Peter Morville's Blog: Intertwingled

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is a brilliant exploration of the hidden lives of fungi and of the many ways they transgress and confound our categories and mental models. What is it like to be a fungus? (3) Fungi are everywhere, but they are easy to miss. (3) They are eating rock, making soil, digestingKeep reading

The Tell-Tale Brain by V. S. Ramachandran explores the neuroscience behind perception, synesthesia, blindsight, empathy, belief, consciousness, and creativity. It is impossible to understand how the brain works without also understanding how it evolved. (xiv) In biological systems there is a deep unity between structure, function, and origin. (xiv) Nature is full of nonlinear phenomenaKeep reading

In Connectome (2012), Sebastian Seung describes our audacious effort to map the brain — to understand what makes us unique, from our personalities to mental afflictions. Inside every one of our skulls lies an organ so vast in its complexity [100 billion neurons] that it might as well be infinite. (x) A connectome is theKeep reading

In The Moral Circle (2025), philosopher Jeff Sebo calls for a revolution in ethics, arguing that we should expand our “moral circle” to include insects, AI systems, and microbes. Many legal systems divide the world into “persons,” who have the capacity for legal rights, and “things,” which lack this capacity. (1) [We] classify humans (andKeep reading

Creativity (2023) by Mark Runco is an academic textbook that summarizes research on the development, expression, and enhancement of creativity and divergent thinking. Book Notes I’m interested in everyday creative problem solving. For instance — “what to do, when and how, why and with whom” — is a universal problem. We redefine and reorder tasksKeep reading

As I work on Natural Information Architecture, I’m sharing notes and quotes from my sources of inspiration and provocation. As always, your questions and suggestions are welcome. Ecopsychology (1995) is a collection of essays, edited by Roszak, Gomes, and Kanner, focused on ecopsychology, a new field at the crossroads of ecology and psychology. A PsychologicalKeep reading

As I work on Natural Information Architecture, I’m sharing notes and quotes from my sources of inspiration and provocation. As always, your questions and suggestions are welcome. In Information Anxiety (1989), Richard Saul Wurman explains (on the front cover to reduce the reader’s anxiety) that “information anxiety is produced by the ever-widening gap between whatKeep reading

As I work on Natural Information Architecture, I’m sharing notes and quotes from my sources of inspiration and provocation. As always, your questions and suggestions are welcome. In Surfaces and Essences, Hofstadter and Sander claim that analogy is the core of all thinking, analogies are categories, and categories are mental models that evolve. Without conceptsKeep reading

As I work on Natural Information Architecture, I’m sharing notes and quotes from my sources of inspiration and provocation. As always, your questions and suggestions are welcome. On Intelligence (2005) by Jeff Hawkins was a source of inspiration for my book on the design of paths and goals, Planning for Everything (2018). All our knowledgeKeep reading

After a rough start, Animal Book Club in Charlottesville, Virginia is a happy success. I tell our origin story so that you might create an animal book club in your community. Merlin (2025) To begin, we partnered with our public library. Catherine Fae volunteered to co-host. We vigorously promoted our book club via event calendars,Keep reading