Notes from 51st International STC Conference
Baltimore, Maryland, May 9-12, 2004

Closing Session:
Information Overload: a Love Story

Thom Haller

Haller is a technical communicator with 20 years' experience. Haller is an expert information design architect and a long-time teacher.

Session Description: The speaker focused on how the labels we use to define ourselves and our jobs limit our potential and suggested ways in which technical communicators can navigate their future in the profession. He used familiar props such as hula hoops and Play-Doh to dramatize how he discovered the value of communication.

• It helps to love your job, to have some joy in your work from day to day.
• 60% of us have worked in a cubicle; 93% would like to see an "improved working environment"
• But we must make our separate peace with "cubicle hell," to find passion for our work despite the limitations.
• Haller presented a very entertaining autobiographical sketch on what brought him into illustration, teaching, and technical communication.
• Intercollegiate debate taught him the value of structuring information.
• He used Play Doh to represent the two sides of the brain: one unfettered and creative, the other limiting and negative
• Studied rhetoric at Ohio State: how labels and structures affect human thought, but he couldn't find rhetorician in the want ads – leaving him with the challenge of what he was going to do for a living.
• TLA = three-letter acronym (FBI, CIA, etc.)
• "You only understand something new relative to something you already understand."
• His passion was for structuring information and finding innovative visual ways to communicate... so he became an "information architect."
• His vision: structure information so people appreciate the experience.