Four information architects walk into a Chinese restaurant.

Last Thursday night, over dinner at Eat First with Lou, Mike Lee, and Aaron Watkins, as the conversation meandered from information architecture, young designers, microcelebrity, Movable Type, the Ted Kennedy question, the information networks of museum collections, and raising five-year-olds, a billboard on the back of a truck rolled past the restaurant window on rain-drenched H Street. Dozens of bullet holes were painted on it, and printed in all-caps Impact were the words “FREE RANGE TIME.”

In the space of the last several weeks gliding recklessly above the clouds, papers and case studies and Movable Type templates disconnected from the earth, it was tempting to call that dinner a reprieve or a distraction. But these experiences are also indispensable for perspective, the necessary context for independent professionals toiling, certainly underappreciated and often alone, in a nigh boundless profession. That night, it was free range time (I once knew it as free-association hour), and while it lacked the structure and rigor of the workplace or the seminar, to deem it a euphemism for loafing is naïve and disrespectful of the range of thought and power of metaphors. In that alighting with a plate of Szechuan beef and three colleagues, with the yawning chasm between the day’s labor and my professional pursuits in full view, I remembered the relevance of these lofted abstractions, remembered why the work is worth it.

(I should note the word interdisciplinary peppered this conversation with unsurprising frequency.)