Comments on We Are All Connected: The Path from Architecture to Information Architecture

TN — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:48 GMT

I had to cringe too. “Customization”, “Personalization” and Yahoo being a prime example for a “dynamic” site? When has anyone here last personalized a site? Me, around the end of the last Century. Probably also the last time I bothered to visit Yahoo’s convoluted, messy and visually as well as functionally inacceptable front page.

And to be honest: what an IA actually does, and what her precise role in the development process; this article—like so many on this topic—leaves more or less unanswered. Instead we get again a fair load of didactic metaphors (“revolving doors”), and nice sounding concepts (“connectedness”) and Nielsenesque dogmas of how important the “ALT” tag is. I also didn’t need architects in order to teach me to “know my clients” and how important it is to document everything.

I hope in favor of the author that this article was written well before it was posted (November 2003). If not, then I seriously doubt that the discipline of IA has evolved much in the last 5 years.

phil jones — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:48 GMT

A criticism of :

The biggest problem with the article is that *nothing* in his discussion of building web-sites actually follows from his initial assertion that IA is like A.

I’m increasingly attracted to the analogies between architecture and information system design (both at the programming level and at the user interaction level) so I was really hoping for something interesting here.

But as far as I can see, the only message we’re meant to take from the analogy is that we need a separation between “grand designers” and the builders and engineers who do the work. And that we need a lot of contracts and specifications.

Is this the lesson from architecture? One of my favourite books is “How Buildings Learn” which is partly an extended rant against this kind of thinking, and a celebration of bottom-up design that emerges from users and builders making continuous small modifications. Although the author of this essay namechecks the book and uses the “e” word, it doesn’t seem that he allows it to disturb his off-the-shelf preconceptions about web-development in the slightest.

Another theme of HBL is the danger of “Magzine Architecture” and a complaint that architects don’t think through or evaluate long-term usability of buildings. Yet this author puts “test before putting it together for real” in his check-list of things IA can learn from A.

So, what testing is it that architects do? (Note : I’m sure the *engineers* do a lot of testing.) And in what sense is this something which IA – which got it’s
testing obsession via UI and human factors people (like Nielsen), and maybe ultimately from *industrial* design – can learn from architecture? Possibly IA is ahead of A here.

Once we get to the real life example, this is all standard web-design stuff. The architecture comparison isn’t even mentioned. There don’t seem to be any innovations inspired by architecture. Or even attempts to show parallels.

Seems like the author knows a lot of interesting ideas : Alexander, Brand, Nielsen, emergence etc; believes in connectedness; but doesn’t seem to understand *how* these things are connected : the logical implications between them, and the structural constraints that they place on each other.

Sanjiv Sirpal — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 20:50:35 GMT

“We are all connected.”

I believe, that is one of the most powerfull and beautiful realization’s I’ve made in my life.

I do have a strong affection to the interconnectedness of all things. That each motion … is just that – a motion. Which may or may not have a physical effect on some other event. But in my mind, I have the ability to connect it to…anything and everything. That to me is a beautiful thing….and also a very slippery slope.

Alan, dismissive? Yes, very. Disrespectful? Hmm, perhaps that’s the only way you can connect it. It wasn’t my intention – for that I apologize.

But I won’t apologize for implying that the article was written to validate a profession.

Then again, I could be wrong.

Adam Greenfield — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 03:39:46 GMT

While agreeing that Jakob is a tone-deaf tinhorn dictator, I think we give Chris Alexander a little too much credit. His recent magnum opus is just as reductive, just as programmatic, and ultimately just as much about himself as anything Jakob’s ever offered. That said, of course, I do believe “Pattern Language” was a visionary document that has utterly changed the way I understand human habitations at all scales.

I, for one, surely do appreciate Fu-Tien’s piece; like Andrew points out, for all the bloviation about the parallels between IA and A-A, the analogy is rarely fleshed out in such detail.

One strong point of commonality between the disciples, one that I *don’t* think is emphasized enough here, is how deeply architects and information architects both rely on the efforts of (structural, software) engineers to achieve clarity and beauty in the structures they design. I’ve seen this as an IA working closely with coders and back-end types, and I’ve seen it in the architecture I critique on v-2 (Diller & Scofidio’s Blur building being a perfect case in point): the vision must be matched by a technically-perfect execution that is often outside the ambit of our expertise. We depend critically on engineers, and they rarely get enough credit.

Finally, Sanjiv, I feel your commentary is just dismissive, verging on disrespectful.

Sanjiv Sirpal — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 03:39:47 GMT

I almost ‘cringed’ when I read this.

Then I thought “Heck I can relate to this!” – you see I also came from a formal training in architecture (ooh ya all that “sexy” studio stuff).

Okay I’ll be honest, I really am cringing again. All these metaphors relating doors to back buttons, governments to the golden section. Wow so cool? Really, must everything be Matrix-ized? “Like, you know…like when Neo met up with the new oracle it symbolized ….like …..a rebirth of a self replic-carnated culture vulture…cauze like….it spewed the yin(g) yang it had for lunch and the code had to reboot it…by golly….. of course! you can replace that curtain wall with hyperlinks! Heck ya!”

You know, you’re probably REALLY ticking off all those Industrial Design & Media Heads, heck they went to school for this ‘shyte’. Lord I can feel the i-podian backash already….

You see….

Architecture is about the Design of Space : People Use Space.
IA is about the design of Content : People Don’t Read Content.

Everything else is all about process. And we all know, that the struggle is the process.

Sorry to rain on your Taj Mahal. Matrix was a bitch.