We began serving on the board of the Information Architecture Institute on October 2, 2010. Week after week, we did very little but bicker. We had little if any experience working together, and at least in my case, no experience whatsoever directing a non-profit organization.
Everybody involved had a flurry of ideas and initiatives for what they wanted to do with their board tenure. Most conspicuously, everybody had pet priorities couched in private understanding.
It was clear that in order to collaborate we needed a common language, and it was ultimately convenient that manufacturing common language is kind of what I do.
On one of our weekly conference calls in late January 2011, we invited Thomas Vander Wal to talk to us about the original purpose and objectives of the institute. Immediately afterward, I sketched out this:
A week or two later, we took this image to Iceland where we put it on the wall for the purpose of focusing our attention while we sat in a hotel basement for (most of) two days.
We did get out a little bit, though.
The fundamental relationships in the diagram didn't change much, though some of the wording did and so did the positions of the relationships. There is some significance to the left and right panels but we're not quite sure what it is yet.
In addition to the relationships in which the Institute serves as a mediator, we also added two direct relationships: one to business leaders and one to other service organizations. The only thing left to do was formalize the image, which I did in time for the IA Summit, to be printed onto a card.
Of course, the back of the card was a little barren, so I wrote some copy for it. This was probably the easiest copy I've ever written. A single draft, started as a text file and subedited directly in Illustrator, which I'll reproduce here:
In my admittedly biased opinion, this artifact is an excellent start under the aegis of the Institute's new working motto: