Peter Morville's talk at World IA Day 2013.

1. The Architecture
of Understanding
Peter Morville, World IA Day(02013) 1

2. 2

3. 3

4. 4

5. Architecture
Understanding
Miscellaneou
s
5

6. 6

7. 7

8. 8

9. Michael D. Cohen
March 22, 1945 – February 2, 2013 9

10. 10

11. “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?”
11

12. 12

13. 13

14. The Architecture of a Class
14

15. 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.
15

16. 16

17. Information Literacy
The ability the find,
evaluate, create, organize,
and use information from
myriad sources and media.
17

18. 18

19. “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.”
19

20. “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.”
20

21. 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.
21

22. “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.”
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil
to one who is striking at the root.” Henry David
Thoreau
22

23. “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)
23

24. “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.”
24

25. “Willpower is the single most
important keystone habit for
individual success.”
25

26. “We shape our buildings. Thereafter, they shape us.”
Winston Churchill (1943)
26

27. 27

28. 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
28

29. “I mean architect as used in the
wordsarchitect of foreign policy…as in the
creating of systemic, structural, andorderly
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.”
29

30. 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
30

31. “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)
31

32. 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.
32

33. 33

34. 34

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

36. The library is an act of
inspiration architecture
and a keystone of culture.
36

37. Information architects make connections
What We Do
that make the invisible visible.
37

38. IA Therefore I Am
Peter Morville
morville@semanticstudios.com
Understanding IA (Prezi)
http://is.gd/iaprezi
Blog
http://findability.org/
Twitter
@morville
38