Peter Morville’s latest article looks at Information Architecture 3.0 in the light of Web 2.0.
His core message is pretty simple: information architecture is relevant to the Web 2.0 world:
Of course, user hostile web sites are only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface lurk multitudes of Web 2.0 startups and Ajaxian mashups that are way behind schedule and horribly over budget. Apparently, nobody told the entrepreneurs about the step change in design and development cost between pages and applications.
But, that’s enough gloom and doom, as the future’s quite bright, especially for information architects who find ways to connect the timeless principles of design and organization with new transmedia models of interaction, co-creation, tagging, and user participation.
Along the way, he talks about information architecture naysayers, the relationship of the discipline to its practitioners and larger community, how it fits (or doesn’t) with interaction design, and paths IA might take forward.
Whether you love information architecture or can’t wait to attend its funeral, it’s an article worth considering if you’re building anything complex. I’d love to see a followup on how IA 3.0 works out, and how its relationship with Web 2.0 (or 3.0, or x.0) develops.
(I had the pleasure of working with Peter as his editor on both Information Architecture, 3rd Edition and Ambient Findability.)
Nice! Thanks for the links, Simon! (reading)
He wants a world more dreadful than I thought I could imagine because a world I could imagine and did, he actually wants.
That means we are at the tipping point of unwisdom.
If IA and ambient findability are his goals, he has found a perfect Judas Goat. The prediction of course is quite easy. Collision detection, real time asset tracking, GPS to the map, querying from inside the application by through use of proximity emergent situations, these are all the favorite topics of the real-time 3D community, aka, Virtual Reality. This is now the faovrite topic of the security service companies and the public safety companies. IBM will push hard for standards for the 3D Internet, and these technologies will merge in the new Internet made possible by higher bandwidth technologies. At the same time, technologies will be developed to shield some from the views afforded by others (it's easy to do using the fact of the update protocols for MU views), and some will have full access for the right price or the right political position. The Chinese will be unhappy if their people can see what the Americans are doing, same for some Muslim emirates, and so on. Laws will be discussed and past about the requirements of full fidelity or merely representational models at the coordinates of meatspace (can a VR map of New York still have the Twin Towers?) and so on.
Life will become a game in an ever more real and simultaneously virtual sense. Just as the filtering and bias of other media today enables warping of decisions made, this will drive it even more incredibly to believe the unbelievable and accept the unacceptable. So perhaps this new ambient findable world is the ultimate tool for the Overton flush.
len