Information & Information Architecture
A history of content and sources
Good annotation
Information displays should be annotated, combining words, images, graphics, whatever it takes to describe and explain something. Annotation calls out and explains information and, at the same time, explains to viewers how to read data displays. Good annotation is like a knowledgeable expert/teacher at the viewer's side pointing and saying, "Now see how this works with that, how this might explain that..."
An immense wordy diagram
In ~1560 Ettore Ausonia, a polymath with interests from mathematics to mirror-making, constructed an immense wordy diagram depicting reflections from concave spherical mirrors. Then, between 1592 and 1601, while teaching at the University of Padua, Galileo made this handwritten copy of the diagram, which was fortunate since Ausonio's original has since gone missing. Three helpful architectures for the off-the-grid sentences are deployed – word trees, stacklists, annotated linking lines.
No wonder you think it's complicated
We were very proud of our user interface and the fact that we had a way to browse 16,000 (!!) pages of documentation on a CD-ROM. But browsing the hierarchy felt a little complicated to us.
So we asked Tufte to come in and have a look, and were hoping perhaps for a pat on the head or some free advice. He played with our AnswerBook for 90 seconds, turned around, pronounced his review:
"Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care is a best-selling owner's manual for the most complicated 'product' imaginable – and it has only 2 levels of headings. You have 8 levels of hierarchy and I haven't stopped counting yet. No wonder you think it's complicated."
Infinite varieties of contexts
Over the course of 10 years of using Are.na, I have fully adopted the view that any piece of information can be important to a person given the right context. And on Are.na, pieces of information can be arranged in infinite varieties of contexts – their respective meaning shifts as the proximate information shifts. In other words, the more connections a block has, the more opportunities it has to be a nodal point.
Nodal points
I started thinking about all the other important “nodal points” (I don’t know what else to call this) of people, places, books, albums, websites, etc. that all played a part in shaping who I am as a person and what I think is important. These points are a combination of seeking things out myself and getting a recommendation that felt like it was actually for me. A mixture of both passive and active knowledge acquisition.
ultimately, it's the totality of those “nodal points” that indicate one’s own unique perspective. It doesn’t matter if you specifically sought out the nodal point or not, it’s the recognition that counts. When you encounter a piece of life-changing information (no matter how large the change part is), you are simultaneously discovering and creating “yourself,” becoming incrementally more complete. Your perspective (where your gaze is directed) is made up of a meandering line through these points. Learning (or maybe some precursor to learning) is a lot about developing the intuition to recognize when something you find in the world is going to be a nodal point for you.
What is a commonplace?
In all cases, a commonplace is a method of compiling knowledge for later use. In digital or analog form, this continued growth of stored ideas and projects is a key driver of intellectual development. Any time you decide to work on a project, you should attempt to collect and categorise all information that is relevant and useful.
Reveling in infrastructure
Hunstanton Secondary School (1954) in Norfolk, England, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson. Photo by Anna Armstrong (2011)
When the Smithsons placed the water heater for the Hunstanton Secondary School prominently above the school’s roofline, they weren’t just revealing the building’s infrastructure, they were reveling in it. What does it look like to do this on the web?
Of course there’s no single answer, because the web is simultaneously a physical and digital medium. It is material and it isn’t. It depends on how literally you interpret the question. But taking it somewhere in-between, seeing the web as primarily an information medium, we can ask the question a little differently: what does it look like to design something that is true to the material of digital information?
The quality of thought
It is the quality of thought and the information we use that determines yield, not the size or quality of the site.
A dot went for a walk
A dot went for a walk and turned into a line.
The dot, the line, the dance, the story, and the painting had found connections. Memory became learning, learning became understanding.Learning is remembering what one is interested in. Learning, interest, and memory are the tango of understanding.
Creating a map of meaning between data and understanding is the transformation of big data into big understanding.
The dot had embraced understanding.
Understanding precedes action.
Each of us is a dot on a journey.The need to record
With collecting comes the need to record. A specimen without a label is simply a (sometimes) pretty object. Without its associated data it is scientifically worthless.
The lapse of many years
At this point I wish to emphasize what I believe will ultimately prove to be the greatest purpose of our museum. This value will not, however, be realized until the lapse of many years, possibly a century, assuming that our material is safely preserved. And this is that the student of the future will have access to the original record of faunal conditions in California and the west, wherever we now work. He will know the proportional constituency of our faunae by species, the relative numbers of each species and the extent of the ranges of species as they exist today.
— Joseph Grinnell, 1910
Information imposters
Information imposters: This is nonsense that masquerades as information because it is postured in the form of information. We automatically give a certain weight to data based on the form in which it is delivered to us. Because we don’t take the time to question this, we assume that we have received some information.
My favorite example of this is in cookbook recipes that call for you to “cook until done.” This doesn’t tell you very much. Why bother? Information imposters are fodder for administravitis.
Like a prism
When you look at phonemes, you look through the perspective of morphemes, which are one linguistic level higher. The higher level is like a prism that splits the light in two. What was one thing, like ‘length’ at the phoneme level, looks like two opposite things ‘long’ and ‘short’ from the perspective of the morphemes. In practice, when you find both a word and its opposite, then the phoneme is not about either of these two things, but about what is common to them.
Thinking in terms of outputs
In our use of digital and analogue filing tools, we classify information through folders. An article about railway construction gets filed under ‘infrastructure’ or ‘transport’. In Evernote we tag it with ‘rail’ or ‘construction’. This is thinking like a librarian and not like a writer. We are classifying the information as an input. The reason you take notes as a writer is to produce content. It makes sense, then, to take notes in line with this goal.
Traditional filing like this tends to fail when you attempt to write your content. You are stuck trying to figure out which categories will be relevant for your proposal, paper or blog post. Interesting writing often comes from connecting separate fields through a common idea. By revealing the common denominator. By unifying two seemingly-contradictory ideas. How can you possibly achieve this if you’re looking in the same category for your information? The categories simply do not fulfil the function required by the writer.
The notes you take and indeed, the way you process information, should be with a specific project or idea in mind. You must classify information in terms of its outputs. When you take notes on a book, think about how this could apply to a specific idea you had or how it argues against a paper you read last week. The premise is that you should be organising by context and always trying to connect the dots between the content you're consuming.
Off to the races
"You get to the point where you're about to place your wager; the race is about to be run. You evaluate the sum total of the information, which has to do with how the money has been bet, what the horses looked like on the track, all this information—and it's like you run your hand over the race—I've had this happen so many times, it's the only way to explain it—you run your hand over the race. All the information is logically there, but there's something wrong. You don't know why something is wrong, but something is not correct. Then I have to reevaluate everything in terms of this feeling I have about the thing, which is derived from information, but which is so complex and so intricate and so subtle that there's no way you can put a tag on it."
The pie has been made
"In today's world, boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentleman, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classification, organization, presentation. To put it another way, the pie has been made—the contest is now in the slicing."
The Visual Information Seeking Mantra
There are many visual design guidelines but the basic principle might be summarized as the Visual Information Seeking Mantra:
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demandEach line represents one project in which I found myself rediscovering this principle and therefore wrote it down it as a reminder. It proved to be only a starting point in trying to characterize the multiple information visualization innovations occurring at university, government, and industry research labs.
Envisioning Information
A Book by Edward TufteBeautiful Evidence
A Book by Edward TufteThe Visual Display of Quantitative Information
A Book by Edward TufteThe Ladder of Abstraction
An Essay by Bret VictorThe Elements of Graphing Data
A Book by William S. ClevelandUnderstanding Understanding
A Book by Richard Saul WurmanVisual Explanations
A Book by Edward TufteInformation Visualization: Perception for Design
A Book by Colin WareThe Eyes Have It
A Research Paper by Ben ShneidermanLooseleaf
A WebsiteWikipedia
A WebsiteTinderbox
An ApplicationTinderbox is a workbench for your ideas and plans, ands ideas. It can help you analyze and understand them today, and it will adapt to your changing needs and growing knowledge.
Your Tinderbox documents can help organize themselves, keeping your data clean. We believe in information gardening: as your understanding grows, Tinderbox grows with you.
The medium is the message
A Quote by Marshall McLuhanProduct Design Resources
A Reference Work by Brandon DornThings I‘ve read, people I‘ve tried to learn from, and things I‘ve done to become a better designer. This is an idiosyncratic list reflecting what has helped me along the way, rather than an exhaustive list of design classics.
Though the list leans toward theory — principles are more durable than technique — I offer a few ideas further down about how to practice design. It also leans toward information design, because the task of presenting rich, dense information in an accessible way is ultimately the task of any digital product.
Blogging with Version Control
An Article by Will DarwinI’ve been musing for a while now on the way blog posts are typically presented—in reverse chronological order. This format has never truly made sense and does not reflect the way good writing and thinking happens.
...The main issue with the ‘pile’ system is that this post is eventually buried beneath more recent pieces of writing; there is no incentive for revisiting or updating the work. Even worse, if an author does decide to unearth the piece and make some major changes, those who read the original piece are not made aware of these alterations. The sorting order is static.
Nobody gives a hoot about groupthink
An Article by Baldur BjarnasonTwo relatively common ‘fashions’ today are real-time collaboration and shared data repositories of one kind or another.
Both increase productivity in the naive sense. We work more; everybody is more active; the group feels more cohesive.
The downside is that they also both tend to reduce the quality of the work and increase busywork.
Two types of work
An Article by Jorge ArangoThere are two types of work: growth work and maintenance work.
Growth work involves making new things. It can be something big or small. In either case, growth work often follows a loose process.
Maintenance work is different. Maintenance work involves caring for the resources and instruments that make growth work possible. This includes tools, but also body and mind.
Maintenance is ultimately in service to growth. But effective growth can’t happen without maintenance. As with so many things, the ideal is a healthy balance — and it doesn’t come without struggle.
Open Transclude for Networked Writing
An Essay by Toby ShorinWebsites are not living rooms and other lessons for information architecture
An Essay by Sarah R. BarrettWhile there is a lot that IA can learn from actual architecture or city planning, websites aren’t buildings or cities, and they don’t have to work like them. Instead, they should be designed according to the same principles that people’s brains expect from physical experiences.
Web History Chapter 1: Birth
A Chapter by Jay HoffmannHow to Think About Notes
An Article by Will DarwinWhat we have known since long
A Quote by Ludwig WittgensteinThe problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think
A Book by Ben Shneiderman
The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth
- Two generating systems
- Two types of building production
- System A
- System B
- This has harmed modern society greatly
Two generating systems
Imagine a town of type "A" — a neighborhood, if you like, and allow yourself to consider that it has the quality of birds, moss-grown stones, waves breaking on a small shore, pools in which crabs and shells present themselves. Because of the depth and scope of its structure, this world is almost infinite in its richness.
Compare this imagined town with a more usual neighborhood of type "B", typical of modern property development, where there is a stale and ugly air of repetition. Even when variation is attempted, this variation does not flow from the reality of living. Rather it is manufactured variety — an attempt to create something interesting. But what we feel instead is something flat, without excitement, without the urgent joy of life.
These two kinds of places, then, A and B, are typically generated in two different ways. We may therefore call these two different generating systems A and B.
Two types of building production
There are, loosely speaking, two types of building production. Type A is a type of production which relies on feedback and correction, so that every step allows the elements to be perfected while they are being made. This is not unlike the way a good cook tastes a soup while cooking it, checking it, modifying it, until it tastes just right. Type B is a type of production that is organized by a fixed system of rigidly prefabricated elements, and the sequence of assembly is much more rigidly preprogrammed. This type became commonplace in the 20th century, and is still widely used.
System A
System A is concerned with the well-being of the land, its integrity, the well-being of the people and plants and animals who inhabit the land. This has very much to do with the integral nature of plants, animals, and water resources, and with the tailoring of each part of every part to its immediate context, with the result that the larger wholes, also, become harmonious and integral in their nature.
System B
System B is concerned with efficiency, with money, with power and control. Although these qualities are less attractive, and less noble than the concerns of System A, they are nevertheless important. They cannot be ignored. If we are traveling in an airplane, or a high-speed train, we shall often be very glad that this system is constructed under the guidance of some version of system B.
This has harmed modern society greatly
System A places emphasis on subtleties, finesse, on the structure of adaptation that makes each tiny part fit into the larger context. System B places emphasis on more gross aspects of size, speed, profit, efficiency, and numerical productivity.
However, during the last hundred and fifty years, because of choices that nations and states have made in modern times, System B has become the dominant production system for the environment (for land and towns and regions), largely to the exclusion of System A. This has harmed modern society greatly.
Arcade
Here is an interior street on the Eishin campus, with an arcade opening from the back of the classroom buildings. The arcade steps up as the street goes along the slope. Because the natural contours of the land are preserved, the arcade jumps up, in small increments, as it goes along. Steps are inserted where needed; and in plan, too, the arcade follows a gentle series of curves and bends, following the natural character of the land.
This aspect of a street is not usually present in large construction projects, which typically destroy the natural character of the land, and tend to start with a blank "page" that has been created by perfect grading and flattening.
Transmitted through drawings
Architecture is now only transmitted through drawings. The typical architect does not personally know how to make anything — not buildings, not windows, not floors or ceilings. He or she draws drawings. Some other organization then produces buildings from these drawings. We are, by now, so deeply enmeshed in this way of thinking, that it doesn't sound like idiocy.
The life-giving continuum
In System A, creation and production are organic in character, and are governed by human judgments that emanate from the underlying wholeness of situations, conditions, and surroundings.
In System B, the production process is thought of as mechanical. What matters are regulations, procedures, categories, money, efficiency, and profit: all the machinery designed to make society run smoothly, as if society was working as a great machine. The production process is rarely context-sensitive. Wholeness is left out.
Identifying these two categories helps us sharpen and clarify the range of differences among ways of creating the environment that exist in different societies. And the two categories serve to identify a dimension of great importance: the dimension that runs from more life-giving to less life-giving.
Blueprints
Blueprints lead to the making of things that are abstract, not always based on reality. Once something becomes abstract, it breeds disconnectedness — separation and the inability to connect with our surroundings. People buy houses from blueprints, but then don't like the actual house: "What on earth is this? I had no idea it was going to be like this...etc."
Hopes and dreams
The very first thing we did was spend two weeks just talking to different teachers and students, to get a feeling for their hopes and dreams. These talks were one-on-one and often lasted about an hour, for any one interview, during which we asked questions, talked, probed, explored dreams of an ideal campus, and tried to understand each person's deepest visions as a teacher, or as a student. We asked people about their longings, and their practical needs. We asked them to close their eyes and imagine themselves walking about in the most wonderful campus they could imagine.
Mixed use
Pattern 5.5 – Every sports field is always attached to some building which has nothing to do with the particular sports function. Thus, for instance, the tennis courts may be next to the art studio, and placed so that people entering the art studio are just at that place where the tennis court is most enjoyable to watch.
Secret garden
Pattern 7.7 – There is also one garden, so secret, that it does not appear on any map. The importance of the pattern is that it must never be publicly announced, and must not be in site plan. Except for a few, nobody should be able to find it.
In the mind's eye
In System A, it is always the wholeness of the place that matters. To intensify the wholeness of any place — whether it consists of existing buildings in a town, or of virgin land that is largely unbuilt — proposed construction and buildings must be decided, and that means "felt" and thought through on the site itself. It is really not possible to do it any other way, since the relationships which exist between the buildings and the world around them are complex and subtle.
On a drawing or a plan, one simply does not see enough. The drawn plan does not give enough information. So trying to make decisions by drawing on a plan is doomed to failure. To produce a plan that has reality, and to bring the actual place itself to life, decisions are made gradually, on the site itself, under circumstances where one visualizes the situation as the whole it really is. Step by step, this brings building positions to life in the mind's eye — and so, in imagination, one conceives the buildings literally, in their full size and volume as they are really going to be.
Simulacra and simulation
The situation of contemporary construction is more likely to be that a building still gets its character first as an image, drawn on paper, by an architect's fantasy, a simulacrum which is then physically built in cheap and flimsy studs and sheetrock, concrete panels, cardboard — or in whatever conventional system of construction the contractor has on hand.
Sadly, this is where the dull, lifeless, and stereotyped character of buildings in the 20th century mainly came from. It is also, at the same time, where the wild and fantastic egotistical shapes of the present era come from. They are conceived and carried out as images, or part-images, not as built, solid, made works. These papery, System B things are not conceived and made for the sake of their material reality. The feeling one gets in the presence of these buildings does not fill the onlooker with the beauty or the presence of the material substance.
Power law
Buildings which most profoundly communicate subtle harmony are composed of a complex mixture of materials, with the overall amounts of different materials jumping in a calibrated cascade — typically according to a power law. The relative proportions — the statistical distribution of materials by quantity of total visible area — is critical. It is this specific distribution, not just the mixture, which creates depth of feeling.
Elements of Eishin
Each of the elements in the following list were essential to the creation of every space and every building at Eishin:
- The way each building relates to its surroundings, as well as the ground on which it stands.
- The geometry directed by its position in the whole and its function.
- Working with people who will inhabit the spaces.
- The immensely detailed use of models and experiments.
- The search for beautiful materials and ways of making the buildings that should stand there.
- The careful use of money in a manner that reflects the values of the endeavor.
- Creation of positive space, at every turn, and every scale.
- Placing materials between other nearby materials that are similar, and wedging harmonious materials in-between.
- Interlocking spatial links forming a two-dimensional sheet of courtyards, buildings, and openings.
Our responsibility
As makers of buildings, we architects must start now,
with a fundamental change of direction.
For the last hundred years or so, we have understood
building to be an art in which an architect draws a building,
and a contractor then builds that building from the
architect's plans.
But a living environment cannot be built
successfully this way.To achieve a successful building — one that has life — we
must focus our attention on all the crafts and processes,
and then, as architects, ourselves take direct charge
of the making.
We must take full responsibility
for the entire building process, ourselves.
Unfolding
In short, the architect is responsible for building construction, is watching the building unfold continuously, and is making ongoing modifications as it becomes clear from each given stage, what modifications and changes should be made at each moment. And this is all to be done within a management framework that controls budget and cost very tightly.
Direct management
Direct Management does not include or permit the concept of profit to occur. The management is fee-based, or based as a fixed salary, and all construction costs are fixed ahead of time, and the building design is modified during construction, to make up any over-runs. The manager is not able to move money around at will, or put it in their pocket. At the same time, the design is approximately fixed, but with the understanding that it may be changed, during the evolution of the building, so that subtle adaptations can be included in the emerging building. In the Direct Management method it is the architect themselves and the direct manager who together manage the building works and all on-site construction for the owner.
The problem of schedule
We have emphasized, from the beginning, that in order to achieve really profound quality in this project, it is necessary to be able to modify it continuously, during the process of construction. This in turn requires that the Manager is alive to the fact that important decisions are being faced at every stage, and is aware that one of the most important things that is happening, is the evolution of the building designs, while they are being built.
We have a strong intuition that a general contractor will interfere with this process, no matter what is said in advance. The reason is this: All the large general contractors we have interviewed are strongly oriented to the problem of schedule. Of course, this is one of their strengths. However, we are convinced that they are so strongly oriented to this problem, that they will ultimately kill the life of the project, in order to achieve enough management control to be able to guarantee schedule.
We must get our hands dirty!
We must get our hands dirty!In every work of architecture, the construction details are the heart of the project, and the true makers of the project are the ones who make the details, who make the materials directly, and who are not afraid to get dirt
under their fingernails.
We feel it in our fingers
In System A, there is no architect separate from the contractor. We are builders, simply. As builders, we have a direct feeling about construction. We feel it in our fingers, so it is down to earth. One result of this down-to-earth quality is that everything is somewhat experimental. We make experiments all the time. Sometimes we place a piece of wood this way. Another time, we may like to try it that way. Any time something new comes up in the design of a building, we are very likely to try and invent the best way of building it. This is not a great big invention. Just a simple invention, the way we might invent a way of tying a piece of string, to hold a broken toy together. It is just practical.
Four principles
The essential purpose of Direct Management, as we understand the term, is to create buildings which are whole. This means that each part of the building is right in relation to the other parts, and to the part of the land that makes the buildings and the land more beautiful.
I will try to summarize the real meaning of Direct Management.
- The design evolves during construction. This means that the form of control over designs does not stop when drawings are finished, but goes on, continuously, before, during, and after construction. This cannot be done if architect and contractor are separate, or consider their jobs separately. It will only happen if the person who controls the design at the beginning actually controls the construction, too.
- Flexible cost control. Cost control requires continuous changing of ideas about what is built, in relation to money that is available, and in relation to what has been done already.
- Experience with one's hands. It is also impossible for an architect to have enough knowledge to control the process successfully, unless they have experienced almost every phase of construction with their own hands.
- Love of craft and the joy in the physical process of making. In the old days, making a building was clearly understood as a work of making. In this word, designing and physically building are inseparable. However, in the modern world, design has become separated from construction. Architects think of their work as designing, on paper, with the idea that the building process is a separate process. This is not what I call making at all. A good building can only be created, when it is deeply understood as something which is made, by a direct connection of the act of making, and the act of feeling, with your hands.
Guided by image
In our minds, the drawings we had originally made for the columns and capitals were no more than first approximations of the final shapes. We assumed that we would work out the real shapes during construction, and left the inaccurate approximations on our drawings, just for the sake of the building permit. Fujita, used to working with architects in System B, assumed that whatever was on our drawings must be what we wanted, and must be implemented as drawn.
Anybody who was making those column capitals, if they had seen this "double" capital, and had been free to make something harmonious, would have done it differently. But Fujita's people, in System B, did not know how to be guided by reality. They were guided by "image".
So Fujita, in this situation, was not free to respond in a natural way to what they saw. They were trapped by the image-making process they were used to. But because of this, they doomed their own carpenters to a pretentious kind of slavery, producing whatever silly images they were told to do, without being able to ask themselves whether they were beautiful, and unable to use their own sense of reality to make them better.
Invisible substance
We wanted wood, not only in many visible places, but also in the roof trusses of the homeroom buildings, where they are invisible. Fujita wanted to replace the invisible trusses with steel trusses. They could not understand the idea that it was the actual substance — even though not visible — which would control the feeling of the thing.
A practical and sacred act
The emotional energy of a building can be achieved, only if the artists who make and shape the building are genuinely responsible for the way the building gets its shape. To put this another way around, it means that if we fail to take the practical responsibility for the acts of shaping, the emotional energy of the building will almost certainly be false. If the emotional quality of the building is to be alive, and is to be seen, understood, and felt by the people who live there or work there, then this task must not be handed on to someone else. The life and magnificence of the buildings will come to fruition only if we architects, or master builders, or artists — or for that matter, lay people — any of us — take on the task of shaping as a practical and sacred act.
In the walls and mosses
If we reach such a very ordinary state of daily life, and then back it up with building and construction that comes from the depths in us, then that gradually accumulates our value in the world, all of us together as a whole. Later, then, perhaps hundreds of years later, people will look back at our stones and say to themselves, "My word, those people way back then — they certainly knew how to live," and they would say this because they could see the lingering whispers in the walls and mosses, and could read them, and could treasure them, and would learn from these traces how to live like that again.
Melt
In many late 20th century buildings, the architect focused attention on a few strongly defined elements. Usually, the way the building stood out in its surroundings was very sharp, and intentionally separated from the buildings that surround it.
Real architecture comes about in a different way. If the architecture is real, there will be thousands of living centers; many of them modest, all of them having direct impact on human beings. In this condition, there is an overall wholeness in the building and the zones nearby, but this quality is not aggressive nor too sharp. It rather creates a condition where the building melts into the town, or street, or garden where it is placed.
Umbrella
From the curator's visit to a place that captures all the beauty, depth, and wholeness it attempts.