Or at least they’ve gone and built their own asylum, somewhere nice, by the sea.
It’s been linked up the wazoo already, but in case you missed it, a number of the usual IA suspects have set up an institute for “advancing and promoting information architecture”: The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture Best of luck to all involved.
The most interesting/provoking parts of all this to me were:
a) A quote on the homepage from Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain
“Order and simplification are the first steps toward mastery of a subject -the actual enemy is the unknown.”
Which I found sort of alienating. I’m not a big fan of ‘order’, or treating the unknown as an enemy. Big fan of simplicity, which often, but not reliably often, comes from simplification. I know, I know… I’m being vague, but that quote set my teeth on edge. BWDIK?*
b) Andrew Hinton‘s ’25 Theses’ manifesto, which I have niggles with:
e.g. “3. Without human intervention, information devolves into entropy and chaos.”
Huh? What’s the defn. of information used through this piece? Is it “Meaning?” which is inherently linked with human perception; or is it the physicists definition of ‘information’ – i.e. that “Information is what remains after one abstracts from the material aspects of physical reality”
On reading Andrew’s point (3), a physicist friend of mine said that it implies that consciousness is the only thing that can lower entropy. Physics, and specifically thermodynamics say that entropy and information can and do exist without reference to human consciousness. And there is also a fair amount of theory and experimental evidence to point to order spontaneously arising from chaos.
And so it unravels.
If I do a quick search-and-replace on the manifesto substituting ‘information’ with ‘meaning’**, things get interesting.
I’ve used the clumsy metaphor of the construction industry before – that architects, engineers, construction workers, clients and everyone else involved in the complex interconnected endeavour of actually building something, unite in understand around that which they are actually building, which is actually a building.
UX/ID/IA/Designers/Programmers/Whatever could unite around what they are actually building – which is ‘meaning’. (cf. Mok’s ‘understanding business’) Forming a federation or just loose field of understanding, around what you need to construct for ‘understanding’: The Meaning Construction Industry
But I digress. And hey! It’s a manifesto, you’re meant to have niggles with it!
(C) Andrew’s notion of the internet being a ‘shared information environment’ is fantastic – might help those in the Meaning Construction Industries(tm) to think outside the webpage/website paradigm, and into the more ecological mindset recquired to deal with next-generation concepts like web services and the semantic web.
Anyway – all of this doesn’t distract from the good that this will do those who practice IA (in the USA at least) – and congratualtions to all involved.
Petafloptimism 