Information Architecture

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Explain IA and win a thousand bucks!

January 13, 2010 by Andrew | 2 comments

Peter Morville and the IA Institute have joined forces with some excellent sponsors to host a contest. To wit:

In this contest, you are invited to explain information architecture. What is it? Why is it important? What does it mean to you? Some folks may offer a definition in 140 characters or less, while others will use this opportunity to tell a story (using text, pictures, audio, and/or video) about their relationship to IA.

Be sure to note the fine print lower on the Flickr page (where there’s also a link to a free prize!):

Our goals are to engage the information architecture community (by fostering creativity and discussion) and advance the field (by evolving our definitions and sharing our stories). We believe this can be a positive, productive community activity, and a whole lot of fun. We hope you do too!

I’m glad to see most of the chatter around this has been positive. But there are, of course, some nay-sayers — and the nays tend to ask a question along the lines of this: “Why is the IA Institute having to pay people to tell it what Information Architecture is?”

I suspect the contest would come across that way only if you’re already predisposed to think negatively of IA as a practice or the Institute as an organization — or people who self-identify as “Information Architects” in general. This post isn’t addressed to those folks, because I’m not interested in trying to sway their opinions — they’re going to think what they want to think.

But just in case others may be wondering what’s up, here’s the deal.

Information architecture is a relatively new community of practice. As technology and the community evolve, so does the understanding of this term of art.

For some people, IA is old hat — a relic of the days when websites were mere collections of linked text files. For others, IA represents an archaic, even oppressive worldview, where only experts are allowed to organize and label human knowledge. Again, I think these views of IA say more about the people who hold them than the practice of IA itself.

But for the rest of us, this contest is just an opportunity to celebrate the energetic conversations that are already happening anyway — and that happen within any vibrant, growing community of practice. It’s a way to spotlight how much IA has evolved, and bring others into those conversations as well.

Of course, the Institute is interested in these expressions as raw material for how it continues to evolve itself. But why wouldn’t any practitice-based organization be interested in what the community has to say about the central concern of the practice?

I’m looking forward to what everyone comes up with. I’m especially excited to learn things I don’t know yet, and discover people I hadn’t met before.

So, go for it! Explain that sucker!

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EBAI was awesome

October 19, 2009 by Andrew | 4 comments

ebai

EBAI, The Brazilian Information Architecture Congress (basically the IA Summit or EuroIA of Brazil) was kind and generous enough to invite me to Sao Paulo as a keynote speaker, closing their first day. They gave me a huge chunk of time, so I presented a long version of my Linkosophy talk, expanded with more about designing for Context. It was a terrific experience. Here’s just a smattering of what I discovered:

  • Brazilian user-experience designers tend to use the term Information Architecture (and Architect) for their community of practice — which I think is a fine thing. (I explained we still need to agree what “IA” means in the context of a given design, but who am I to tell them “there are no information architects“?)
  • These people are brilliant. They’re doing and inventing UX design research and methods that really should be shared with the larger, non-Portuguese-speaking world.
  • I wish I knew Portuguese so I could’ve understood even more of what they were presenting about. (Hence my wish it could all be translated to English!)
  • Brazilians have the best methods of drinking beer and eating steak ever invented: small portions that keep on coming through the meal means your beer is never warm, and your steak is always fresh off the grill. Genius!

Thank you, EBAI (and in particular my gracious host, Guilhermo Reis) for an enlightening, delightful experience.

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Favorites are FAIL for web security

September 1, 2009 by Andrew | 6 comments

I don’t usually get into nitty-gritty interaction design issues like this on my blog. But I recently moved to a new address, and started new web accounts with various services like phone and utilities. And almost all of them are adding new layers of security asking me additional personal questions that they will use later to verify who I am. And entirely too many are asking questions like these, asked by AT&T on their wireless site:

badsecurity1

I can’t believe how many of them are using “favorites” questions for security. Why? Because it’s so variable over time, and because it’s not a fully discrete category. Now, I know I’m especially deficient in “favorite” aptitude — if you ask me my favorite band, favorite food, favorite city, I’ll mumble something about “well, I like a lot of them, and there are things about some I like more than others, but I really can’t think of just one favorite…” Most people probably have at least something they can name as a favorite. But because it’s such a fuzzy category, it’s still risky and confusing.

It’s especially risky because we change over time. You might say Italian food is your favorite, but you’ve never had Thai. And when you do, you realize it blows Italian food away — and by the next time you try logging into an account a year later, you can’t remember which cuisine you specified.

Even the question about “who was your best friend as a kid” or “what’s the name of your favorite pet, when you were growing up” — our attitudes toward these things are highly variable. In fact, we hardly ever explicitly decide our favorite friend or pet — unless a computer asks us to. Then we find ourselves, in the moment, deciding “ok, I’ll name Rover as my favorite pet” — but a week later you see a picture in a photo album of your childhood cat “Peaches” and on your next login, it’s error-city.

I suspect one reason this bugs me so much is that it’s an indicator of how a binary mentality behind software can do uncomfortable things to us as non-binary human beings. It’s the same problem as Facebook presents when it asks you to select which category your relationship falls into. What if none of them quite fit? Or even if one of them technically fits, it reduces your relationship to that data point, without all the rich context that makes that category matter in your own life.

Probably I’m making too much of it, but at least, PLEASE, can we get the word out in the digital design community that these security questions simply do not work?

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The Journal of Information Architecture Debuts

May 5, 2009 by Andrew | No comments

Congratulations to Andrea Resmini and all the hardworking, brilliant people who just launched the Journal of Information Architecture.

I’m not saying this just because I’m fortunate enough to have an article in it, either. In fact, I hope my tortured prose can live up to the standard set by the other writers.

Link to contents page for Journal of IA Volume 1, Issue 1

Link to the PDF of my article: “The Machineries of Context”

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You Are (Mostly) Here: Digital Space & the Context Problem

March 26, 2009 by Andrew | 9 comments

Here’s the presentation I did for A Summit 2009 in Memphis, TN. It’s an update of what I did for IDEA 2008; it’s not hugely different, but I think it pulls the ideas together a little better. The PDF is downloadable from SlideShare. The notes are legible only at full-screen or on the PDF.

TheContextProblem
View more documents from andrewhinton.

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IAI Workshop for IASummit 2009: Beyond Findability

February 13, 2009 by Andrew | 1 comment

Now that the workshop has come and gone, I’m here to say that it went swimmingly, if I do blog so myself.

My colleagues did some great work — hopefully it’ll all be up on Slideshare at some point. But here are the slides I contributed. Alas, there are no “speaker notes” with these — but most of the points are pretty clear. I would love to blog about some of the slides sometime soon — but whenever I promise to blog about something, I almost guarantee I won’t get around to it. So I’ll just say “it would be cool if I blogged about this…” :-)

Beyond Findability: Context
View more presentations from andrewhinton.

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Just one more blog plug for the workshop some of us are doing before the IA Summit in Memphis this year.

Links:
See the Pre-Con Page at the Conference Site.
Register Here

For those of you who may be attending the IA Summit in Memphis this year, let me encourage you to look into the IA Institute’s pre-conference workshop called “Beyond Findability: Reframing IA Practice & Strategy for Turbulent Times.”

A few things I want to make clear about the session:

- We’re making it relevant for any UX design people, not just those who self-identify as “Information Architects.” In fact, part of the workshop is about how different practitioner communities can better collaborate & complement other approaches.
- By “Turbulent times” we don’t just mean the economy, but the turbulence of technological change — the incredibly rapid evolution of how people use the stuff we make.
- It’s not a how-to/tutorial-style workshop, but meant to spark some challenging conversation and push the evolution of our professions ahead a little faster.
- There will, however, be some practical take-away content that you should be able to stick on a cube wall and make use of immediately.
- It’s not “anti-Findability” — but looks at what IA in particular brings to design *beyond* the conventional understanding of the practice.
- We’re hoping experienced design professionals will attend, not just newer folks; the content is meant to be somewhat high-level and advanced, but you should be able to get value from it no matter where you are in your career.

Here’s the quickie blurb:

This workshop aims to take your IA practice to a higher level of understanding, performance and impact. Learn about contextual models and scalable frameworks, design collaboration tactics, and how to wield more influence at the “strategy table.”

If you have any specific questions about it, please feel free to hit me up with an email!

*Note: the IA Summit itself is produced by ASIS&T, not the IA Institute.

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A mature approach to maturing IA

February 12, 2009 by Andrew | 1 comment

Here’s an excellent article written up at the ASIS&T Bulletin, by some talented and thoughtful folks in Europe (namely Andrea Resmini, Katriina Byström and Dorte Madsen). I’ll quote the end of the piece at length.

IA Growing Roots – Concerning the Journal of IA

Even if someone’s ideas about information architecture are mind-boggling, if they do not discuss them in public, embody them in some communicable artifact and get them to be influential, they are moot. This reality is the main reason behind the upcoming peer-reviewed scientific Journal of Information Architecture, due in Spring 2009. For the discipline to mature, the community needs a corpus, a defining body of knowledge, not a definition.

No doubt this approach may be seen as fuzzy, uncertain and highly controversial in places. Political, even biased. But again, some overlapping and uncertainty and controversy will always be there: Is the Eiffel Tower architecture or engineering? The answer is that it depends on whom you ask, and why you ask. And did the people who built it consider themselves doing architecture, engineering or what? The elephant is a mighty complex animal, as the blind men in the old Indian story can tell you, and when we look closer, things usually get complex.

The IA community does not need to agree on a “definition” because there is more to do. An analytical approach must be taken on the way the community sees itself, with some critical thinking and some historical perspective. The community needs to grow roots. We hope the Journal will help along the way.

I especially like the Eiffel tower example. And putting a stake in the ground saying let’s not worry about a definition, we have more work to do. This is the sort of mature thinking we need at the “discipline” level, where people can focus on the academic, theoretical framework that helps evolve what the bulk of IA folk do at the “practice” level. (Of course, that flow works in the other direction too!)

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Beyond Findability Seminar at IA Summit 2009

January 14, 2009 by Andrew | 3 comments

In case you were wondering which of the fabulous IA Summit 2009 pre-conference seminars to spend your hard-earned (or hard-begged) money on, look no further than “Beyond Findability: Reframing IA Practice & Strategy for Turbulent Times”

It’s being presented by the IA Institute, and includes some very smart, experienced people in the UX/IA world: Livia Labate, Joe Lamantia and Matthew Milan. In addition, it includes little old me.

Hit that link to learn more about the workshop. I’m excited about it — we’ll be digging into some meaty subjects, and stretching our brains about IA. Yet we’ll manage to have lots of practical take-aways and fascinating conversations too.

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Flickr and Market Governance

September 30, 2008 by Andrew | No comments

Erin Malone points to an article on the challenges of managing the Flickr community in the SF Chronicle:

"People bring their human relationships to Flickr, and we end up having to police them," Champ says. …

Lest your inner libertarian objects to such interventions, Champ is quick to correct the idea that the community would ultimately find its own balance.

"The amount of time it would take for the community to self-regulate — I don't think it could sustain itself in the meantime," she says. "Anyway, I can't think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own."

This struck me as uncannily relevant to what’s going on right now in the US economy.

Once social platforms like Flickr reach a certain size, they really do become a weird amalgam of City & Economy, and they require governance. Heather Champ (Flickr’s estimable community manager) points out that, even if you truly believe a collective crowd like this will self-regulate, much damage will be done on the way to finding that balance.

Isn’t that precisely the perennial tension we have in terms of free-market economics?

It seems to me that User Experience design is increasingly needing to learn from Economics and Political Science — and it may even have a thing or two to teach them, as well.

I have lots of thoughts on this, but too many to get down here … just wanted to bring it up because I think it’s so damned fascinating.

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The Cultivation Equation Part 2: Motivation

September 22, 2008 by Andrew | No comments

Motivation

Months ago, I posted the first part of something I’d been presenting on for over a year: a simple way of thinking about social design choices. I called it the “Cultivation Equation for Social Design.” I should’ve known better, but I said at the end of that post that I’d be posting the rest soon … then proceeded to put it off for a very long time. At any rate, here’s the second part, about Motivation. The third part (about Moderation) will be forthcoming, eventually, but I make no promises on timing.
Read the rest of this entry »

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Denis Wood: A Narrative Atlas of Boylan Heights « Making Maps: DIY Cartography

September 20, 2008 by Andrew | No comments

Detail from Halloween Pumpkins Map of Wood's Neighborhood

In my talk for IDEA Conference, I’ll be referencing the work of Denis Wood.

I’m so utterly intrigued by a particular long-term project he did back in the 80s, which ended up in an episode of This American Life.

In a blog post at the “Making Maps” blog, Wood goes into some detail about this project and how it managed to go from being a bunch of stuff in a box under his desk to one of the most popular episodes of TAL: Denis Wood: A Narrative Atlas of Boylan Heights « Making Maps: DIY Cartography

There was a lot we wanted to do. Certainly we wanted to use the mapping to help us figure out what a neighborhood was, but we also wanted to use the mapping as a kind of organizational tool, as a way of bringing the neighborhood together and helping it to see itself. This meant we wanted to be able to get copies of the atlas into the hands of the residents and so we planned a black and white atlas that could be cheaply reproduced on a copy machine. At the same time we wanted to make something beautiful, almost a livre d’artiste. I in particular was impatient with distinctions between art and science – it was an important part of my teaching that these distinctions were arbitrary and obfuscatory – and I wanted the atlas to read almost like a novel.

One thing I love about this story is how it breaks assumptions about what maps are, and what they’re for. How a map of a neighborhood shapes the identity if the neighborhood. Wood uses the term “mask” for what a map can do — it creates a mask that the place wears on its own face, for anyone who looks at the map. It constructs & reveals at the same time, a neighborhood’s crime patterns, underground tunnels & cisterns, or the spirit of its residents through where the jack-o-lanterns are on Halloween.

The map is a narrative. So what does that mean, when we create virtual places that are their own maps? It means our assumptions of what the map shows actually shape the neighborhood itself. Not just in the “social construction” sense of printed maps and physical neighborhoods, but quite literally in the sense of architecture.

What does it mean to be a resident of a neighborhood mapped as X vs one mapped as Y? What if, with the flip of a switch, the neighborhood could change between X and Y? Isn’t that what we’re making with our virtual spaces?

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Changes in how we perceive place & time

September 15, 2008 by Andrew | No comments

From Adam Greenfield:

If, as so many have pointed out, the ongoing process of digital ephemeralization has taken previously place-bound functions like communication, banking and commerce, and exploded them – “smearing them across urban space,” in Bill Mitchell’s words – it’s without question also doing interesting and significant things to how we perceive the nexus of place and time.

Adam says he’s going to focus on these changes in his new book — I’m looking forward to it.

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