Information Architecture
This course investigates the cultural, cognitive, and rhetorical dimensions of information architecture as it applies to academic professions. Most professional knowledge workers are awash in a tsunami of information and struggling to stay afloat. Edward Tufte maintains that there is no such thing as information overload, only poor information design.
Information architecture is an emerging field that includes aspects of composition, rhetoric, design, cognitive science, information sciences, computer science, mathematics, and social sciences. As computer technologies have expanded the possibilities for creating, organizing, storing, representing, and communicating information, the sheer quantity of information exchanged has exploded. The new field of information architecture (or “informatics” in a current program proposal at UC Irvine) studies this dynamic process, develops systems to help people better manage it, and plans for changes projected in how information is developed and organized.
Theorists currently in the field, including Richard Saul Wurman, Jakob Nielsen, Kevin Mullet, Darrell Sano, and Edward Tufte argue that design, including typography and page design, use of graphics, and organizational structure are crucial to the delivery of information in ways that potential audiences find useful. These elements are often left to editors or publishers in formal publishing situations, or executed poorly in popular media and online communications. Yet they can determine whether information can be easily accessed, apprehended, and interpreted. Similarly, information archives are left in the hands of librarians whose experience and expertise may vary widely from expert to little or no training or preparation. Even well-trained librarians, however, may be ill-equipped to manage the proliferation and dynamic transformation of new media, modes, and genres of work, including web sites, multimedia compositions, collaborative constructions that cross continents and disciplinary boundaries, and online virtual worlds. There are many systems, from library catalogues to Web search engines, to research databases now in use to gather, store, and manipulate information, yet we still often feel overwhelmed, ill-informed, and lost in dealing with them. Wurman has termed our general apprehension “information anxiety.”
While a great deal of work has been done in areas of information science, library science, interface design, and so on, we believe that little attention has been paid to the deeply rhetorical nature of information architecture, particularly in online environments. This course will look at the cultural and cognitive production, organization, representation, and distribution of knowledge as activity.
The objectives for students include the following:
- Students will be introduced to a new field of study and its concepts, methods, and practices.
- Students will explore cultural, cognitive, and rhetorical implications of diverse information structures, including hypertext, text-based virtual reality, the Web, and databases.
- Students will experiment with design for gathering, organizing, and presenting information.
- Students will develop their own projects based on existing theoretical and methodological challenges in this field.
Required texts:
Course Reader
There will be a list of recommended texts from which students will make selections for presentations and project work.
Evaluation will be via the Online Learning Record, portfolio-based assessment.
Assignments and class format:
Ground-up information architecture for survival in professional and academic ecosystems:
The project for the semester: Design your own infosphere: a way to manage the flow, storage, communication, and transformation of information in your own lived ecosystem. Conduct and write up a case study detailing this process. This process will require a great deal of observation, reflection, and research. Much of this research will be difficult because our own accommodations are sometimes invisible to us. Alternatively: do this with someone else as your research subject/client.
Part 1: An inventory of information types, media, and sources that participate in your ecosystem right now. Don’t forget the human resources! A second inventory of what should be part of your information ecosystem. This work should be done collaboratively, to help stimulate your thinking about it.
Part 2: The current state of the ecosystem: including what gets left out, what gets ignored or dismissed, what takes greater or lesser priority. Also included, the preferences of the user (you): greater or lesser order and systematicity, willingness to maintain a system, competing or conflicting life commitments, greater or lesser dependence on/enthusiasm for using technology
Part 3: Categories of purpose. What classes of information are needed? What roles are they associated with? Be sure the classes are distinct enough to be useful. “News” is a generic term that probably should be broken down into categories like: news about the world, news about my discipline, personal news, news about my department, and so on. What is the quality of life you aspire to?
Part 4: Audience: Who else is involved as an audience or provider for the information flows? What is their preferred medium for getting and/or receiving information? What structures do they need or prefer to help them interpret and apply the information?
Part 5: Pace and timing: what are the dynamics of information flows in different classes? You may discover that you are a person that prefers to check email as it arrives, once or twice a day, or, as in my Dad’s case, once or twice a year. You may read a newspaper daily, visit the library twice a week, write a paper once a semester. The pace may change during times of crisis or high activity: for example, before an exam. What are the dependencies among different kinds of information, different situations?
Part 6: A review of models: libraries, museums, air traffic control, city planning, ecology, music orchestration, choreography, architecture, etc.
Part 7: What structures, technological or physical, can help gather, organize, maintain, and manage the information flows? Of course, this is no guarantee of stress-free information management, but rather, how can you establish a system that fits your own ecosystem and supports your larger goals? What can be done to support the transformation of information into wisdom?
We will also look at your work during class time in in-class workshops.
Process: Each phase of this work will cover two weeks of classes, organized as follows:
Week 1: Small group discussion around projects (M)
Focus on technology (W)
Week 2: Readings and disciplinary considerations (M)
Presentation workshops/check in: group inquiry process (W)
Technological component:
1. The Learning Record as a model of information architecture development and evolution
2. Brainstorming tools: Novamind, Tinderbox, Omnigraffle
3. Archiving tools: EndNote, FileMaker Pro, MacJournal, file structures (File Don’t Pile)
4. Presentation tools: screen formatting, the web, accessibility
5. Social tools: blogs, wikis, myspace, Google groups
6. Workflow tools: GTD process, Fasttrack schedule, Now Up to Date, Actiontastic, Quicksilver, news aggregators, etc.
7. Integration of systems: putting the pieces together technologically
8. Project presentations (t and th)
E388M Information Architecture Texts
Case Study Research: Design & Methods,
Robert K. Yin
ISBN:0761925538
Information Architecture For The World Wide Web,
Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville
ISBN:0596527349
Notes On The Synthesis Of Form,
Christopher Alexander
ISBN:0674627512
Visual Display Of Quantitative Information,
Edward Tufte
ISBN:0961392142
Thinking in Systems,
Donella Meadows
ISBN: 978-1-60358-055-7
Plus online sources as listed on the class wiki