Info Architecture
The brilliant Alex Wright has just published his first book, Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages.
In Alex’s words:
The book is about, roughly, the history of information: exploring the ways people have collected, organized and shared their intellectual capital [over] the years. It delves into, among other things, early oral traditions, the invention of writing, classical libraries, medieval alchemy, Victorian bibliography and early computer networks. Ultimately, the book is about the relationship between information technology and social change.
From the early draft I read, I recommend the book very highly. Anyone working in or around information (i.e. you) will undoubtedly learn something new and valuable. Congratulations, Alex!
What are the possible ways to organize things?
For information, there are 7. For interfaces, there are at least 4, identified on a mailing list: Things, Tasks, Tools, and Time. Can you think of others?
Peter Morville has your Information Architecture summer reading list. Get cracking!
What are the differences between a vocabulary, a taxonomy, a thesaurus, an ontology, and a meta-model? (via xplane)
This has been written about to death, but I really think email clients need to be organized around faceted classification. It’s actually surprising given how data and context rich emails are that email clients have lagged behind photo and audio file browsers in the sophistication of their classification schemes.
Search (across and within mail folders) is a major improvement, but it sure would be helpful to assign keywords to individual messages and then be able to filter by keyword or date or author etc (and the distinction between filter and sort is an important one). Mike’s slider idea and interfaces like this make so much sense for email. I assume someone will email me a link to Lifestreams, but I’ve always been turned off by the way Lifestreams privileges Date over other organizing principles (although it probably makes more sense for email than other types of documents). There are other projects, but still I’m using folders within folders to manage most of my documents.
This is not to say that I see this as a lost cause; it’s easy to see that metadata-organized file browsing is around the corner. I think I’m just surprised how far behind the major email clients are.
Update: Thanks to Andrew for the link to Remail, a next-gen email project out of IBM. While many of the ideas (e.g. threads) have surfaced elsewhere, I haven’t seen anything like Remail’s Thread Arcs feature. I also like that it can incorporate RSS feeds. And, as expected, there’s a faceted classification mechanism called Collections.
Alex Wright’s The Sociobiology of Information Architecture is well worth reading. Alex examines the evolutionary history of knowledge exchange and memory, and distills useful guidance for current IAs:
Today’s information architects are the heirs of yesterday’s scribes, clerks, and clerics: laboring to acquire, store, and disseminate knowledge for the sake of humanity, but ultimately in the service of institutions….And he talks about ants, too!
What evolution teaches us is this: in order to understand the deeper roots of our need to generate and manage information, we need to look beyond the individual organism [or institution -ns], towards the social groups that drive the mechanisms of evolution and adaptation for all species.
From the AIIA, some sweet little IA Elevator Pitches
Making Cents from Information Architecture… Why is it so hard to define ROI for Information Architecture? How many articles have you seen like this that set out to cost-justify IA, but end up just kinda saying that IA is a good thing?
In Bottoms Up: Designing complex, adaptive systems, Peter Morville offers an (ironically top-down) approach to designing from the bottom up. I seem to remember Peter Merholz making a lot of the same points under the phrase the “tyranny of hierarchy” (no permalink, but you can search for “tyranny” on that page). The basic idea is that monolithic hierarchies do violence to any more-than-a-little complex information space, which reminds me of my favorite classical mythology phrase: the Procrustean Bed.
Anyone interested in Information Architecture (in its many forms and levels of practice) will want to take a look at the newly-launched Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture…
The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture (�AIfIA�) serves to advance the design of shared information environments. We support a global community infrastructure that connects people, ideas, content, and tools. Through research, education, advocacy and community service, we promote excellence within our field and build bridges to related disciplines and organizations.These are smart, involved people, making a serious attempt to establish IA as a serious discipline. Gosh, Web design is all growed up!
Boxes and Arrows: Because we can. Right on, guys!
jjg.net: ia/recon: “Research benefits architecture most when it seeks to define the problem we must solve. Research benefits architecture least — and can actually produce bad results — when it seeks to define the solution itself.” I can’t agree more.
DENIM 1.0 released… getting there, although I’d say it’s still probably more like version 0.89 than 1.0, but it remains the only real attempt I know of an integrated web prototyping tool (i.e. one that handles site organization, page schematics, and storyboarding in a single document), and for that it gets big points in my book.
Wow, someone must’ve read my last post: the SIGIA list now has an archive! Right on!
A couple of (admittedly wise-ass) observations about the IA community:
1) (one of) the (many) centers of IA discussion, the SIGIA list, has no archive. This is unspeakably ironic. What it has in lieu of an archive is many, many, many opinions about the ideal way to structure an archive (which I’d link to, but, well, there’s no archive).
2) the logo for boxesandarrows.com symbolically represents (to me) the cumulative effect of all the many long threads trying to define IA…
The IA community, order-loving as it is, wants nothing more than to put itself in a box.
The virtue of irregularity, the limits of structure: Hypertext Gardens
Right on! Eric figured out a way to have a community-editable stylesheet for IAwiki: IAwiki: IAwikiStyleSheets. Take that, Palatino! (well, until some yahoo changes the font to Tekton or something).
Online Journalism Review: Taxonomy Software to the Rescue (via iaslash)
OK, I’ll give it a try.. IAwiki and Recent changes And, I’m sure the Text-formatting rules would be helpful.
Amazon’s new “Look Inside” feature is just plain smart. This is the largest barrier to impulse-buying books online for me.
Janice Crotty Fraser: Taking a Content Inventory
I’m on a reading fast this week, but if I wasn’t I’d definitely read this Feed/Plastic thread about David Gelernter’s ongoing desktop shenanigans.
Navigation on the web. And it even has pictures! (via brightlycoloredfood)
Nice argus whitepaper on “Evaluating Information Architecture.”
Browsing Amazon’s recommendations for me, I noticed a little “Why was I recommended this” link and clicked it. Apparently I was recommended “Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris because I added a Fila Brazillia album and the Makita LS1013 Dual Slide Compound 10” Miter Saw to my Wish List at some point. Er… WHAT?
Peter’s slideshow—How Websites Learn: Information Architecture that Adapts to Use—looks like it was a good’un.
Just noticed this IA glossary on the Argus site. Seems like a worthwhile start, but damn I wish it wasn’t pdf.
In case you haven’t been there in a while, the Microsoft usability research site has been updated with, among other things, a paper that peter found long ago, but which was taken offline: Kirsten Risden, Toward usable browse hierarchies for the Web (.doc file).
Which brings up something that’s always annoyed me: when I want to link to a book title, I (like you and everybody else) always use the Amazon.com page for the book (unless I can easily find a good publisher’s or author’s page). And I hate it.. why should I link to some big store when what I really want to do is point folks to the definitive record for that particular book? I’d rather link somewhere like the Library of Congress record (e.g. A Pattern Language), but the LOC site is just a travesty of sloth and confusion and doesn’t provide any useful information anyway. So by default Amazon becomes the world’s library. Feh!
I like the idea of design patterns and pattern languages in general, and I love the book A Pattern Language, but I generally find them more useful as something to browse than as a reference tool. I think all the various (competing!) attempts to define a pattern language for web design need to keep this in mind. My guess is that they need to be written more holistically; as a survey rather than a dictionary.
Marc Rettig: Architecture for use: ethnography & information architecture, which addresses both the emerging field of experience design/information architecture/whatever and gives a really nice overview of ethnography/contextual inquiry.
Here’s a whole lot of thinkin’ about Designing Navigable Information Spaces. I found it on this MIT information architecture site (via Info Design)
Also a lot of great links in the Information Architecture Guide maintained by Argus Associates.
Mappa.Mundi: Demystifying Metadata.
Hidden in this Mapping Web Sites seminar outline are a whole lot of examples of different ways people have chosen to represent web sites, including several site-map research prototypes. It’s ironic that most “way new” site maps are more or less useless for navigation, although they are sometimes useful for other purposes such as measuring the size of different sections of a site.
Awesome: Captain Cursor (hi taylor!) has a new weblog! And he just posted a link to the Atlas of Cybergeography which I had forgotten about, and which I think is very “neat.”