Abstract
We live in a world of increasingly complex, interconnected, societal problems. Design Thinking (DT), as an academic concern, and amongst other disciplines, has been grappling with such problems since the 1970s in order to solve the problems facing humanity and the environment. Initially, this paper briefly introduces the discourse of design thinking before describing in reference to selected theory from the field of design thinking a brief account of the characteristics of complexity and indeterminacy within the design phases of researching, ideation and prototyping. This paper then examines the ways in which the practice of information architecture (information architecture, IA) operates in some very similar ways and how this view reframes an understanding of the practice of IA. The paper will then present three ‘illusions’ embedded in the current view of information architecture that we believe account for its misconception. The reframing of IA presented here has implications for the field of information architecture, its theory, its practice and the teaching thereof, but perhaps more importantly also for other fields of design that stand to gain enormous value from the application of the thinking, tools and techniques of IA to grapple with the complex problems of our time.
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Notes
- 1.
See Thomas Lockwood’s Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value (2010) for a business orientated description of design thinking.
- 2.
- 3.
See Dindler (2010) for a discussion of the historical emergence in design theory of problem setting and problem solutioning.
- 4.
Buchanan terms these types of solutions as ‘categorical’.
- 5.
The popular community-based and practice-led website of IA “Boxes & Arrows 2014” has used the tag line ‘The design behind the design’ for many years.
- 6.
It is worth noting that the IA that exists may not ever have been explicitly designed or have been created by someone that self-identifies with the role of IA. This is often the case when an original IA design has morphed over time into something that no longer holds the original principles and objectives of the design or when a programmer, graphic designer or even project manager has been tasked with designing a website when no skilled information architect is present to contribute to the thinking.
- 7.
Based on the professional experience of the authors, user journeys have been applied extensively in the field of information architecture design for over 13 years with specific reference to the evaluation, research and design of digital experiences (in particular website design).
- 8.
In the field of Service Design user journeys are referred to as Customer Journey Maps, Journey Maps or Experience Maps.
- 9.
A minor edit of Oz’s latter paragraph starts to read a little like a description of the way people can navigate websites and the effort that information architects take to relationally structure navigation, to hyperlink data, in ways that provide multiple options for journeying through a single structured logic of associations: “made up of different avenues (…) everything can happen in one of several ways (…) parallel logics (…) [e]ach (…) consistent and coherent in its own terms, perfect in itself, indifferent to all the others”.
- 10.
This should not be confused with knowledge however. One simple example would be the Genus of Species: our understanding of the animal kingdom, and what it means to us, would be very different today had an alternative categorisation been applied. In Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” the Abbott provides the categorization: celestial, terrestrial, aerial and aquatic (1980).
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Fenn, T., Hobbs, J. (2014). The Information Architecture of Meaning Making. In: Resmini, A. (eds) Reframing Information Architecture. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06492-5_2
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