I’ve been reading bits and pieces of storytelling in business-storytelling in organizations, an archived set of materials from a symposium on the subject, hosted at Xerox-PARC.
I’m intrigued by what narrative and story have to do with IA. It isn’t addressed directly as such in this seminar, but there’s plenty that’s applicable.
If you think of an information architecture as a three-dimensional experience of storied language, where some stories are predetermined, some are created by the user, and some are created collaboratively between users, it becomes an Escher-like hall ideas and expression.
The Internet is a huge hall like this, with very little predetermined structure, but an information architect can create structural occasions and opportunities for others to follow. It could be a linear narrative (anything from an ecommerce workflow to a case study walkthrough) or on the other end of the spectrum, a wiki.
If we think of stories in the truly contemporary way, as socially constructed narratives that have as many dimensions and facets as reality itself, and we strip away the atoms and much of the baggage of conventional time and space, is what we are left with something very much like the Internet, or its more popular manifestation, the Web?