Collaborative Information Architecture at Scale
Designing an information architecture with input from multiple stakeholder groups can feel like a NASA-level effort. This article shares thoughts on how to keep things organised while working systematically.
My thinking on the topic has been influenced by Bret Victor’s essays about tools for understanding, particularly his essay “Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction.” He begins with a question we’ve all experienced when working with more information than we can take in at once: “How can we design systems when we don’t fully know what we’re dealing with?” Victor goes on to talk about how we make sense of complex data sets, and why information tools should allow us to easily move between abstract representations of discrete data—the categories we use to make sense of things—and the discrete data themselves. You’d be hard-pressed to find better thinking on information architecture.
An excerpt from Collaborative Information Architecture at Scale
