It was lovely to meet Jason Mesut again at PaperCamp on Saturday. This is a quick diagram from our chat about how the tech industry orientates its sense of history.
The horizontal view makes everything seem likes a coherent linear process. A timeline of development of tools and methods that pass from one generation to the next.
From Information Architecture to Interaction Experience Design to User Experience to Product Management. From IA to IX to UX to PM.
A process can be audited. Your perspective can shift easily backwards and forwards.
However, it’s more likely the actuality is vertical. An accretion of ideas over time. One thing on top of another. One thing built over the ruins of another or deliberately demolishing and covering up the past.
Layers of fragments and pasts that only archaeology can examine. Messy and muddy, a history that can only be examined carefully and contextually.
Ghosts and relics of past professional practice pop up now and again. People regret the loss of past cultures and hope that they will be meaningful if displayed and exhibited now (the Agile Manifesto as a British Museum artefact perhaps).
Ironically, I have just started to read Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience and I can’t ignore the fact that User Experience is now extinct too.
Only the machines remain and matter in Product Management.