Morgan's Notes on Make Me Think about Organizing
Mara 2016, rev Mar 2017The cleverness of five hat racks that Lynch mentions is compelling because it makes things seem easy and final. But the hat racks idea has become decontextualized from detailed rationales, separated from its ontological foundations. The idea has become reified, naturalized, and finally prescriptive. Another issue is this: There may be "five fundamental ways to organize information,” but there are far more ways to present that organization on a screen. There’s a space between the organizational schema and the representation of that schema.
Let's bring to the surface some of the stuff the taxonomies seem to leave out and question what kind of advice is being offered.
in class review and questions
- How the organization systems appear on pages
- How else they show up? what kind of classification are tags, for instance? What does it mean to organize by audience?
- Do we find any content that does not fit into the five hat racks?
- What else the taxonomies tell us about the organizer, the purposes of the organization, the relationship the organizer seeks to establish with the users. In cases where the system works, what effect does it have on the case? the users? eg Jen on Google Maps.
- What else the taxonomies tell us about the organizer, the purposes of the organization, the relationship the organizer seeks to establish with the users. In cases where the system works, what effect does it have on the case? the users? eg Jen on Google Maps.
- Taxonomies tend to conserve the social order as determined by the creators and users of that order. They may appear natural and the only right way to organize.
- The organizer uses terms to label the items and the classes. do we organize by terms or by content? and what do we do with the problems of the terms? warm - cold / hot - cool / reddish - bluish / saturated - unsaturated
Where do we place
- tags - and how does that manifestation differ from what categories do? Tags are classification, for instance, but one that collects rather than separates, as classes do.
- maps of physical spaces
- maps of physical spaces overlaid with information
- maps of conceptual spaces or maps of ideas
- Venn Diagram v concept map
- color, as in a color search on google: warm - cold - hot - cool -
- geographical features such as height? what terms are used? or is it avoided?
- ...
Organizational schemes are not neutral or inert. They shape, eliminate, assign value. We can see the value coming out even in the method: What is going to be considered content and what's not? The hierarchy is ideological as much as it is ontological.
The schemes seem to favor certain kinds of content over other kinds - mainly text over image, for instance, and institutional over personal.
An exercise
Organizing leads us to taxonomies. And taxonomies are how we put representations of the world together to make sense for selves and dictate sense for others.Do some taxonomy redesign.
- Create a menu for BSU English BA senior.
- Create a menu for BSU Psych BS senior.
- Create a third menu for a mom and dad of a prospective student.
Notice how your work is limited by your willingness to imagine the users in their complexity, your knowledge of what content is available, what the institution has declared as legitimate content and made available, and your ability and willingness to create new content if it isn't available. Notice that it is limited by your sense of appropriate terminology, and dependent on what terms would connect with family or students in other majors. Notice that it's limited by a limited knowledge of what others might need.
PeterMorvilleOnOrganizing
Notes on your notes
5 Apr 2015Here are some of dangers in looking over sites that I culled from reviewing your notes.
- We tend to select reasonably inert examples, with the intent to reinforce the system rather than question it. Selected winners rather than losers, with little question of who wins and who looses.
- We don't actually explain how the organization worked - either how or how well - but tended to assert that it did work, and imagined it working flawlessly and simply.
- Tend not see many areas where the scheme didn't work or could easily be fouled.
- Jump immediately to evaluation rather than keeping a critical eye on things.
- Tend not to see how the organization influences and possibly determines what users want.
- Tend not to consider that don't fit the hat rack aren't created or added.
- Items that don't fit the ideas of the creators of the hat rack aren't created. (list of restaurants in Bemidji on the BSU website).
- We tend to see the language in the categories and topics as basic or simple rather than seeing it a cultural code. That is, you have to know how to use the code in order to make sense of the organization scheme. (Academics on the BSU website is a technical term, as are Giving and others.)
- In creating organization schemes, we tend to imagine users who want exactly what the organization gives them and don't imagine users who need something else. (Compare MIT and BSU).
The hat racks seem to work by eliminating possibilities and content as much as by including them. So, let's look at an alternative set of schemes for organizing to see what we can see.
CategoryNotes
