Place

Relationships are what give you a potential of movement in a digital environment. A strong sense of “here” begets a “there,” where you could potentially go. 

So IA isn’t just about dealing with a certain kind of mess, helping people make information as they encounter those messes, I think we also come to it with a certain presupposition of a solution: To create places made of information. 

I know this is a little fuzzy with the whole idea of information being cocreated at all moments, but my basic argument here is that we can arrange things so that people can bring their sensemaking skills they developed on real places to non-physical environments, so that they can make information out of them. For convenience’s sake, I’m going to refer to this idea as creating places made of information.

Why places? Why do we think this works?

Partly, we think we’ve been doing something similar for a long time. Jorge Arango argues in Living in Information, that architecture is humanity’s oldest information technology. (Arango, 2018) That might be a bit of a stretch, but he points out that physical environments, places in the real world, do a great job of encoding, storing, and conveying information to us. Whether it’s a cathedral making an argument about man’s relationship to the divine or a train platform cueing you to stand back, this is happening all the time. 

We also know that we’re really good at it. Our memories for physical space stay with us much longer than we expect. I bet, if you close your eyes, you can remember where your grandparents kept their telephone. Or what the layout of your third grade classroom was. Most of us tend to remember this kind of thing quite easily, and we can reason about it intuitively, without thinking too hard. It’s a good candidate for latching onto, as we’re building out non-physical information environments. 

So then, what makes information into places? This is a surprisingly hard question to answer, for all that I’m arguing that we have a folk tradition of doing it fairly effectively.

We can start with what makes space into places? In Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Yi-Fu Tuan writes:

“What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value … the ideas ‘‘space’’ and ‘‘place’’ require each other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.” (Tuan, 1977, p. 6)

So, place is differentiated, secure, stable, closed, protected, a pause between movements. This works for me, metaphorically, as we think through how we do this as IAs.**

Walls, streets, or edges of page sections form boundaries. Close boundaries create a stronger sense of place than distant ones. [[hartleyGeometricDeterminantsHuman2004]] (p. 44)

A line is formed where two colors meet. A boundary is formed where two contrasting characteristics meet. These boundaries are essential for creating meaning.

Geographers can’t agree on what places are, this is actually a very poorly-defined concept in the space. Places demonstrably exist, though, cells are firing in those little rat brains. The polar bear book says that websites are places made of information. In reality, all places are made of information; we only know places when we see them, when the information reaches a threshold to make those little cells fire. The key is to think about how naturally the physical world gives you those cues, how freely it offers that information up.

If digital experiences are places and not products, what is the minimum viable place? The design of software is new but the design of places is not. Sutton Hoo? [[arangoLivingInformationArchitecture2018]]