Jimmy Lin The iSchool University of Maryland Monday, March 30, 2009
The Information School at the University of Washington Information Architecture What is it Bob Boiko...
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The Information School at the University of Washington Information Architecture What is it Bob Boiko UW iSchool ischool.washington.edu Metatorial Services Inc. www.metatorial.com
Transcript of The Information School at the University of Washington Information Architecture What is it Bob Boiko...
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Information ArchitectureWhat is it
Bob Boiko
UW iSchoolischool.washington.eduMetatorial Services Inc.
www.metatorial.com
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What we will cover
• What is IA?– Define it– Divide it– Delimit it
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Define It
• Information: The common forms of knowledge artifacts we find around us
• Architecture: The art and science of designing structures.
• Information Architecture: The art and science of designing information structures.
A la English
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Define It
• Organization, labeling, and navigation schemes in an information system.
• The structural design of an information space.
• Making web sites manageable and accessible.
• A new discipline bringing architecture and design to the “digital landscape.”
A la Rosenfeld & Morville
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Divide It
• Organization systems: Creating indexes, taxonomies, associations, sequences, thesauri.
• Labeling systems: Choosing and organizing the way concepts will be named and pointed to.
• Search systems: Creating effective automated info retrieval systems.
• Metadata: Developing the schemas and other representations that encode the above.
• Navigation systems: The use of all the above to assist a person to get to what they need.
By Deliverables
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Divide It
• User study: Finding out what users know, want, expect, and need.
• Info ecologies: Discovering the way information works and interacts in the social system of the organization.
• Research and writing: Digging into and explaining the above to the organization.
• Structure creation: Creating and revising deliverables.• Negotiation and compromise: Getting the organization
to agree on the appropriate structures and their constituents.
• Testing and revision: Trying structures and revising them and trying again.
By Tasks
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Delimit it
• Vs information design: ID is the sensory representation, IA is the logical representation
• Vs usability and Human Computer Interaction (HCI): HCI and usability are about the behaviors that are useful and wasteful in using computers.
• Vs user experience: UE is about the emotional reactions that an application inspires. Or maybe UE is the overarching concept that envelops IA and related studies.
• Software development: Implements the structures that an IA creates
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Delimit it
• Vs content management: A CMS consumes the products of IA and manages their continued update
• Vs KM: KM depends on the structures of IA. Good IA is KM.
• Vs Web sites: The Web is what made IA so hot, but it is only the first stop.
• Vs Libraries and information science: IA came from library science but has moved on to embrace a world of other stuff.
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Discussion: Classical and Modern IA
• Contrast the classical and modern approaches described by R&M on page 356
• When would you use one over the other?
• What is the essential difference between the descriptive and the prescriptive?
• Can the descriptive ever become the prescriptive?
Classical Information Architecture
Post-Modern Innovation Architecture
Top-Down Bottom-Up
Centralized Distributed
Closed Open
Stable Adaptive
Planned Emergent
