A Model for Information EnvironmentsA Five-Minute Summary for the “Reframe IA” WorkshopIA Summit Baltimore MD | 2013

Andrew Hinton | @inkblurtInformation Architect |The Understanding Group (TUG)

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

Notes: For over a decade, the community that calls this conference home has defined information architecture as, in part, "the structural design of shared information environments," yet we still lack a consensus for what we mean by that phrase.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

Notes: This has contributed in many ways to a years-long circular discourse about what IA is and does, preventing IA from having a central, shared domain as a community of practice that can properly evolve into a full-fledged discipline.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

YOU ARE NOT YOUR F***ING WIREFRAMES.

Notes: It has also contributed to the perception of IA as a bucket of methods one can learn in a day-long workshop, or as a narrow specialization for fussy card-catalogers, or worse yet a backward vocation for wireframe fetishists. Image: Fight Club

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

NO MORE WEASEL WORDS

Notes: I contend that, rather than a fuzzily meaningless phrase of weasel-words, “information environment” is a sound concept that only requires more effort on our part to fully articulate and develop into a real foundation for understanding our medium.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mustela_nivalis_-British_Wildlife_Centre-4.jpg

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

STARTHERE

Notes: Rather than starting with technology and information theory, I believe IA’s best value comes from starting with deeper, core layers of perception, cognition, and language – the slower moving foundations underneath the areas of typical focus.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

Notes: I should point out that these ideas borrow from a movement some have called “radical embodied cognition theory” that seeks to replace conventional cognitive science. Embodied cognition argues that cognition is a whole-body perceptual system, with the brain in a supporting role.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

Notes: The model outlines three modes for how we experience information: ecological, semantic, and digital. Let me be clear that this is not an academic definition of information, or a comprehensive model. It’s offered as a pragmatic step toward something we can use in practice.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

Notes: The ecological mode has to do with the relationship an animal has with its so-called physical environment. It’s the intrinsic, structural information we perceive in the surfaces and objects of nature and the built environment.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

Notes: This mode is based on the perception science of ecological psychologist James J Gibson. It posits that cognition comes from bodily perception of intrinsic information about affordances “picked up” from the structural qualities of our environment.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

AFFORDANCE = INFORMATION IN THE ENVIRONMENT SPECIFYING AFFORDANCE FOR BODILY ACTION

Notes: In fact, Gibson is the originator of the concept of “affordance” – an idea that has been popularized and appropriated inaccurately since Gibson’s final work in the 1970s. Gibson believed all perception to be perception of environmental affordances.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

Notes: This is rich work that is impossible to fully explain in a five-minute summary. But I believe it to be essential for us, because I believe an embodied understanding of ecological information to be the first principle upon which everything else rests.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

Notes: The second mode for information is “semantic.” This is information we pick up from language for communication between people. It includes oral speech, and written text, as well as graphical communication such as pictures, maps, icons, and diagrams.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

LANGUAGE IS

ENVIRONMENT

Notes: Language itself is not information. It is environment. Our cognition perceives language by using exapted mechanisms that evolved from ecological perception of the physical world, as birds evolved to exapt warming feathers for flight.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

LANGUAGE MAKES

ARCHITECTURE

Notes: The semantic mode is what we tend to focus on for information architecture practice. But what’s often missing is the realization that by creating and connecting labels – “mere language” – we’re actually creating architecture.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

LANGUAGE IS

INFRASTRUCTURE

Notes: That is because language is infrastructure. And we create inhabited environments with it – whether through conversations, games, corporate structures, or even government-defining constitutions. Not to mention software.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

LABEL

LABEL

LABEL

LABEL

LABEL

RULES

Notes: Information architecture works with written and visual language in the form of labels, connections and rules, to create inhabited structures, and bring sense-making and place-making to our environment.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

Notes: The third mode, Digital information is the coded symbols and rules made for (and even by) machines to communicate with machines. This is a mode we normally don’t experience directly, but mainly in its effects on the ecological and semantic modes.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

Notes: Pervasive digital information technology has disrupted the previously invariant affordances in which we evolved. This has made necessary an explicit, sophisticated attention to how language functions as environment.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

ECOLOGICAL

SEMANTIC

DIGITAL

Notes: In all, this model is a step toward re-framing information architecture as environmental architecture of the semantic landscape, with knowledgeable attention to the ecological and digital modes and their interdependencies.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

ECOLOGICAL

SEMANTIC

DIGITAL

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Notes: This frame frees IA from the trappings of specific techniques and technologies. Instead it more clearly positions IA where I believe it has always been: as architecture for an essential dimension of our shared reality.

ANDREW HINTON

A MODEL FOR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS

REFRAMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREA ROUND TABLE WORKSHOP AT THE IA SUMMIT 2013 - BALTIMORE

Andrew Hintonandrewhinton.com | @inkblurtTUG | understandinggroup.org

For the full “position paper” in PDF form: http://inkblurt.com/media/Hinton_IAS_reframe_workshop2013.pdf

Ideas from this short talk adapted from an in-progress book on how information creates and shapes context. http://www.inkblurt.com/contextbook/