Hello. I'm Jason Hobbs, a designer, academic, teacher and speaker living mostly in Johannesburg, SA. This site is about my work and the things I do related to design. Have a read, Abundance by Design
Presentation for UX South Africa, on November 4th, 2020.
Building upon a rethinking of complexity, a lack of appropriate design skills is identified as the primary limitation to ideating effective solutions in and for complexity. In this scenario, scarcity prevails. New theory and practice in information architecture is argued to provide such skills when conducted in design, as a form of design.
This is a radical shift in how IA is usually considered in UX, and beyond, and is long overdue. Because of the near pervasive lack of these skills, a variety of assumptions and myths have come to constrain the otherwise natural abundance to be found in acts of designing.
Despite the importance and need for these new skills, they require enactment with an awareness of a far more troubling form of scarcity. This is the artificial scarcity born of the commodification of the web over the last two decades which has vastly undermined the otherwise inherent abundance and potential of the technology.
In both cases, the young field of UX is challenged to question certain fundamental, and fundamentally flawed, beliefs regarding what is and is not possible by design.
View or download the presentation (3.25 meg .pdf)
