This document summarizes Peter Bogaards' presentation on information architecture. It discusses his background in instructional design and information design. It then poses questions about user experience, documents, and the dimensions of documents. The document triangle of structure, content, and presentation is introduced. The rest of the presentation will explore these concepts in more depth.

1. infodesign.bogieland.com InfoDesign: To surf the community Peter J. Bogaards
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
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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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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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