After an 8-year hiatus, the Journal of Information Architecture has resumed publishing. The Spring 2021 issue is slowly arriving; its first three articles are thought-provoking examinations of algorithmic persuasion, the architecture of music, and more.

In news that confirms product managers’ worst fears, research published in Nature suggests that humans really, really love to add complexity. Subjects presented with a variety of problem-solving exercises consistently preferred solutions that added complexity to the scenario rather than eliminating it – even when the complex solutions were less effective.

Paul Ford writes eloquently about the tension between big, alluring tech revolutions and more sustainable organic innovation.

According to the results of this December 2020 survey, best practices for Design Tokens are still fuzzy. Using them to capture highly variable design metadata in complex systems is increasingly popular, but questions like “Who owns their defintion?” and “Can they be standardized across organizations?” remain unanswered.

Detailed post-mortems for high-profile digital projects are rare; this look at the key decisions that shaped 2020’s COVIDTracking Project demonstrate how critical a team’s foundational principles can be.

Working with systems rather than individual components or tasks means stepping back to see the big picture. Whether the system is biological, mechanical, economic, or social, self-reinforcing cycles are a common piece of that picture.

Building a design system is hard; keeping track of what every other team is doing is practically impossible. Component Gallery does the heavy lifting for you, cataloguing publicly available design systems, presenting a unified browsing interface for the different components they share, and calling out vocabulary digressions that can mask otherwise similar work.

Down in the dumps over the turnaround time for your enterprise content initiatives? “According to internal Pentagon communications, it took U.S. Cyber Command 22 days to finalize and post the meme.” Metrics are hard for the government, too: according to the report, “the graphics may not be shaping adversary behavior.”

ProPublica breaks down the elements of their new article page template. Key features included a smorgasbord of header variations, editorial control over treatment and placement for embedded media, and automated generation of image variations based on focal points with optional per-breakpoint overrides. It’s a good look at their efforts to polish the key elements of their primary content type.

The old joke is that every successful organization has at least one secret, load-bearing spreadsheet. Custom spreadsheets are often the spackle and Krazy Glue of enterprise, plugging the gaps that “real software” isn’t nimble enough to fill. “If you want to see the future of B2B software, look at what Excel users are hacking together in spreadsheets today.”