[Sigia-l] Information-centered Design (was I Want My GUT of Information Arc hitecture!)

[Matthew Rehkopf]

I hear you, Peter. And when I left the summit, I felt that we were all
missing the bigger picture. Perhaps because our jobs force us to consider
the micro that we are not able to step back and look at the larger issue
that IA is meant to address... 

<crazy radical soapbox speech>
Here's my GUT of Information Architecture, in my very non-scientific speech:
The future web will not contain "sites" built around business goals and user
needs. Instead, it will be structured around information nodes connected by
relevance to other nodes. IAs will develop and maintain these nodes,
concerned only with the relevance of content.

How is this different? Let's take an example. Today, we build, for example,
furniture sites for companies building or selling furniture; separate sites
for each brand, on and on they go, too many to list here. We build them for
businesses that have one thing in mind - to make money; big surprise.
Businesses control this information; our current job is to make it easy for
furniture buyers to find what they are looking for (User-centered design may
only exist to make content easy to find on *my* site), and that activity
makes us all proud. However, there are many others sites on related topics
like: building furniture yourself, reviews of furniture, styles of
furniture, etc, but this information is controlled and developed by others,
again thinking of only their own business goals, and, thus, disconnected
from the rest of furniture sites. 

In the future, there will not be these independent brand sites. There will
be *one furniture site* where all the brands will post their products. Why?
Because we consumers will go there for all the other relevant information,
including reviews, photos, stories, etc. etc. The Web will empower the
individual to create and own information, taking it away for the
organizations that used to own and control it in the past (those
organizations for which we are all now slaving). IAs will help this happen,
working independently of businesses to allow for the free exchange of
relevant information in one central and easily-accessible location. The
individuals word will soon become more powerful than the institutions'.

Sound crazy? I heard this concept repeated many times at the summit:

1. Alex Wright said "I like IA but I feel unfulfilled. There must be more."
He talked about the sociobiology of IA, of how institutions have always
controlled information in the past. This hierarchical control of information
is coming to an end. The individuals word will soon become more powerful
than the institutions', and, hopefully, we are there to organize it.

2. Lou Rosenfeld asked Amy Warner about connecting vocabularies. Here it
starts, if it has not started already. Vocabs defined by relevance,
universal to all, the beginning of one furniture site, one book site, one
medicine site, one food site, one anything site... 

3. Thom Haller said he was a blobhead. We are all blobheads, and the
decentralization of these gobs of information just makes our heads spin
more. 

The truth of the matter is that we are all creating tons and tons of content
on individual sites. Do we think about how are one little tiny website's
content meshes with all the other related content on all the other related
websites? No, not yet. Soon, we will see organizations concerned about huge
drops in activity on their sites as people struggle through finding what
they need on the *ever-widening* "superhighway". Then, there will be a cry
for help, a cry for one spot to "get it all about furniture". And thus, it
will start. (applause, applause, blows "you are too kinds" :-) ).

The Cluetrain Manifesto may have planted this idea in my head. I am waiting
for the day that such sites start to take shape, when we stop working for
the institutions, and start working for the information. Ha,
information-centered design.
</crazy radical soapbox speech>

But, we have to get paid, right? For now?

Matt