Information Anxiety 2
Author
Richard Saul Wurman, born Philadelphia, March 26, 1935, with B.Arch. and M.Arch. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, the graduate degree taken with honours in 1959.[1] He practised architecture for thirteen years before turning to information design, coined the term information architecture, and founded the TED conference.[1][2] He describes his own work as the promotion of understanding.[2]
Que Publishing, 2000, ISBN 0-7897-2410-3.[3] Written with Loring Leifer and David Sume, edited by Karen Whitehouse.[4]
A substantially revised edition of Information Anxiety (1989), which had foreseen the problems of data clutter and proposed a way of organising and presenting knowledge on human terms.[4] The first edition became a cult guidebook to the information age.[5]
He is also the author of the Access travel series, Understanding USA (1999), Understanding Healthcare (2004), Information Architects (1996), and UnderstandingUnderstanding (2017).[1]
Description
The book alternates between describing the stress of absorbing badly organised data and setting out solutions that require some rethinking, with the return being improved understanding and possibly a change of state from information to wisdom.[4]
The revised edition examines how the Internet, desktop computing, and digital technology have not simply improved access to information but changed how people live and work, with attention to how technological advances can hinder understanding and shape the conduct of business.[4]
It also covers aesthetic considerations set against making information understandable, the pervasiveness of advertising, bartering and conversation, and communication in the workplace, with humorous asides and black and white cartoons throughout.[5] Chapter 3 pairs management styles with learning styles.[5]
LATCH
Latch is thebook's most portable contribution, introduced in the 1989 edition and also called the Five Hat Racks.[1]
Wurman's claim is that while information may be infinite, the ways of structuring it are not, and once you have a place where a piece of information can be plugged in, it becomes far more useful.[6]
The Five Hat Racks
- Location. Where things are relative to each other. Maps, floor plans, anatomical diagrams.
- Alphabet. Sequence by name. Directories, indexes, glossaries. Useful when the reader already knows what they are looking for.
- Time. Sequence by when. Timelines, schedules, histories, process steps.
- Category. Grouping by kind. Product types, departments, genres.
- Hierarchy. Ranking by magnitude. Largest to smallest, best to worst, most to least expensive.
These apply to almost any subject regardless of what the information is about.[6][1] Wurman demonstrates the point in the book by running the same subject, dogs, through all five schemes.[6]
The value of LATCH is diagnostic rather than generative. When an interface is hard to navigate, the usual cause is that it mixes two of these schemes without saying so, or claims one and delivers another. A list sorted alphabetically but presented as a ranking will mislead every reader who scans it.
Relevance
Wurman named the discipline that most interface work now sits inside, and this book is where the reasoning behind it is set out for a general reader rather than for practitioners.
His framing of the problem as anxiety rather than as volume is the useful part. The condition he describes is not caused by there being too much material but by the gap between what a person has and what they understand, and that gap produces a specific physical state. This is the same territory Low Resolution Indicators addresses from the perception side.
Criticism
Wurman occasionally indulges in New Age-flavoured pop psychology, though the analysis itself stays clear, and readers who dislike that register generally get past it.[4] The book is also largely theoretical, more interested in people's emotions around the need for knowledge than in tested method.[5]
Related Reading
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
- Envisioning Information
- Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
- Ambient Findability
- Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
- The Design of Everyday Things
- Donald Norman
- Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
- Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design
- Low Resolution Indicators
- User experience design
- Paul Otlet
- Architectural Intelligence
- Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation
- Present Shock
- Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
- The Power of Maps
External Links
- wurman.com
- Information Anxiety 2, Internet Archive, lending copy
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Richard Saul Wurman, Wikipedia.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Information Anxiety: Towards Understanding, wurman.com.
- ↑ Information Anxiety 2, AbeBooks.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Information Anxiety 2, Amazon.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Information Anxiety 2, Goodreads.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Organizing information is finite, Duarte.
