The future of IA... or what to do with all that content

(This is part of my series on what I learned at the Fluxible conference over the weekend.)

Karl Fast, a prof at Kent State, talked about the huge load of information that is available online and how we can cope with it. He doesn't have a solution, but suggested themes that information architects might pursue towards finding a solution. He said...

Our current ways for processing all this information are:

Intentional structure, such as a library or folders
Algorithms plus computation (the Google approach)
Loosely coordinated group actions (the Wikipedia approach)

Information is cheap but understanding is expensive - and we have not figured it out. IA is about understanding the world as it may be, and a fundamentally new way of processing information is needed but might not happen for a long time. In working towards that new understanding, he has come up with some themes that might prove fruitful. They seek to understand how people work with content. They all fit into the idea of cognition as extension. For example, when we do a jigsaw puzzle we look at the puzzle, using just our brain, but we also move the pieces with our hands. We combine pragmatic action and epistemic action.

These are the themes he thinks might be fruitful in moving to a better way to process content:

Deep interaction - He argues that our mental model is wrong: we think cognition is all in the brain, but it's really part brain, part external: gestures, inflection, content artefacts, people, devices, etc. (When we do usability testing we usually ignore a lot of really important stuff like gestures.) Scientists have discovered that we don't just use our brains to think: thinking is a mind-body integration. For example, gestures are so important that we don't think as clearly if we don't gesture. Another example: this study of Tetris users concluded that thinking is not all in the brain.

Coordination/orchestration - We coordinate a variety of online devices, books, a whole bunch of things. It's not as simple as processing one thing. We have multiple PCs, tablets, smartphones, etc., and also have non-electronic content to coordinate. To figure out how to process the vast new amount of info we face, we should think of PHINGS: Physical, haptic, interactive and information-rich, networked and next-generation, stuff on surfaces. These refer to:

Physical: not just the brain, but also the body and physical things
Haptic: non-verbal communication
Interactive and information-rich
Networked and next-generation
Stuff on surfaces: on screens or paper

Mess - We tend to treat mess as an a bad thing to be avoided, but mess is necessary and should be worked into our theory. "Mess is the soul of creativity." Messy desks, messy desktops, messy bookshelves. Mess is a fundamental part of reality and we need a way of describing it. The idea of mess is completely tied up in the idea of deep interaction and PHINGS. Mess reflects our reality.

While talking about mess, Fast told an anecdote about Steve Jobs. Jobs liked to popularize a myth that he lived a stripped-down, simple life, and played up a time when he had no living room furniture... but this is what his home office looked like:

All this is a bit difficult to comprehend, especially as it applies to a way to process online content. I was fascinated but not exactly led to enlightenment. I am not sure I have captured his meaning perfectly, but I'm going to keep Karl Fast on my watch list. You can find his published papers here: Medeley Profiles.

Update: Karl Fast recently left Kent State to become an information architect at Normative Design.