Slides for Peter Morville's talk at CanUX 2016 in Ottawa.

1. The Architecture
of Understanding
Peter Morville, CanUX 2016

6. 6
The Library of Congress
“To further the progress of knowledge and creativity.”

7. Fragmentation
Fragmentation into multiple sites,
domains, and identities is a major
problem. Users don’t know which
site to visit for which purpose.
Findability
Users can’t find what they need
from the home page, but most users
don’t come through the front door.
They enter via a web search or a
deep link, and are confused by what
they find. Even worse, most never
use the Library, because its
resources aren’t easily findable.

8. 8
Web Governance Board

9. Nature

12. Isle Royale National Park

13. Planning
Inspiration

14. Planning
Playing
Practicing

15. “With respect to learning by failure, it’s all fun and
games until someone gets a larval cyst in the brain.”

19. “There is a problem in discussing
systems only with words. Words and
sentences must, by necessity, come only
one at a time in linear, logical order.
Systems happen all at once. They are
connected not just in one direction, but
in many directions simultaneously.”

20. Food Scarcity
(overpopluation)
T T
Inflow
(birth rate)
Outflow
(death rate)
Stock
(population)
T T
Disease
(canine parvovirus)
Immigration
(via ice bridge)
Parasites
(moose tick)
Weather
(mild winter)
Inflow
(birth rate)
Outflow
(death rate)
Stock
(population)

21. “It is the responsibility of the
architect to know and concentrate
on the critical few details and
interfaces that really matter.”

22. The design and management
of information systems.
Understanding the nature
of information in systems.

24. Categories

26. Categories are the cornerstones of cognition and culture.

27. We use radio buttons when checkboxes or sliders would reveal the truth.

28. Connections

29. HyperlinksPages
Web

30. PathsPlaces
Space

31. ConnectionsCategories
Mind

32. ConsequencesActions
Time

33. intertwingled.org/planning-book
GoalPath
Here
& Now
Risks, Estimates, Metrics
Play, Practice, Prototype
Feedback, Reflection
Order, Options
Vision, Values, Subgoals

34. If you think information architecture hasn’t changed
since the polar bear, you’re simply not paying attention.

35. “Tell me about a day in your life.”

36. Culture

37. Underlying
Assumptions
Espoused
Values
Artifacts
Visible organizational
structures and processes
(hard to decipher)
Strategies, goals,
philosophies, justifications
Unconscious, taken for
granted beliefs, perceptions,
thoughts, feelings
(source of values, action)
Three Levels of Culture

38. Double-loop learning in organizations (and individuals) is rare.

39. The relationship between information and culture.

40. “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.”

41. “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.”

42. 42 Roger Bannister, Iffley Road Track, Oxford, 1954

43. Limits

45. Daylighting

46. Daylighting

47. “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 (2011)

48. 48

55. 55
The library is an act of inspiration architecture and a keystone of culture .

56. Thank You!IA Therefore I Am