Information Geography and Ecology

30 August 2016

Thomas Wendt has an essay in the Journal of Information Architecture calling for a more adaptive Information Architecture practice that takes into account how rapidly information structures shift and change given mobile, context-aware, and artificially intelligent computing that he calls Information Cartilage. I highly recommend giving it a close read. I really like this biological element that he’s infused into a conception of information structures. As I’ve become more interested in user experience and information architecture, it’s the first thing I’ve read that’s sparked that part of me that became so passionate about the ideas of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault while I was in college.

I’ve found a lot written about information architecture to focus more on the “how-to” aspect and less on philosophical ruminations on what it means to analyze and attempt to organize information. I think both are very important not only to stay on the right track as a practitioner, but also to maintain intellectual curiosity and creativity in the face of what can occasionally feel a little dull. Honestly, not all information is interesting.

The post-digital merging of the digital and the physical, or the virtual and the real, reminds me a lot of Deleuze, though his idea of the “virtual” was more of a multiplicity of possibilities as I understand it. Wendt’s biological description of how the information community must adapt sparked my imagination to consider other ways of conceptualizing the post-digital era. What really grabbed me was the ambiguity of the post-digital in terms of “space.” If the lines between a digital and a physical space are blurred, it could be useful to conceive of information’s relation to and across space as a form of geography or ecology, both of which focus on relationships and space. Geography as a discipline emphasizes human elements of space and how space changes, adapts, and is adapted by people, paralleling a lot of the goals of human-centered design.

While both geography and ecology tend to be more descriptive rather than prescriptive, both have elements of social justice or conservation that motivate their practitioners. A geographical lens to information could help us understand information structures and predict their shifts; an ecological lens could help us maintain and preserve information that might otherwise become lost or obscure. Taking ecological ideas like conservation, footprints, waste, and pollution and then thinking of them in terms of information and its organization, structure, and accessibility could lead to innovative design and architecture techniques and strategies that help the information community adapt to the unprecedented proliferation of information that Wendt illustrates as mobile and context-aware computing come into their own.