Props to Gunner. He’s been saying this all along. It just took over a decade for me to fully understand — and apply it to my work.
Over the last week or so, it’s become clearer that how I structure and store my work matters a lot to my ability to be effective an efficient. I’ve always paid a lot of attention to information architecture and file nomenclature, but now I’m taking it a step further.
I was going to call this “data first” or “focus on the data”. But, then I wondered, what about “data centric”? I do human-centered design. But what does it really mean to center something? So I went to look it up. (I do this a lot when I write: get really pedantic about the definition of words.) Google returned this as the first hit;
Data centric refers to an architecture where data is the primary and permanent asset, and applications come and go. In the data centric architecture, the data model precedes the implementation of any given application and will be around and valid long after it is gone — Dave McComb. (2016). The Data-Centric Revolution: Data-Centric vs. Data-Driven.
OMG. Yes. So much this. I’ve heard Gunner say the same thing. Repeatedly. The corollaries: Make sure there’s an export function. It’s not a matter of if you will break up with your tech. It’s just a matter of when.
But what’s new, and has emerged from my obsession with Airtable, is structuring everything. And making it easy to see and improve that structure, and to work with and display/share my data. So much of my work is re-usable chunks.
This means the following can be transferred to a database and then served up in different ways depending on what people need: