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The Architecture of Understanding

Peter Morville, World IA Day (02013)

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Understanding

Architecture

Miscellaneous

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9Michael D. Cohen

March 22, 1945 – February 2, 2013

10Technology + Pedagogy

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“When I was playing baseball, most of the time I wasn’t playing full-scale, four bases, nine innings. I was playing a perfectly suitable junior version of the game...But when I was studying those shards of math and history, I wasn’t playing a junior version of anything. It was like batting practice without knowing the whole game. Why would anyone want to do that?”

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Quiz

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The Architecture of a Class

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The MOOCs must first compete with nonconsumption by meeting demand outside the schools (e.g., developing countries, home-schooling) and then within (e.g., letting students take courses not offered by their district). Later, this self-paced, student-centered model may gain sufficient momentum to become the dominant paradigm.

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Inquiry Learning

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Information LiteracyThe ability the find,evaluate, create,

organize,and use information

from myriad sources and

media.

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“70 percent of humans experience severe back pain…and in the U.S. this results in tens of thousands of surgeries each year.”

“There’s a secret about MRIs and back pain: the most common problems physicians see on MRI and attribute to back pain – herniated, ruptured, and bulging discs – are seen almost as commonly on MRIs of healthy people without back pain.”

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“If you want to accelerate someone’s death, give him a personal doctor. I don’t mean provide him with a bad doctor: just pay for him to choose his own. Any doctor will do.”

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Why is Medicine a Mess?

• Our minds/bodies are complex.• Patients want a quick fix.• Doctors hate saying: “I don’t

know.”• The AMA is an advocacy group.• Relentless and insidious

advertising.• Industry-funded research.• $2.7 trillion per year.

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“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” Henry David Thoreau

“Our government is corrupt. Not corrupt in any criminal sense. But corrupt in a perfectly legal sense: special interests bend the levers of power to benefit them at the expense of the rest of us.”

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“It is now my suggestion that many people may not want information, and that they will avoid using a system precisely because it gives them information…If you have information, you must first read it…You must then try to understand it…Understanding the information may show that your work was wrong, or may show that your work was needless…Thus not having and not using information can often lead to less trouble and pain than having and using it.”Calvin Mooers (1959)

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“Some habits have the power to start a chain reaction. Success doesn’t depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers.”

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“Willpower is the single mostimportant keystone habit for

individual success.”

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“We shape our buildings. Thereafter, they shape us.”Winston Churchill (1943)

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There is one timeless way of building.It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been.The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way.It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way.And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills, and as our faces are.

The Timeless Way of Building Christopher Alexander

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“I mean architect as used in the words architect of foreign policy…as in the creating of systemic, structural, and orderly principles to make something work.”

“The person who creates the structure or map of information that allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge.”

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Where architects use forms and spaces to design environments for inhabitation, information architects use nodes and links to create environments for understanding.Jorge Arango, Architectures

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“Cyberspace will require constant planning and organization. The structures proliferating within it will require design, and the people who design these structures will be called cyberspace architects.”Michael Benedikt (1991)

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Ambient Commons is about attention in architecture. It is about information media becoming contextual, tangible, and persistent.The intrinsic structure of space—the layout of a studio, for example, or a plaza—becomes part of any mental engagement.

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35Polar bears are a keystone species in the Arctic ecosystem.

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The library is an act of inspiration architecture and a

keystone of culture.

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What We DoInformation architects make connections that make the invisible visible.

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IA Therefore I AmPeter Morvillemorville@semanticstudios.com

Understanding IA (Prezi)http://is.gd/iaprezi

Bloghttp://findability.org/

Twitter@morville