Andrea Resmini :: Information architecture for a post-digital world

http://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/c/1/b/8/600_433249592.jpeg

This talk introduces the socio-technical changes that lay at the bottom of our post-digital, cross-channel world, discusses the nature and role of information architecture today, and argues that information architecture is a necessary and crucial component of any good design.

Some fifteen years ago, in 1998, Peter Morville & Lou Rosenfeld could argue that the Web was the unifying factor for many different technologies and wildly diverse types of content. We cannot anymore.

Information architecture had a role in there, a very specific one. In 2013, the Web is but one piece of a larger mechanism: our focus has moved away from the single artifact to consider the actors' own ecosystems, complex, personal, postdigital information-based beasts that span products and services.

Constantly reshaped and reconnected by individual actors using whatever arbitrary channels they like, ecosystems force us out of the Web, a “simpler” world where the lenses provided by either library science or graphic and product design seemed to be enough. Not anymore.

Information has gone mobile and has bled into physical space, but mobile itself is not the revolution, it is an enabler. The revolution is in what constant access to dynamically remediated information is allowing us to do, in how it allows the digital to seep into physical space, in how it turns receivers into writers constantly weaving new subjective narratives.

This is a different order, bringing not unity but multiplicity and complexity; bridging our many disembodied self, connecting people, places, objects through ever-changing semantics that defy or enhance physical proximity; transforming information spaces into durable architectures; ultimately reshaping reality, and producing a new need for context, place and meaning.

About the speaker

Andrea Resmini is an assistant professor, architect, information architect, compulsive reader, pensive writer, videogamer, and piano player.

He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Information Architecture (http://journalofia.org), served two terms as President of the Information Architecture Institute (http://iainstitute.org), and the author of two books, Pervasive Information Architecture (http://pervasiveia.com) and Reframing Information Architecture (http://www.springer.com/computer/hci/book/978-3-319-06491-8).

Andrea tweets at @resmini (https://twitter.com/resmini) and blogs at http://andrearesmini.com .