the architecture of understanding (and happiness)
TRANSCRIPT
The Architecture of Understanding
Peter Morville, CanUX 2016
+ Happiness
6
The Library of Congress“To further the progress of knowledge and
creativity.”
FragmentationFragmentation into multiple sites, domains, and identities is a major problem. Users don’t know which site to visit for which purpose.
Findability Users can’t find what they need from the home page, but most users don’t come through the front door. They enter via a web search or a deep link, and are confused by what they find. Even worse, most never use the Library, because its resources aren’t easily findable.
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Web Governance Board
Nature
Isle Royale National Park
Planning
Inspiration
Planning
PlayingPracticin
g
“With respect to learning by failure, it’s all fun and games until someone gets a larval cyst in
the brain.”
“There is a problem in discussing systems only with words. Words and sentences must, by necessity, come only one at a time in linear, logical order. Systems happen all at once. They are connected not just in one direction, but in many directions simultaneously.”
“It is the responsibility of the architect to know and concentrate on the critical few details and interfaces that really matter.”
The design and management
of information systems.
Understanding the nature of information in systems.
Categories
Categories are the cornerstones of cognition and culture.
We use radio buttons when checkboxes or sliders would reveal the truth.
Connections
HyperlinksPages
Web
PathsPlaces
Space
ConnectionsCategories
Mind
ConsequencesActions
Time
intertwingled.org/planning-book
Risks, Estimates, Metrics
Play, Practice, Prototype
Feedback, Reflection
Order, Options
Vision, Values, Subgoals
If you think information architecture hasn’t changed
since the polar bear, you’re simply not paying attention.
“Tell me about a day in your life.”
Culture
Double-loop learning in organizations (and individuals) is rare.
The relationship between information and culture.
“There’s a secret about MRIs and back pain: the most common problems physicians see on MRI and attribute to back pain – herniated, ruptured, and bulging discs – are seen almost as commonly on MRIs of healthy people without back pain.”
“If you want to accelerate someone’s death, give him a personal doctor. I don’t mean provide him with a bad doctor. Just pay for him to choose his own. Any doctor will do.”
42Roger Bannister, Iffley Road Track, Oxford, 1954
Limits
Daylighting
Daylighting
“Where architects use forms and spaces to design
environments for inhabitation, information architects
use nodes and links to create environments for
understanding.”
Jorge Arango, Architectures (2011)
48
Firmitas, Utilitas, VenustasVitruvius, De Architectura (15 BC)
“Each step is a potential place: place
to worship, place to wash, place to
sell, place to sleep, place to die and
be burned.”
Donlyn Lyndon (1962)
No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it.
55The l ibrary is an act of inspiration architecture and a keystone of culture .
Thank You!IA Therefore I Am