[Sigia-l] Less Spatiality, More Semantics?

[Christopher Fahey [askrom]]

> In his provocative panel presentation for the fourth IA 
> Summit in Portland, "Wayfinding and navigation is digital
> spaces" Andrew Dillon took the field of Information 
> Architecture to task for it's fixation on "spatiality" as the
> primary navigation model/metaphor, and suggested that we 
> would do well to spend more effort creating navigation systems
> based on the harder, but 'neglected' area of "semantics."

I didn't attend Andrew's panel :( because I assumed (incorrectly?) that
most of us already understand the severe pitfalls of spacial- or
metaphor-based information architectures. The counterexamples in the IA
canon are plentiful: WalMart's famous early site iteration where the
main navigation was a replica of a store floor plan, Microsoft BOB, etc.
Spatial navigation seemed like a design theory that was quite popular in
the pre-web "multimedia" era and which today only really exists on
children's web sites and multimedia experiential sites.

Maybe I was oversimplifying Andrew's message, but I assumed this was a
problem that, like polio, has already been virtually wiped out. Then I
read PeterMe's interpretation of "spatial":

> What Andrew means by spatial processing, as I understand, 
> has to do primarily with the notion that we "navigate" 
> information, and that we have to create tools (navigation 
> bars, breadcrumbs, explicit hierarchies) to assist people in
> navigating it.

This is not what I think of as "spatial".  I would call what Peter is
describing "oversimplistic semantics" or even "monolithic semantics",
not "spatial". It is quite true that we over-rely on all-powerful
simgular explicit hierarchies, and I am constantly pointing out that IAs
suffer from Emerson's hobgoblin of "foolish consistency" so much that we
habitually ignore the possibility of exploiting a wider variety of
multiple semantic models that users can readily understand and access to
get around a site.

To me it's a misperception to see it as a problem of thinking "spatially
versus semantically". It's a problem of thinking "narrowly versus
broadly about semantic models". It's a problem that ultimately stifles
innovation, and is definitely worth talking about. 

[what's the difference between "spacial" and "spatial" anyway?]

-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
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