The Architecture of Understanding

Peter Morville

6 The Library of Congress

“To further the progress of knowledge and creativity.”

Fragmentation Fragmentation 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.

8

9

Web Governance Board

Nature

Isle Royale National Park

Planning

Inspiration

Planning

Playing Practicing

“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.”

Food Scarcity(overpopluation)

T T

Inflow(birth rate)

Outflow(death rate)

Stock(population)

T T

Disease(canine parvovirus)

Immigration(via ice bridge)

Parasites(moose tick)

Weather(mild winter)

Inflow(birth rate)

Outflow(death rate)

Stock(population)

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

“The system always kicks back.”

If you think information architecture hasn’t changed since the polar bear, you’re simply not paying attention.

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“Tell me about a day in your life.”

“How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”

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.”

44Roger Bannister, Iffley Road Track, Oxford, 1954

Limits

“It is now my suggestion that many people may not want information, and that they will avoid using a system precisely because it gives them information…If you have information, you must first read it. You must then try to understand it. Understanding the information may show that your work was wrong, or may show that your work was needless. Thus not having and not using information can lead to less trouble and pain than having and using it.”Calvin Mooers (1959)

The limits of information

“We shape our buildings. Thereafter, they shape us.” – Winston Churchill

“Willpower is the single most

important keystone habit for

individual success.”

“A culture of generosity.” Josie Parker, Ann Arbor District Library

“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)

Daylighting

Daylighting

Map the System

Map the Context Share the Map

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Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas Vitruvius, 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.

Thank You!IA Therefore I Am