Slides for Peter Morville's free O'Reilly webcast about the architecture of understanding.

1. The Architecture
of Understanding
Peter Morville, O’Reilly Webcast

5. Nature

11. Isle Royale National Park

12. Planning
Inspiration

13. Playing
Practicing
Planning

14. “With respect to learning by failure, it’s all fun and
games until someone gets a larval cyst in the brain.”

16. Everything should be made as simple
as possible, but not simpler.

19. “There is a problem in discussing
systems only with words. Words and
sentences must, by necessity, come only
one at a time in linear, logical order.
Systems happen all at once. They are
connected not just in one direction, but
in many directions simultaneously.”

20. Food Scarcity
(overpopluation)
T T
T T
Inflow
(birth rate)
Outflow
(death rate)
Stock
(population)
Disease
(canine parvovirus)
Immigration
(via ice bridge)
Parasites
(moose tick)
Weather
(mild winter)
Inflow
(birth rate)
Outflow
(death rate)
Stock
(population)

21. The design and management
of information systems.
Understanding the nature
of information in systems.

22. Categories

24. Categories are the cornerstones of cognition and culture.

25. We use radio buttons when checkboxes or sliders would reveal the truth.

26. Connections

27. Web
Pages Hyperlinks
I n f o r m a t i o n A r c h i t e c t u r e

28. Space
Places Paths
I n f o r m a t i o n A r c h i t e c t u r e

29. 29
Multi-Channel Cross-Channel
SERVICE
SERVICE
Adapted from Cross-Platform Service User Experience
portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1851637
+ +

30. Mind
Categories Connections
I n f o r m a t i o n A r c h i t e c t u r e

31. Time
Actions Consequences
I n f o r m a t i o n A r c h i t e c t u r e

32. 32

33. “The system always kicks back.”

34. “How can I know what I
think until I see what I say?”

35. Culture

36. Artifacts
Espoused
Values
Underlying
Assumptions
Visible organizational
structures and processes
(hard to decipher)
Strategies, goals,
philosophies, justifications
Unconscious, taken for
granted beliefs, perceptions,
thoughts, feelings
(source of values, action)
Three Levels of Culture

37. National values are fixed. Organizational practices are not.

38. Double-loop learning in organizations (and individuals) is rare.

39. The relationship between information and culture.

40. “There’s a secret about MRIs and
back pain: the most common
problems physicians see on MRI and
attribute to back pain – herniated,
ruptured, and bulging discs – are
seen almost as commonly on MRIs of
healthy people without back pain.”

41. “If you want to accelerate
someone’s death, give him a
personal doctor. I don’t mean
provide him with a bad doctor.
Just pay for him to choose his
own. Any doctor will do.”

42. Limits

45. “It is now my suggestion that many
people may not want information, and
that they will avoid using a system
precisely because it gives them
information…If you have information,
you must first read it. You must then try
to understand it. Understanding the
information may show that your work
was wrong, or may show that your work
was needless. Thus not having and not
using information can lead to less trouble
and pain than having and using it.”
Calvin Mooers (1959)
The limits of information

46. “We shape our buildings. Thereafter, they shape us.” – Winston Churchill

48. “Tell me about a day in your life.”

49. “Willpower is the single most
important keystone habit for
individual success.”

50. “A culture of generosity.”
Josie Parker, Ann Arbor District Library

52. Daylighting

53. Daylighting

57. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it
hitched to everything else in the universe.”
John Muir

58. IA Therefore I Am Thank You!