Lecture given to students 'Media Studies' at the University of Amsterdam (2003).

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Information architecture:
Structure, content, and form
Peter J. Bogaards (BogieLand.com)
Information designer & information architect
“Sharing knowledge is better than having it.”
Media Studies - University of Amsterdam
November 14, 2003
Nov. 14, 2003 Information architecture: Structure, content, and form 1

2. infodesign.bogieland.com InfoDesign: To surf the community Peter J. Bogaards
Introduction
• Background in instructional design (UvA 1987)
• Design of (tech) facilities to enhance human
learning processes
• Interface, interaction, and information designer
(Informaat)
• WWW: Electronic documentation and user interface
design merger
• Information designer and information architect
(Razorfish EU)
• InfoDesign blog (1997): infodesign.bogieland.com -
>230,000 visits
• BogieLand (2003): Information design &
information architecture company
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Questions to answer
• What is user experience, (information) design / architecture?
• What is a document?
• What are dimensions of a document? The document triangle.
• What do you get when you abstract these dimensions?
• What is the impact of computation and connectivity on these
dimensions?
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User experience
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bbc
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Ebay
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google
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Iceberg
A
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Iceberg UX
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What is user experience?
The elements of user experience
J.J. Garrett 2002
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Information design
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12. infodesign.bogieland.com InfoDesign: To surf the community Peter J. Bogaards
What is information design?
• Understanding, useful, making sense (‘complexity’)
• User-centered design: Thinking ‘outside in’ versus ‘inside out’
• To design is to decide: To provide a design rationale (reasoning on
decisions)
• Reference to context, constraints, goals, and requirements
• Products: Conventional (signage/wayfinding) and information artifacts
(paper/digital e.g. CUI/GUI, sites, handhelds, and documentation)
• History: Minard (1861), Zwaga, Tufte, Jacobson, IDJ/IIID, and STC ID
SIG (>3000 members)
• Relation with graphic design, document design, interaction design,
technical writing, interface design, sound design, and information
architecture...
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Information design history
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Information architecture
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What is information architecture?
• Concept of ‘space’: (atoms) buildings (e.g. house,
office, factory, museum) and (bits) sites (e.g. intranet,
blog, company site, search engine, auction site)
• Naming, labeling, organizing, and structuring of
information
• Navigation (3 Qs: source point/location, target
point/location, and path to follow) and browse/search
(findability)
• Strong position in design and development for WWW
• Information architecture history: Wurman 1976
(Information architects), LIS (Rosenfeld/Morville),
ASIS&T IA Summit, AIfIA
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The Winchester mystery house
Courtesy of Alan Cooper
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The document
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Docs
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The document concept
• Obvious and non-obvious ones
• Monolithic documents
• ‘Paper’ versus electronic documents
• Conceptual, logical and physical layers of documents
• Fixed document (PDFs) / assembled ‘on-the-fly’ (e.g. search results)
• Bottom-up (blog posts) / top-down (enterprise IA/digital libs)
• Technology: DOM, .doc, .txt, .htm, .exe, .etc
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The document triangle
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Structure
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structures
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The structure dimension
• Creating a conSTRUCtion
• To identify the wholes and parts - (de)composition -
category criteria and mistakes – hierarchy -
identification of objects and its composites
• A noun and verb: To structure - to create structure -
to bring more structure to its structure
• Similarities and (quantity/quality) differences
• Relationship(s) between objects - dependencies
• R.S. Wurman: LATCH-principle
• Cognition (‘conSTRUCtionism’), granularity, and order
• Technology: DTD, Schema
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Content
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content
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The content dimension
• The dynamic interests, needs, and wants of the information
consumer (people) and producer (editor): the prosumer
• Data (‘factoids’) versus instructions/explanations
• Domain knowledge (dependent and independent)
• Facts -> interpretations -> opinions -> theories
• Referential: References to reality (De Saussure)
• Technology: (X)HTML, XML, RDF, DC, OIL, ...
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From data to wisdom
Courtesy of N. Shedroff
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Form
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Forms
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The form dimension
• Formats:
– textual (e.g. typography)
– visual (diagrams/stills/moving)
– auditive (voice, FXs, music)
– motion (input/output mechs)
• Visual design -> sensorial design (N. Shedroff)
• Meta(media) specific attributes
• Form is the manifestation of an underlying 'model'
• 'Form follows function'
• Technology: DSSSL, CSS, XSL(T), SVG/PNG, ...
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Abstraction
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abstract
By Pablo Picasso
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Meta-level thinking
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A thought experiment
• Reflection
• Abstraction of the 3 dimensions: meta-level thinking
• Meta-structure: knowledge representation, conceptual or knowledge
structures, pattern expressions - control structures (if ... then ... else
...)
• Meta-content: meta data (‘data about data’)
• Meta-form: Strategic declarations on form
- visual: Robert Horn's ‘Visual Language’
- audio: Earcons (sound FXs) / techno?
- textual: Hypertext
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Computation
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comp
utatio
n
Charles Babbage
1791-1871
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The computation attribute
• Machine-attributes: Features and functions
• Manipulation of symbol systems: Algorithms vs.
heuristics
• Input/Output - Emergent adaptation
• Computing the structure, content, and form of
documents
• User modelling
• Knowledge engineering, artificial intelligence, the
semantic web initiative
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Connectivity
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connect
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The connectivity attribute
• Information, communication, coordination,
collaboration
• n-1, 1-1, 1-n, n-n
• Hardly any space and time constraints
• Trends: p2p, wireless, mobile, ubicomp
• Impact on people, groups, organizations, states
• Exchange of information
• Online webservices
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Conceptual model of thinking
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Wrap-up
• Objective ID/A: To find, use, and understand information
• What’s the document and the process?
• What’s its structure and how to structure?
• What’s its contents and how does it serve human needs?
• What’s are the representational forms in use and how do they make
optimal use of the media specific attributes?
• What are structure, content, and form in conceptual terms?
• How to integrate computation and connectivity in the document
dimensions?
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questions
infodesign.bogieland.com
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