I finally finished dragging my rear enough to finish a review of Mike Kuniavsky’s Boxes and Arrows: Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research, and it’s posted at that link on the Boxes and Arrows website now.
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I’m sitting in the Taxonomy pre-conference thingie here at the IA Summit. For four years I’ve been wanting to take this one, and even though I have some basics I figured I’d do the whole course. It’s just Friday, the rest of the conference is just…well…regular conference stuff.
Austin is flat. And they have a new building downtown that looks like it came from the set of a Batman movie.
That’s all for now.
Mappa.Mundi Magazine – Memory Palaces
This article summarizes some very important stuff that keeps haunting me as I obsess over how to conceptualize information environments.
I read Frances Yates’ book on The Art of Memory as an undergraduate, and used it as part of a paper I wrote on Vico’s science of the imagination. Since then I keep thinking of this powerful, ancient idea of the “memory palace” and how we still use spatial representations of place in our heads, even when we’re not navigating actual “space.” (An example: when you compare the nutritional information of two snacks, you usually would hold them side by side, looking at the tables printed on their packaging. But if you weren’t able to hold them side by side in real time, you’d unconsciously list the info from product A in your head and compare it in that imagined list’s ‘space’ against product B… )
Anyway, we make these little rooms still, even if we don’t do it on purpose. We especially use them to get around websites and environments that aren’t even physical… making something physical out of them in our imaginations.
I’m about to start trying to visually model one of the largest financial services web properties in the world… and maybe I’m reaching back to this idea like an old friend, or “comfort food” — something to reassure me that what I’m doing isn’t that scary?
Anyway, I really dig the muted post horn reference toward the bottom of this article. Pynchon lives!
Just updated my resume. (pdf download)
And no, I didn’t take the time to figure out the accent HTML code to make “resume” look right. I’m too busy trying to find a job!
One year ago this month, the website for AIFIA finally launched. *sniff*
This is an excellent article:
Boxes and Arrows: We Are All Connected: The Path from Architecture to Information Architecture
I’m still intrigued by the connection, and it’s always been the best way for me to describe what I do to people.
Until I try describing it to architects, or those who are very familiar with architects… who usually say “you don’t wanna call yourself an architect, you’ll give yourself a bad name” (grin). But if you ignore the high-style version of architecture, buildings as relatively useless sculpture, and get back to basics, as this article discusses somewhat, there are powerful parallels… I mean, it really *is* architecture, but the way it *should* be, in my oh-so-humble opinion.
Thanks to B&A for this and the other excellent articles they’ve published recently.
(Ok, does my plug get me some more time on the book review I was supposed to do???)
Peter Van Dijck’s new book arrived today. And it’s a handsome, nicely produced volume. I’m proud to have a case study in there! For more info see: information architecture for designers – the site for the book.
But looking at this reminded me the challenges I faced on the job described, several years ago now. And, I wondered…do I still do this work? Does anybody care about how the human interactions in their organizations can be healed and evolved through careful architecture of information environments?
SRC was the first and last client to both ‘get’ it and to understand how it would help them, and then go so far as to make the necessary bits take place fully enough to see great results. Others have axed major parts of the architectures we propose in order to save time or not piss somebody off, then they end up with a very mediocre solution that only barely gets them by.
And that hasn’t changed.
But, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
25 Theses of Information Architecture
- People need information.
- More importantly, people need the right information at the right time.
- Without human intervention, information devolves into entropy and chaos.
- The Internet has changed how we live with information. It has made ubiquitous the once rare entity: the shared information environment.
- Shaping information to be relevant and timely requires specialized human work. Doing so for a globally shared environment that is itself made of information is a relatively new kind of specialized human work.
- This work is both a science and an art.
- This work is an act of architecture: the structuring of raw information into shared information environments with useful, navigable form that resists entropy and reduces confusion.
- This is a new kind of architecture that designs structures of information rather than of bricks, wood, plastic and stone.
- People live and work in these structures, just as they live and work in their homes, offices, factories and malls. These places are not virtual: they are as real as our own minds.
- Many people spend most of their waking hours in these spaces. As the numbers of physical workers decline and knowledge workers increase, more and more people will live, work, share, collaborate, learn and play in these environments for more and more of their lives.
- There is already too much information for us to comprehend easily. And each day there will only be more of it, not less. Inexorably, information drowns in its own mass. It needs to breathe, and the air it needs is relevance.
- One goal of information architecture is to shape information into an environment that allows users to create, manage and share its very substance in a framework that provides semantic relevance.
- Another goal of information architecture is to shape the environment to enable users to better communicate, collaborate and experience one another.
- The latter goal is more fundamental than the former: information exists only in communities of meaning. Without other people, information no longer has context, and no longer informs. It becomes mere data, less than dust.
- Therefore, information architecture is about people first, and technology second.
- All people have a right to know where they are and where they are going and how to get what they need. People naturally seek places that provide these essential needs. Any environment that ignores this natural law will attract and retain fewer people.
- The interface is a window to information. Even the best interface is only as good as the shape of the information behind it. (The converse is also true: even the most comprehensively shaped information is only as useful as its interface. For this reason, interface design and information architecture are mutually dependent.)
- Just as the Copernican revolution changed the paradigm for more than astronomy, the Internet has changed our paradigm for more than just technology. We now expect all information environments to be as accessible, as immediate, and as total.
- Just because information architecture happens mostly on the Internet today, it doesn’t mean that will be the case tomorrow.
- Information architecture accomplishes its task with whatever tools necessary.
- These tools are being fashioned by many people, including information scientists, artists, librarians, designers, anthropologists, architects, writers, engineers, programmers & philosophers. They all bring different perspectives, and they all add flavor to the stew. They are all necessary.
- These tools come in many forms and methods, including controlled vocabularies, mental modeling, brainstorming, ethnography, thesauri, human-computer interaction, and others. Some tools are very old, and some are very new. Most are still waiting to be invented.
- Information architecture acknowledges that this practice is bigger than any single methodology, tool or perspective.
- Information architecture is first an act, then a practice, then a discipline.
- Sharing the practice grows the discipline, and makes it stronger.
At the IA Summit last weekend, I was part of a panel on tools for IA. Here’s the presentation bits in a ppt deck, handsomely hosted by Nick Fink under his domain-moniker: IA Summit 2003: IA Tools and Technology.
It’s always fun to think of slippery words like facilitator and think about how they’re put together… like, “facile” isn’t really the most positive word I can think of, but it’s about ease, which isn’t necessarily negative, and if you’re a facilitator, it sounds like you’re doing something very nice, modestly enabling. Anyway, here I am in cloudy Portland, Oregon, tucked into my hotel room (a “facility”) and listening to the news on CNN as I type, where the term “facile” actually applies nicely: there’s a certain blissful ease with which the news is being reported about the war. One anchor actually referred to the conflict as “The Big Dance.” If that isn’t the nastiest sort of unearned ease of affect, I don’t know what is.
But, hey, enough about that. Why am I here? Well, I’m here for the AIFIA | Information Architecture Leadership Seminar of course! Where I am a “facilitator” — which is like being a “dictator,” but more about making things easier on others (“facili…”), and less about being a … well, you know.
Never been to Portland before. There have been protestors arrested, squatting in the streets here. But it’s pretty… reminds me of Louisville, if Louisville had a rocky range of home-spotted hills surrounding the river. It’s actually like Louisville, KY and Asheville, NC squished into one. Though I probably would think differently if I were here in, say, January.
For some reason ‘love your hearth’ seemed a very Christopher Alexander-ish thing to say in the title. Though I’m still a neophyte when it comes to his writings… I’ve read only small chunks of his gorgeous A Timeless Way of Building and other amazing books. I’m thinking about delving in again now that I’ve run across this excellent synopsis of his work.
At my company, we design our own business cards. I ran out of mine, and so it was time to make more… i made a new one using a painting I discovered, Kandinsky’s “Etages” (“Storeys”).
I think it’s fabulous as a kind of mandala for IA. It’s sort of of obvious once you see it. At least to me. What do you think?
250k.
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Welcome to inkblurt, the online home of Andrew Hinton. Read something, drop a comment, or say hello!
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