IA, Design and What is Information?
Over at Bokardo, a recent article about infoprefixation got me to thinking about an old problem. But rather than rehash old arguments, I’d just assume start with the basics of understanding information, since so much misunderstanding seems to occur at that level.
Information = Data + Context
There has been an ongoing misconception for a while now that information is something that can exist on its own without interpretation. But one man’s information is just another man’s data. Without the context portion involved in the above equation, namely the human perception and understanding, there is no information, only noise.
Consider a very simple example: a list of phone numbers. Some people would call that information. I would say that without the associated names, it it not information. And I would add that it is a designer’s job to make that name-number association useful by putting in alphabetical order (or whatever order the user would like).
There are is tons and tons of data in the world. Most of it is going to waste because it isn’t being transformed into information. if you don’t believe me, look at what Hans Rosling accomplished with the right data and intelligent design.
Your point that information architecture is design dovetails nicely with my piece. I agree completely.
Part of the problem is that by focusing on architecting information it is easy to forget that each user comes with their own context…and that building a single architecture (like say a document-based web navigation system) to satisfy this need is almost a fool’s errand.
The new paradigm of providing sorting, filtering, and aggregation tools for users to let them do the organizing is a much better, and contextually-sensitive, approach. The tools, otherwise known as web applications, are how individual users turn data into information.
This may seem off the topic, but I also think that what some people are calling 3rd generation interfaces are also going to allow people to get at their information and manipulate it more to suit their needs. I hope to post on this topic coming up soon.