[Sigia-l] Design by Committee: biological reasons discovered

[Stewart Dean]

Hi,

Not design by committee but decentralised systems, or bottom up design in 
other terms.  The behavour of the cockroaches has a name - it's called 
emergence. The system type is known as a 'complex' system - complex as in 
self organising.

The concepts of complexity and emergence meet the world when looking at 
community sites such as Flickr and Myspace and even in Wikis.  Most websites 
are top down, hirachicaly created, these can be thought of as being 
organised like the average office or royal palace. Nature, on the other 
hand, has found that decentralised 'environments' can do tasks very well. 
For example in an ants nest there is not top down control, the queen ant 
does not send out instructions like a real queen but is just part of the 
machinery of the nest. A web site can be much the same.  This can be viewed 
as a bottom up system.

Most attempts at bottom up IA are a mixture of top and bottom up. For 
example my limited knowledge of BBCs recent efforts is to try and get a 
bottom up approach working by applying a top down schema to all content. 
This ignores the most important aspect of any bottom up system - that it is 
made up of the relationships between items. A bottom up site is, in effect, 
partly created through use.  The IA's job in this case is set up an 
environment in which the information exists and enables it to change over 
time according to how it is used.  I have never come across a true bottom up 
IA structure and it's alien to the way we humans organise things so it's 
hard to conceive.

Those here who work on large sites may recognise aspects of this in 
conceptual navigation and through user voting.

So really it's not design by commitee but design by nature. Bottom up rather 
than top down. Jane Jacobs uses the word 'biomimicry' in her book about how 
economic systems work better if they use behavours we see in natural systems 
in her book 'The Nature of Economies' - I think it's aplicable to 
information architecture as well.

Cheers

Stewart Dean


>From: Listera <listera at rcn.com>
>To: SIGIA-L <sigia-l at asis.org>
>Subject: [Sigia-l] Design by Committee: biological reasons discovered
>Date: Sat, 01 Apr 2006 04:30:58 -0500
>
>Finally:
>
><http://tinyurl.com/mb2mr>
>
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>Ziya
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