The best ia is contingent

The “best” architecture is contingent on the ambient level of task uncertainty, because that uncertainty limits your ability to plan.

We’ll generally want fluid organic architectures in uncertain situations and fixed, mechanistic architectures in repeatable ones. The ambient level of certainty is what determines it. (What is fluid vs what is fixed might surprise you. It’s not about the content itself, it’s about the predictability of the structure of that content. Social media, for instance, or any site that relies on user-generated content is extremely fixed in structure. A big company’s internal wiki, on the other hand, is probably extremely loose. A big part of my job as an IA is showing organizations how their work is actually more predictable than they think, and therefor they can benefit from a more fixed, mechanistic architecture. The rest of the job is putting the fluidity in the right place.)

This thoughtful placement of order and chaos can be unintuitive, because traditional stories about information tend to position it as something that serves order and is threatened by chaos. Instead, as Dervin does, I think of information as something that is made and unmade in communication.

There are many ways of adding order to information, but not all of them are IA. Just like Liminal spaces can exist without feeling like places, data can be modeled without being architected. Architecting information is making it work more like a place.

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