INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE IN THE AGE OF POSTDIGITAL

ANDREA @RESMINI

GHOST IN THE SHELL

The best way to frame this conversation is through this tweet I sent a few months ago.

That prompted a quick reply from someone who has some responsibilities when it comes to making IA a thing.

So I played nice. Who wants to get into a nasty twitter fight with Lou Rosenfeld of all people. But honestly, I'm not that sure.

THERE IS A NEW SPIRIT

Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (1926)

The reason for this is that there is a new spirit.

COMPLEXITY

A new spirit that works through complexity

MULTIPLICITY

COMPLEXITY

Multiplicity

POSTDIGITAL

MULTIPLICITY

COMPLEXITY

Its the expression of a postdigital society

POSTDIGITAL

MULTIPLICITY

COMPLEXITY

ARCHITECTURE

And works through architectural principles.

COMPLEXITY

Lets start from complexity.

NPR.ORG

An example can explain what complexity is not. Ever tried to build a piece of furniture from IKEA following their instructions?

NPR.ORG

COMPLICATED

Well, this is not complex. This is complicated.

This is complex. A city. Venice, in this case.

COMPLEX

An emergent, layered system that includes people, artifacts, relationships, and the environment through which they connect and interact.

COMPARISON

So, again, what is complexity? Tim Gwinn gives us a good example when explaining what complexity means for Robert Rosen. He says complexity works by comparison.

OVERSIZED

Think of vehicles, and suppose you impose a measure past which they are considered oversize.

This car is within the limits, so its ok. Its easy to see that a bike would also be ok, and they are approximately comparable. The size wouldnt differ too much.

Now, a truck. This is oversize. Not by much, but its definitely part of the second, opposite set we defined by imposing a limit.

But what about the Death Star? Its still oversized, right? So I can say my truck and this planet-size spaceship are part of the same set. Not helpful, right? While the car and bike express a fairly homogeneous set, at least as far as size goes, this set only works in comparison to the first. Its a complex set, not easily known.

A SYSTEM IS SIMPLE IF ALL ITS MODELS ARE SIMULABLE

Gwinn elaborates a definition from here that he traces back to Rosen. A simple system is simulable.

A SYSTEM THAT IS NOT SIMPLE IS NON-SIMULABLE

A system that is non-simulable, that is, one that does not allow to predict all final states, is not simple.

A NON-SIMULABLE SYSTEM IS UNPREDICTABLE AND COMPLEX

Hence, it is complex. And unpredictable. Complexity is simply what belies modeling. Behavior in a simple model (and hence in a simple system) can always be correctly predicted: not so in complex systems.

City at night, K. Growford

This is complex. A system that produces and consumes information, and that is increasingly experienced through the mediation of contextual information.

But this is also complex. Linneus Tree of Life, a staple of taxonomy and of a way to see information architecture. And its the result of a design choice, or multiple design choices. A process. Just like a city. There is nothing necessary here.

MULTIPLICITY

Now, multiplicity. We need to go back a little for this.

When this book came out in 1998, Lou and Peter were working in a world that was strikingly different from the world of today.

THE WEB IS THE UNIFYING FACTOR FOR MANY DIFFERENT COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES AND WILDLY DIFFERENT TYPES OF CONTENT

L. Rosenfeld & P. Morville, IA for the WWW

They could claim that they were working to bring unity via the one unifying medium, the Web, and rightly so.

SYNCHRONIC

It was largely a synchronic world.

Computer room, Santa Barbara http://is.gd/h4me67

You sat at a computer, and did your computing.

COMPUTING WAS A SPECIFIC ACTIVITY STILL CONFINED TO CLEARLY IDENTIFIED BOUNDED AREAS IN SPACE AND TIME

When you were done, you switched it off and you left all of cyberspace behind.

NOT TODAY

Not today. It doesnt work that way anymore.

ONCE THERE WAS A TIME AND PLACE FOR EVERYTHING: TODAY, THINGS ARE INCREASINGLY SMEARED ACROSS MULTIPLE SITES AND MOMENTS IN COMPLEX AND OFTEN INDETERMINATE WAYS

W. J. Mitchell

As Mitchell says, things are increasingly smeared across multiple sites, devices, identities, and systems, in increasingly complex and undeterminate ways.

Wikimedia http://is.gd/kOVmXy

This is what we are talking about. What do you think? Are there more computers in this picture or more people? Id bet my money on more computers. Smartphones, laptops, devices, appliances, tablets.

25.9

This is the average number of hours that EU citizens spend online per week.

39

ComScoreData. http://www.comscoredatamine.com/2012/08/brits-most-engaged-online-audience-in-europe/

Its an average, that hides the 39 hrs/week of the Brits. More time online than hours in the working week, for some.

A. Bartholl , Museum of Moving ImageBut its not being online sitting at a desk in the office, or in the home. Information is pervasive, it has bled into reality. Its with us when we switch the computer off, because it bounces off a thousand other touchpoints. Its systemic.

Space CubeThrough portable servers the size of your hand.

Sheffield, toph3r http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahxcjb/3552828240/

Through real-time displays.

Tablet use 2, ebayink http://www.flickr.com/photos/ebayink/6816581064/

Through tablets, smartphones, kiosks. This is a world of multiple Webs, and they are asynchronic.

POSTDIGITAL

Welcome to the world of postdigital.

IS DIGITAL DESTINED FOR BANALITY? CERTAINLY

N. NEGROPONTE, BEYOND DIGITAL (1998)

In 1998, a momentous year it seems, Nicholas Negroponte of MIT wrote an essay for Wired titled Beyond Digital.

Negroponte believed digital was on its way to banality.

LIKE AIR AND DRINKING WATER, BEING DIGITAL WILL BE NOTICED ONLY BY ITS ABSENCE, NOT ITS PRESENCE

N. NEGROPONTE, BEYOND DIGITAL (1998)

At a certain point, digital will be so intertwined with the fabric of day-to-day reality that we will only notice when its not there. Just like here, when the conference wi-fi goes down and you can here the awwww from miles away.

IT WILL BECOME TOMORROWS COMMERCIAL AND CULTURAL COMPOST FOR NEW IDEAS

N. NEGROPONTE, BEYOND DIGITAL (1998)

It will be the compost for new ideas.

And this is already happening. Think of how the simple use of a relatively simple tool like Google Maps has changed the way we experience a city.

THE WEB IS NOT A DESTINATION IN ITSELF BUT A ROUTE MAP TO SOMEWHERE REAL

S. Jenkins, Welcome to the post-digital world

ACTOR

WEB

SIGNS

TABLET

SPACE

PHONE

KIOSK

An information-based ecosystem connects actors, devices, places.

They are everywhere.

GHOST IN THE SHELL

Mamuro Oshii (1995)

This is where Mamuro Oshii and his Ghost in the Shell comes in. The movie is a sci-fi / cyberpunk opera questioning what it means to be human.

Major Kusanagi, the protagonist, is a police officer and a cyborg. She is trying to capture a terrorist called the Puppet Master whos probably a runaway government project and who wants to merge his ghost, his conscience, with her shell, her body, into a new being.

This man is Gilbert Ryle, a philosopher. He wrote a book in 1949 called The concept of the mind, in which he attacked Decartes mind-body dualism. He spoke of ghosts in the machine.

GHOST IN THE MACHINE

Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949)

There is no such thing as a ghost in the machine. Our mind is one with our body and viceversa. We are embodied beings. Just like Major Kusanagi, we have been ghost-hacked.

ARCHITECTURE

As embodied beings, we perceive reality through basic primitives that relate to our physical body. Space, time, place. This is where architecture comes in.

This is Paris in the 1920s.

This is a phone at the time.

These are two ladies on a coffee break. Probably a conference.

THERE IS A NEW SPIRIT

In these years, French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier writes his pamphlet, Towards a New Architecture. In it, Le Corbusier argues that architecture is falling behind.

Mercedes-Benz

Cars express the spirit of the times.

Le Corbusier, grain silo, Canada

Factories and utility buildings express the spirit of the times. Houses do not. Architects are blind.

MODERN

Le Corbusier, Ville Savoye

He will embody his ideas in many villas, machines for living, inspired by engineering, pure volumes. The aesthetics of the new century. These will be the roots of Modernism.

C. W. Moore, Piazza d'Italia

As a reaction, Postmodernism will be about relativity, the intellectual pastiche, and citations. Modernism is but the expression of a specific culture among many. There is no supreme truth, there is no sense.

Cloud Atlas is a very good example of postmodernist storytelling.

But then. Ask yourself: the world we live in, the Facebooks, the Twitters, the Paths. Is this an example of Postmodernism? Well, no.

Living Exhibition, photo courtesy of L. Ciolfi

Postmodern is still an old media cultural framing. Its all about the author. We have stepped into a world of folksonomies and reality tv. Its a world where users are producers, and the focus has shifted.

PSEUDOMODERN ARTIFACTS EXIST ONLY AS CONSTANTLY CO-PRODUCED AND REMEDIATED PROCESSES WHOSE CONTENT, MEANINGS AND DYNAMICS ARE SOCIALLY DETERMINED

This is the world of pseudomodern.

Its a world of wranglers, the world Bruce Sterling was talking about in Shaping Things.

A world where your disembodied selves are spread across channels, devices, and places.

This is not broadcasting anymore. But in some weird way, we are still framing our problems and our solutions that way. We dont see the complexity, we dont see the multiplicity, we dont see we are postdigital. And we dont do architecture.

ACDBZRK

ACDBZRW

ACDB

ACDBZRKMODERN

ZB

ACDPOSTMODERN

POSTDIGITAL

Adapted from T. Fenn, 2011

Information architecture is needed. Its the way out of the functional box of modernism and the endless, meaningless plays of postmodernism. Its the way we produce sense. Giving structure, creating the possibility for many different orders.

We have to acknowledge this new spirit. When I was a student of architecture, a record store was what we designed when we were asked to give people access to music.

This is music today. Its a flow. Its information. Its disembodied. It has no medium. Its in a link. Its on Youtube. Its on Spotify. On my phone.

THERE IS A NEW SPIRIT

See it. There is a new spirit.

THE SPIRIT OF A DIFFERENT ORDER, BRINGING NOT UNITY BUT MULTIPLICITY AND COMPLEXITY

A SPIRIT BRIDGING OUR MANY DISEMBODIED SELF, CONNECTING PEOPLE, PLACES, OBJECTS THROUGH EVER-CHANGING SEMANTICS

A SPIRIT OF CONTEXT, PLACE AND MEANING, TRANSFORMING INFORMATION SPACES INTO DURABLE ARCHITECTURES

THE SPIRIT OF IA

A SPIRIT OF SENSE-MAKING, RESHAPING REALITY AND CREATING NEW PLACES FOR HUMAN BEINGS TO LIVE, WORK, AND PLAY IN

THATS WHY INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE IS THE ARCHITECTURE OF POSTDIGITAL INFORMATION SPACES

If you dont believe this is all about information, what about this picture? A run-down industrial building, you say? Let me add a bit of information, if you will.

Suddenly, everything changes. I didnt trick you. Its information. Its all around us. Design this, and embrace the new spirit.

THANK YOU

2013 IA SUMMIT BALTIMORE

Andrea Resmini Ghost in the Shell 2013 IA Summit

GHOST IN THE SHELL