Websites are not living rooms and other lessons for information architecture An Essay by Sarah R. Barrett medium.com While 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. informationsoftwaremetaphor
252. Pools of Light Problem Uniform illumination—the sweetheart of the lighting engineers—serves no useful purpose whatsoever. In fact, it destroys the social nature of space, and makes people feel disoriented and unbounded. Solution Place the lights low, and apart, to form individual pools of light which encompass chairs and tables like bubbles to reinforce the social character of the spaces which they form. Remember that you can’t have pools of light without the darker places in between. Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein & Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language Lights and lampsFalse train station darknesslight