Peter Morville - Editorial
The System of Information Architecture
“ Information architects are inveterate systems thinkers. In the Web’s early days, we were the folks who focused less on pages than on the relationships between pages. Today, we continue to design organization, navigation, and search systems as integral parts of the whole. Of course, the context of our practice has shifted. Increasingly, we must design for experiences across channels. Mobile and social are just the beginning. Our future-friendly, cross-channel information architectures need to address the full spectrum of platforms, devices, and media. ”
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My
Lifeboat #5: Richard Saul Wurman
Rick Wurman and I have been friends a long time. It’s been growing on us; we care about many of the same things. I’ve wanted to interview him for a long time, and now I have a good reason, though he keeps telling me that he’s in communications and I keep telling him that he’s in space. Of course we are both talking about the same thing. Technically, Richard Saul is an architect, a partner in the Philadelphia firm of Murphy, Levy, Wurman. But actually, he’s an architect, a city planner, a human designer, a writer, a communicator, an educator, and a whole lot of other things that it would be tough to put a label on. He was once a protege of Lou Kahn. Now I guess he’s his own protege.
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Andrea Resmini & Luca Rosati
A Brief History of Information Architecture
Information architecture is a professional practice and field of studies focused on solving the basic problems of accessing, and using, the vast amounts of information available today. You commonly hear of information architecture in connection with the design of web sites both large and small, and when wireframes, labels, and taxonomies are discussed. As it is today, it is mainly a production activity, a craft, and it relies on an inductive process and a set, or many sets, of guidelines, best practices, and personal and professional expertise.
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Raffaele Boiano
Ethnotelling for User-generated Experiences
This paper focuses on storytelling as a research tool for social sciences, especially for cultural anthropology. After a short review of the main methodological tools traditionally used in ethnography, with particular regard to observation and interview, we focus on collecting and crafting stories (ethnotelling) as suitable tools for conveying the relational nature of fieldwork. Drawing on the works of Orr, Chipchase, Marradi and Adwan/Bar-on, we show how stories - collected, mediated or made up – are valuable tools for representing experiences and identities. As a result, we suggest a different approach to user-experience design, based on the creation of ‘thick’ environments enabling a whole range of possibilities, where users can imagine or live their own user-generated experiences.
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