the extended mind theory that I find very compelling. That posits that thinking actually happens in an embodied way. So, it's not something that happens exclusively in the brain. Rather, it's something that your body does as it interacts with the environment. So, you know, your brain is part of your body, but so are your hands, who are your eyes, your ears, your senses, you know, and the idea here is that, when you put pen to paper, you're not recording thinking that is happening in your wetware. Rather, the thinking is somehow happening between your wetware and the page, the world, you know, in this case, like a piece of paper, becomes kind of a buffer for your, for your memory, you know, and when you see the lines, making words on the piece of paper, that triggers new ideas, it changes your relationship to the information that you are, that you are thinking about.
So that's a very, I think that that's a very important foundational idea and one that transformed my relationship to, frankly, to my mind, and to the world, because all of a sudden, I start thinking in terms of like, okay, if this is true, that we think with things, then that holds the promise that if you're careful about how you arrange things, you can think better. Right. And that's a very, very powerful idea because I think all of us would like to be more effective thinkers, you know, we want to be better parents, we want to be better. Workers, we want to be better teachers and better students. Anything that we can do to amplify our cognitive abilities is going to help us do that better. And this realisation that you can organise your environment, to do things, particularly thinking things better, is really important when I'm working on something like a book. And we're talking about the outline, right? That's what I'm doing. I'm using the computer not to capture this; I have this outline in my mind, and I'm just going to dump it onto the screen. That's not how it works.
It's actually like the act of writing on in this case, on the screen, is where I'm thinking through these ideas. Now, you asked about this, this idea of the gatherer versus the sculptor: sometimes you operate in one modality, and sometimes you operate in another modality. If I know that I'm writing a book about note-taking, particularly connected digital note-taking, then all of a sudden, my mind is primed to be on the lookout for stories, examples, and ideas that might illustrate those things. And if I'm disciplined about capturing those ideas when I come across them, then by the time I start writing, I will have this, this pile, you know, I'm trying to leverage your image of a gather, there's a little pile of ideas that I can work with, right? So sometimes I'm operating in that modality. At other times, like I'm sitting down to write, you know, write an actual section of the book, I will put words on the screen, and they make a sentence, and I think, oh, no, you know, I'm being overly ornate there or whatever, right? Or, that metaphor just doesn't. It doesn't resonate with what I'm writing about later. And then I call that, and I, you know, and I kind of shape it much in the way that a sculptor would write. So, so, there's both of those, the thinking, thinking is kind of multimodal, you know, we operate in different modalities at different times, and you know, becoming conscious of that can help you be more effective as well.
**Andy Parker**
What we're describing there, so the phrase that you use throughout, Is this concept of creating this personal knowledge garden. And I really like the analogy and the way that you've described it in the past that you've taken the garden because the garden is something that should never necessarily be finished. But it's also going to go through seasons and changes. And that was one of the things that I found challenging with trying to sort of think for myself about the note-taking approaches and the mindset that you're describing, and thinking about how to introduce that into my own practices because I think that you've got this idea of the Evergreen notes. So things which you perceive are going to have long-term value. And if I think about that, in the context of user research, for example, UX research, this is what we end up manifesting and cooling insights, right? It's the thing that's supposed to have this long-term value of understanding and appreciation of our customers or an environment or the products that we're working on. But again, it can also change. I wanted to ask you more about the things that are deciduous because they're with your garden analogy, which I absolutely love. I probably don't need the list, the note that I made for Remember The Milk, because that's short-term. And once I've completed that task, it's kind of done. But it got me thinking about how there are things in your garden that flower and bloom, and then at the end of the season, the flowers drop off, and you think it's dead, but actually, it's not. It comes back again the following year. And whether there's space in your garden for this kind of ebb and flow of information, because there's got to be this real challenge of knowing the difference between something which you believe you are going to have the long-term value that you retain forever and ever. And then these things, which right now just seem like useless crap. But actually, in a year's time, you're going to be like, I'm sure I wrote something about that. Or I took a photograph of that thing. And now you can't find it. How do you start to organise the different patches in your garden?
**Jorge Arango**
Yeah, that's a great prompt. And there, there's a lot there. One way to get into this is by acknowledging that we use the word notes to describe lots of things that are, in fact, very different. We use sticky notes, for example, that's a very common use of notes. And I think that when you mentioned the word notes, perhaps sticky notes are something that comes to people's mind. Sticky notes you use for a particular purpose, right? Well, there are many uses for sticky notes, but you're not going to write a draft for a book chapter on a sticky note. There is not enough space, right? So, the form kind of dictates what you use it for? They are most effective at doing things like putting up a bunch of ideas on a whiteboard or a large sheet of paper, moving them around and clustering stuff. Whereas something like a journal, you know, you take notes in a journal, those have other characteristics, and you use those things for different purposes, you know, an outline or a mind map. That's another kind of note. So, let's start there. You brought up one of the distinctions in the book, this notion of notes that are meant to somehow stand the test of time versus notes that are more transient.
An example of transient notes would be the kind of note that you take when you are heading out to the grocery store and want to make sure that you don't forget what you need to buy. The shopping list is not going to be of much use to you after you come back with the bag of groceries. So you toss that in the in the bed. Whereas you know if, again, if you're writing a book, and you have ideas that you are researching for the book, you want to put those in a place where you can come back to them later. This is the gather-a-pile that we were talking about earlier, the knowledge garden, that's an image that, by the way, that's not my image, I'm just articulating it in the book, right. The idea has no pun intended; it has kind of roots in the in the information management field. It has been used. At the very least, since the 1970s. at Xerox PARC, the idea of you know, your information space has some kind of botanical, botanical space, right? This notion of gardening, and you'll hear the phrase digital gardening is a lot online. But it's a, again, pardon the pun, but it's a fruitful metaphor because it speaks to the fact that this is not meant to be a pile. Again, it's not meant to be a kind of dumping ground for ideas. It's more akin to a living space, a space composed of doing things that you need to tend to. If you think about what we do with gardens, you know, when you're caring for a garden, you store the garden, right? You set things up in a particular way so that the garden will grow and flourish. And you have to water it, and you have to prune it, and you have to do certain things to it. So it's not, it's not instantaneous, it's not something that you let me say I put it. One of the risks of working with these ideas in the technology space is that we've been conditioned to believe that tools will take care of things for us. And, you know, people might approach this with the idea that if you just find the right tool and you start writing into it, the tool will do the thinking for you, especially now that we have AI. It might be that there are tools like that, or that there might be it's, you know, at some point tools like that, I haven't found them. And I don't know that I want to find them. Because for me, this is a space where I can do my thinking. I want to do the thinking I don't want the computer to think for me, and I want the computer to assist me in my thinking right and to serve as the substrate in which my thinking happens. But I don't want it to do the thinking for me, that's, that would defeat the whole point.
So I really liked this idea of the garden as something that requires work. But if you put the work into it, it will yield fruit, and it will also give you satisfaction and pleasure and accompany you throughout your life. Now, you also spoke of user research. And I can definitely see the parallels between what I'm talking about and the needs of a user research team. In this case, although I have to say I do think of them as being slightly different. I mean, I hope that it's coming across in my language. The books duly noted are kind of exclusively focused on your own personal thinking. So this is kind of like another use case for these things. And I think it can be applied to it. But it does introduce some edge cases, like what you're describing this notion of the city as notes. One of the things that I capture in my own knowledge garden and that I work with are books that I've read. When I read a book, I often find ideas in the book that speak to me somehow or, are interesting to me, or relevant to my work or my book writing or whatever it is right. And I want to capture those. By the way, this is where the connected notes thing comes in. If I were to read a book, The example that always comes to my mind is Warren Piece, just because that's a book that I finished reading last year, and it's a very long book, I was like, it took me a while right. And you could take notes on what you're learning from reading a book like War and Peace that are centered on the book, War and Peace, right?
Like you could start a note in the system that has the title War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then you start like writing down everything that you know, everything that you're learning from this book, the thing is that in reading that book, there are themes in that book that express ideas that are you that are somehow universal, they're not just about that book, right, that I might actually encounter when reading other books that might be relevant, right. In the case of Warren Piece, I think a big idea that I that I got out of that was the fact that we kind of overestimate the importance of I'm gonna use the phrase in air quotes, like the big men of history, right, I think in the book, like it's centred on Napoleon. Right. But I think one of the one of the ideas that also is trying to convey is that history is a lot messier. And a lot of the things that actually happen are the result of some contingencies that are that are not necessarily decided on by one or two individuals, right? That's a fairly high-level universal idea. And I will likely, you know, it stood out to me. So I started a separate note from the note about the book, War and Peace.
And in that, in the note about Warren Piece, I made a link to it. I said, you know, this book has this idea about this, you know, kind of contingency in history thing. But I created a separate note for the contingency in history thing, because I know that in the future, I might come across other books that kind of present that same idea from different angles. And the thing is, that I see that other nodes, that second node kind of as, as an example of this deciduous thing that you're talking about, because I find myself circling back to them over and over again, for example, the very idea that we think with things right, that we're talking about, that's an idea that I've come across in many, many resources at this point, academic pay bursts, books etc. So I have a note dedicated to that idea, I keep coming back to that note and expanding it, growing it over time, right. So I don't do it with the period periodicity of something like the trees, you know that change in the seasons. But I do it whenever I encounter another idea that that relates to that one. So that's a big part of this, that you, you come back to your, quote unquote, plants, and you work with them, you nurture them, you add nutrients to the soil, you water them, you prune them. And it's the same thing like you keep coming back to this. And it's it becomes like you're working space, you're working space for ideas.
**Andy Parker**
Really nice analogy, just kind of throughout, I think, certainly a lot more palatable than some from kind of other spaces. I think there are references throughout most of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Lebouf, about Google and what Google really is, and how the monetisation of search came from what they classified as being the data exhaust, you know, it was fumes; it was just crud that was going out into the atmosphere of no value, until someone looked at it and went, well hang on a minute, what's in the particulates of that exhaust, maybe there's actually something of interest in there, there could be nutrients of interest in there. And I think about that a lot with changing that mindset into thinking about like the garden space. Something that would be really great is if you could take us through the workflow that you described in the book a little bit about the structure of a note, because, like you say, there are things, the examples that you provide, through the book are kind of text-heavy to one of a better description. But I think that's more because that's the language that we use most of the moment to be able to find stuff, because it's the medium that we have to interact with computers right now, right? But there's, there's this kind of like structure and the idea of like, how do you describe it? It's that minimum viable note, right? The minimum viable note, and then the sort of definition of an evergreen note, and how you organise the information around it. So you've given a couple of examples to us already about things like certain books that you read, and what might go into a note, there's about a book, is it a large Word document? That's one note file, that I put all of the comments and things that would otherwise have been pencilled into the margins. Or on a sticker tab that I've put on a page, things like that? Or is it that each one of those things is its own individual block? What does it kind of look like?
**Jorge Arango**
Yeah, that's it. It's a good way to talk about I'll pull the zoom lens back a little bit. And they'll say that there are three basic principles, or you can think of them as, like, rules for doing this work. So you might think, you know, this is all really, it sounds like really complicated, like what Jorge is describing here is like, oh, my gosh, this sounds like work. So yeah, I mean, you do have to put work into it. But the basic principles, the basic rules are fairly simple, there's three of them. So, the first principle is that you should aim to make short notes. And I'll tell you about all three of these. Let me just spell them out. The first one is that you should aim to make short notes. The second principle is that you should connect your notes. And then the third principle is that you should nurture notes. So what you're asking here speaks to the first principle, making short notes, it goes back to what I was talking about earlier, that the way that many of us learn to take notes was by focusing them on a single subject or a single need, or, I mean, I don't know how to frame it. But the example that I use is when I was in school, as a kid, I would take lecture notes for whatever class I was in, right? So if it was a science class or whatever, I would write down on a, on a binder in a binder, I would write down notes for what the teacher was saying. And the teacher might have been talking about lots of different ideas throughout the class. And these, and I was just capturing them in this. This one note that I'd made for that one class, that one lecture. At the end of the lecture, I would have this linear stream of ideas, all kind of like wrapped up in this little container around that one lecture.
**Andy Parker**
And that's a very different thing to what most people stay within that context, which would actually be an abridged transcript. Shin of what's been said. So what you're describing is more of the things that you think about whilst the person's talking, rather than verbatim what they've been saying. Right? That's right.
**Jorge Arango**
That's right. I mean, I don't think there are many people who can capture an entire lecture verbatim, right? I don't think there's anyone that can capture an entire lecture verbatim, right? So yeah, you do some synthesis on the fly. But that, but the main point is that you know, in the average lecture, you'll be exposed to a lot of ideas. And you'll be capturing all of them kind of in this linear sequence around the framing device of the lecture. What I'm suggesting in the book is that to work effectively with these knowledge gardens, you have to train yourself to break up those kinds of monolithic lectures, in this case, lecture notes, but it could be Book Notes, or whatever, you need to train yourself to kind of break them down into their constituent ideas with the understanding that you're going to be elaborating those ideas further down the line, you're going to read the revisiting whatever it is that you're hearing. And you have to develop kind of the this is part of the work, you have to develop the criteria to know well, this idea kind of speaks to me, and there deserves to live on its own. Now, if you're going to do that, if you're going to be capturing these vary, you know, in the book, I say, short notes, but it really is about like making an individual note reflect an individual idea. So, like, make a note around an individual idea. And if you're going to do that, if you've ever done this kind of work before, you realise that if you don't capture a certain amount of context around that idea, when you return to it 18 months later, or five years later, or whatever, you might not know what that was about, or why you should care, right?
So there's this notion that when we are working in user experience design, we are designing something for a user who, by definition, is not you. In this case, you are capturing information for a user who is you, but it's you of the future. You know, so it's like, this is gonna be a different person, in many ways, with different interests. Time will have passed, so you will not have the necessary context to make sense of what it is that you're reading here. Like if you know, if you've ever had it happen, that you run across something or someone in the street, and you scribble something down, and then you know, later that evening, you open the thing, and you're like, oh, my gosh, what was that about? You know, you don't like you can't remember, right, like when you know what I'm talking about. So the notion of a minimum viable note is that you learn to capture these granular ideas, with just enough context, to help future you make sense of what it was about, and why maybe it matters without taking you out of the moment. That's the that's the that's the Kentucky balancing act. Because the challenge here is that if you're reading, for example, you're reading Warren Piece, and then you start making a note about the, you know, the, you know, the contingency of history or whatever, you can easily go down that path and like lose your place in the book, you know, metaphor, kind of metaphorically. And, and we do this in conversation, we do it in, you know, when we're listening to a lecture like our minds can wander, what you want to do is you want to train yourself to capture just enough so that you don't completely befuddle future you but not so much that you are out of the moment, you know that you become distracted. And it's a balancing act. But it's it's a skill that I think that we can work on and we kind of have to work on if you're going to manage a knowledge garden of this sort,
**Andy Parker**
Something that I kept reflecting on was my experiences of trying to introduce and adopt good practices for note taking. And there's been a number of books that I think had been quite popular over the years, back of the Napkin, the first one that comes to my mind, and ketch Notestes, which probably really wasn't that long after, but this idea of using like prime and rudimentary shapes that were familiar with and creating these visual languages with things, and I've tried that a number of times and where I fall down every time is that, particularly with the concept of sketch notes, I've tried going to the conference and sitting in the lecture. And what I realised was that I ended up actually creating this like satellite TV lag. My brain is now 30 seconds behind the live presentation that's right in front of me because I'm still drawing a circle to represent a planet that someone was talking about. Whatever it might be. And so I lose that presence of thoughts. The idea of then trying to, I've tried to do the same thing with notes. And, like, I'm sitting here right now with good notes, which I on the iPad that I desperately try to utilise. But having then read through your book, I became increasingly frustrated at my realisation of the one thing that I wanted it to do that I kind of knew that it wasn't going to do when I started was I have absolutely zero way of being able to search through my handwritten texts, to find the page that I made the doodles on about the thing that I wanted to look at, in two months time.
So, breaking down those disciplines into those smaller parts, I find really fascinating because it's, I think, just the nature of industry and discipline if I think about research, repositories of knowledge, information management in general, and the way that we're trying to create these structures, and it just, it got me excited, because what it made me think about is perhaps the reason why these things are falling down and not being as successful as they should be, within sort of creative industries or, or just generally technology is that we don't have the personal disciplines and practice in place. Yet, in thinking in that same kind of way. I'm not sure where I'm going with that. But like, I just, I think your idea of this, this notion of how making a repeatable, practicable process for note taking and organising. More importantly, it's about curation and organisation. And there's a there's a few sort of like concepts like the idea of making containers and tagging and metadata, that started to get introduced. And I know what you're saying at the beginning of, like, God, someone's gonna listen to this and just go like, Whoa, how many day's worth of work have I got here for organising my notes? But it's being like, say, it's being able to see the value at the end of it, you're teaching at the moment, I'm curious too, to know whether you have had students adopt any of these methods, and whether that has changed the way that they continue their personal development and organise their knowledge and their ability to recall that knowledge?
**Jorge Arango**
well, I'll say this. I'm teaching at the moment. Like I was saying earlier in the graduate program and design, I'm not teaching the methods from the book in that course. But I have taught the material in the book, I've co-taught a workshop with my friend Karl Fast, who is very knowledgeable, and all this stuff that I was talking about earlier about the extended mind, his book with Steven Anderson figure it out is, is well worth seeking out, particularly for folks in the design space, I have co-taught with him the material in the workshop, and it has helped people. Now, I want to circle back to a couple of distinctions that you raised there. Because I think it's worth talking about, particularly for designers. One distinction is around capturing written notes using words versus capturing ideas, or, you see, I'm using the word capturing, but again, that's kind of a trap of language. It's thinking with notes that we should be talking about, right? And we think we can think with notes by writing things down in words, we can think by taking pictures, you know, and I'm a big fan of sketch-noting. I had Mike Rohde on my podcast. And that is a modality of thinking. It's a modality of thinking that I sometimes employ for certain types of projects.
I find that I'm unable, much like you were describing, I'm unable to do something like capture a lecture by introducing a lot of visual elements just because I draw more slowly than I write. And like you, I started falling behind, right? So I've come to recognise that for me. And I say for me because everyone is different than this way for me. I can employ drawing more effectively in other contexts than then in capturing lecture notes. And if I'm working on a design project, you know, and I'm designing something that will manifest, say, as a user interface, you know, like some kind of navigation system or whatever, you know, sketching out my sketching out how that thing might work at the screen level is much more effective and much more powerful than trying to describe it with words, right? So, so it's so, my point is, if you buy into this notion that you think with things, then having kind of like a taxonomy of thinking methods with your hands. Having that in your, as part of your, like your toolkit can lead you to be more intentional about how you think with these things. So that, you know, it's like, well, if I'm going to capture a lecture, maybe I do that with words, versus, you know, if I'm sketching user interface, and I do that with pictures. So that's one thing. The other distinction that you introduced there, which is worth talking about, is a distinction about tools. So, there are different tools. Some tools are more effective at this than others. I did notice that you haven't, that you were kind of waving an Apple pencil, so I assumed you were taking notes with your iPad. I don't use good notes, and I use another similar tool called Notability. Notability lets me write and draw by hand on my iPad. It does have a text search, so I can search my handwriting. I believe good notes do as well. So you might want to check into that. And it might depend on how legible your handwriting is.
**Andy Parker**
My chicken scratch is terrible. So that's probably not going to help.
**Jorge Arango**
Well, there you go. I mean, it, you know, again, so many of these things depend, right? I mean, these, these, these, these digital hand writing apps, for me, they're a boon. Because I think differently when I'm writing on paper than I do when I'm typing on a keyboard, right, and that's a different modality. And it's one that sometimes I'm like, you know, I really feel like using my hand to draw something or write something by hand, and, and that's how I want to think about this, I don't want to go type it out in an outline, or whatever. And it's really great to have these tools that bring so much to the party, right? One thing that they bring to the party is that my entire collection of handwritten notes can be with me anywhere I am. I'm not dependent on this shelf stacked with physical notebooks and other capabilities that I can search for them, right? I can search for things. So I can also take photographs or screenshots, and immediately import them into the thing that I'm working with. And I can annotate those, right, like, that's incredible. You can't do that with moleskin. Notebook, right?
So they have amazing capabilities. Now one capability that a lot of these, most of these, I would say handwriting app. note-taking apps don't have is the ability to link from one node to another easily, right? So, like, if I'm, again, the example of the book, if I'm, if I'm reading a book, and I'm like capturing an idea, and I started another node for that idea, I can easily create a link between those two. Right.
So that's, that's why my primary kind of my primary means for working with information in my knowledge garden is a text based tool. It's obsidian, which uses markdown. And it's very, very kind of text-oriented. I do import my handwritten notes in Obsidian just to keep them all in one place. But text, you know, has capabilities that give us some superpowers that you can easily gain with handwritten notes. Now, I expect that tools are going to get better. Like when you were describing the the whole kind of fine ability issue with handwritten stuff, and particularly sketch notes, right, like because it's one thing for the system to not read your handwriting. Right now, I don't think there are any systems that you can use to search for drawings. But with AI, you can imagine that coming, right?
You know, you draw drawn, like, let's say that, that you drew a, I don't know, a star or like a planet with, you know, moons and stuff. You could imagine an AI where you could describe the thing you're looking for, and it knows to, like, you know, look at your pictures and figure it out. Like I can't. I can't imagine that that's coming at some point. Right? tools give us incredible capabilities. And this now talks about like the final thing I wanted to say here, prompted by your comments, is because people have been thinking with their hands and on in the world with things for so long. Particularly like we've been taking notes on paper for many, many, many centuries, right? This is not something new If we have expectations about how these things work, how digital systems are going to work, that are based on non-digital means of working with information. And we do that because we need a handle a mental handle on how to work with these things. And, you know, if we design a system that has recognisable metaphors and things that look like the affordances, we're used to, then we know how to work with it. It becomes, you know, quote, unquote, intuitive, right? But it's possible to go too far with that and lose access to the capabilities that digital systems bring to the table. In particular, the ability to link things right and to create dynamic views of stuff, right? Like if, like, if you think of your knowledge graph, you know, if they're not the knowledge garden as a kind of graph, like a knowledge graph, it's a sort of database of information. Like you can query these things, right, and you can find new relationships, you can, you can generate insights, right? Like you were talking about research, you know, wanting to generate insights. This is something that when you capture information digitally, we have tools to do that. But they're not tools that are recognisable as note-taking tools. So this is part of the this is part of the challenge here. In order to make the most use of these systems, we have to leave behind the comfortable metaphors of our information management history and start thinking in these kinds of more abstract terms that allow us to work with information that is no longer beholden to atoms.
**Andy Parker**
It’s worth emphasising here something which I think is coming through very strongly in what you're describing: the additional shift that's required, particularly in knowledge information management, if you look at that field as a whole, is that is archival. Its intention is almost to be forgotten. It's like the sanctity of this thing happened, and we're keeping it for prosperity. Whereas what you're describing sounds, to me, far more like wanting to utilise this information and this knowledge, frequently. The biggest example of this that I don't know how many people would actually know about it, but is is Jarrett's brain. So this idea of an individual who effectively went bananas with notetaking and made it visibly public. It seemingly makes no sense, but for them, is is hugely beneficial, and they regularly go back to it right and and actually think about those connections in the relationships for improving personal development.
**Jorge Arango**
that, yeah, definitely. I think you're referring to Jerry's brain, right? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Jerry Michalski is profiled in the book. And yes, to your point, like the value of this is not archival, although we have to acknowledge that yet again, this is a superpower that's digital brings us right, that we have so much storage space with computers today, that you can keep everything, it's like, why not keep it, it might be that the thing you're capturing is something that you will never revisit again, that's fine, it's fine. Just keep it you know, you might need it, you don't know, you might be taking down stuff that that you find interesting now without any expectation of using it in the future. But it's pretty clear at this point that we are going to be working, with artificial intelligences, plural, right? in various capacities.
We already are, you know, and if you have the discipline of thinking on paper in air quotes here, right, like in this case, like thinking with a computer in the way that I'm describing, you're going to have this advantage that you will have done your thinking in a medium that language models particularly can work with, you know, and all of a sudden, you have access to an assistant that can tap into your thinking and help you work with it and amplify it and find new connections and do the sorts of things that we usually rely on other people for or even on our own kind of intuition. Right. So it's, it's, it's, there's tremendous potential there. But you have to start with doing the work and doing the work in a medium that the computer can work with. And right now, like I said, That's text. I can imagine it evolving beyond that, but that's how I think about this notion of of archival stuff. I don't fret too much about it. I whenever I write something down, I do it with The assumption that I'm not. I don't care if I come back to it. In the distant future, or even in the near future, I'm just thinking of, I'm doing my thinking on the screen here and writing about it is going to help me figure out what it is that I think about this. If I can use it later, fine. If a computer can help me with it later, fine. But that's not the point. The point is that I'm learning about it.
**Andy Parker**
if people would like to talk to you more about note-taking and thinking with notes, where can they find you?
**Jorge Arango**
Well, the best place is my website; I have a website at jarango.com. And from there, you can find links to a bunch of other places, you know, Twitter slash x, or LinkedIn, Mastodondon. There are links there to my podcast. I have a newsletter as well. All that stuff is linked to there. So, the website is the best place.
**Andy Parker**
And Duly Noted is available pretty much everywhere and anywhere, right?
**Jorge Arango**
You can get it where fine books are sold. But I strongly recommend that you get it from RosenfeMediadia, a great publishing house that's been serving the design community for many, many years at this point. You will have the advantage of getting a beautiful book if you buy the printed version and getting DRM-free ebooks in various formats if you go that way. And you'll also be supporting a small business, which we all love.
**Andy Parker**
Thank you for listening to the UX Coach podcast. You can find all of the previous episodes at the UX coach.com. And of course, wherever you're listening to this right now, assuming it's not on the website, I'm going to be taking a break from recording over the coming months and look forward to being back in the spring where I will be sharing more fantastic conversations with people from this really wonderful community. If you would like to be a guest on the show, I would love to have you it might seem like you have nothing to share, but I assure you that we have all got something that is of value to somebody else. So please get in touch and head over to theuxcoach.com.