the architecture of understanding (and happiness)

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.

8

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