The Ethics and Politics of Information Architecture

The Ethics and Politics of Information Architecture
Shaping Society through Structure and Control
Andrea @Resmini
ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit 2016

THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
(Pacific Rim)
HUDs, holographic interfaces, plasma cannons. Movies such
as Pacific Rim have it all. It’s easy to see how these
promises of a magical future captivate us and why we work
hard to recreate these in the digital world of today.
But the point I want to make today runs contrary to our
fascination with all things glowing blue. I do believe
we’ll have holograms, and VR, and UIs that respond to our
brain waves, but so much of this will be tactics, and not
strategy. Strategy does not have a pretty face, strategy is
pipes and brickwork and infrastructures, and strategy is
where information architecture belongs.

“Facebook promises not to use its product to influence the
US presidential election”. Business Insider ran this story
a couple of weeks ago. This is where I want to start from,
and let me say it’s good of Facebook to promise they’ll
behave. It’s also good of us to believe them.
Because this is the issue: not only we have no way to
really verify if that statement corresponds to the truth,
but it would be even difficult to assess what’s the meaning
of “influencing the election”. We’re discussing a platform
whose algorithmic information architecture is a black box.
The rules and structures that decide how to order posts
from sources we “liked”, that promote or demote, show or
hide events, they are unknown to us. Facebook is not a
neutral platform: it’s a tool through which a company is
furthering its business goals.

Of course, Facebook the company is not the problem here.
Or, if you prefer, this is not a problem we solve shutting
down Facebook. Or Buzzfeed. Or Blindspot.

(Image: Arne Kullmann, https://www.flickr.com/photos/arne/5835855777)
The point I’ll be trying to make today is pretty simple:
the world is a much larger place than we thought twenty
years ago, and the distinction between physical and
digital, offline and online, is becoming fuzzier and
fuzzier. Eventually, it will go away.
This is changing the way we think of digital itself, and
its relationship with the world. It’s making it much more
strategic, and dangerous.
When this community went mainstream in the 90s, library and
information science, the core body of knowledge and
expertise that Lou and Peter and others brought in, seemed
to be all that was necessary. Information architecture was
mostly seen as some sort of library science for the Web,
largely tackling problems of labeling, categorization, and
ordering.
These are still there, they are,

Biancoshock
(https://www.facebook.com/fra.biancoshock/)
… but the illusion of the Web as a library and the Internet
as a different and separated world have given way to much
more complex scenarios.

Biancoshock
The world of today is postdigital. Digital is not
disruptive anymore, it blends easily with physical. The
Internet is a piece of a larger mechanism where our
activities, our consumption and coproduction of
information happens across multiple contexts through
multiple devices and unstable, emergent choreographies.
We moved from punchin cards and lab coats to sensors and
actuators, from authorship to multiple anonymous
collaboration, from the screen to the world. Focus is now
moving away from the single artifact, the website or the
app, to consider the entire experience ecosystem as a
complex, crosschannel informationbased beast.

Biancoshock
As a result, information architecture itself is a different
thing: a channel or mediumaspecific multidisciplinary
framing.
Now, does this mean that whatever you learned or whatever
you do is suddenly worthless? No, that actually is the one
single blind spot this community has, if you allow me to
generalize.
Carpenters make wooden chairs, and one can very well
specialize in making gorgeous and very comfortable wooden
chairs. This is not only normal, and healthy, but it’s
necessary. It provides continuity, a sense of history. But
claiming that all of carpentry is chairmaking and set in
stone, that would be a bit ridicolous, right? The
challenges we face are different, as are the opportunities.

shallowness
Unfortunately, we are so entrenched with this fast layer we
contribute creating, with the blue glow, with disruption,
with what comes next, that the forest has become the trees.
Our first capital sin is shallowness. We are blind because
we have short memory. Let me elaborate.

Technology is a tool we use to make the world what we want
it to be. To give it order. We do this through our control
of space, and time.
We see the disruptive power of the Internet, shrinking
distances, making everything instantaneous, tearing down
borders, and we think this is all new.
Oxford professor Luciano Floridi maintains that ICT,
information and communication technology, has been with us
since we invented writing, and that ICT among other things
immediately made time so irrelevant that we can still read
and enjoy Plato or Shakespeare today. This book, “The
Victorian Internet”, recounts the story of how roughly 150
years ago the telegraph was the very first technology that
did that to space. Made it irrelevant.

(Image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3mbSeqxEx8)
Information was suddenly not bound by horse, ship, or
train. Before the telegraph any North American business
that dealt with the import of bananas from South America
performed a four step choreography: ask the captain and
crew of this year’s ship how the next harvest looked like
down there when they departed, make a business prediction
and bet their company on it being accurate, wait one year,
see if next year’s ship brought in to port what they
expected. Surprises of course were not uncommon. The
telegraph changed all of this almost overnight.
And after the telegraph, we’ve been basically perfecting
how to move and share information around at an increasingly
massive scale.

(Image: nielsonschool.blogspot.se)
Way before becoming a monopoly on both sides of the
Atlantic, the telegraph was also an open platform brought
together through an API, we would say, a communication
protocol. Telegraph operators were de facto the first
“online” community. It was not uncommon for them to spend
their offtime chatting together in large “rooms”, which
sometime counted up to the hundreds. They shared a special
jargon, and made little of borders. Basically, as soon as
we had a way to spend more time gossiping with strangers,
we took it.

(Image: Tillman County Chronicles, tillmancountychronicles.blogspot.se)
When the telephone came along, the pattern repeated itself,
with even more emphasis on openness. The cost of entry is
the primary indicator of how much an industry can be said
to be “open”, and the phone system initially had very low
entry barriers. Here in the US, while Bell was fighting
telegraph behemoth Western Union, local companies
multiplied, eventually reaching 3 million phones on their
network. Bell had 2.5 millions. Individuals took it up for
themselves where local companies didn’t want to go. After
all, a line of galvanized wire was all that was needed.
We’ve seen this all over again at the time AOL was around.
Local providers, local businesses”.
Bell responded to this initially by becoming a closed
garden and refusing to interconnect, and we’ve seen this
recently as well.
In the end, the Bell company declared open war on these
Independents, and managed to definitely crush their
competition on its second try, when they abandoned their
earlier scorched earth approach for a much more rewarding
“join us, it’s going to be great” line that managed to
break the ranks of those who resisted assimilation. The
dark side has never looked any better since.

(Image: The Brox Sisters, Wikipedia)
The wireless, the radio, came next. The radio is probably
the most interesting example, because not only its very
openness was part of its success, everybody could buy or
make one and start broadcasting and DIY radio magazines
were all the rage, but long after it was a thing, its
business model was not clear at all and the medium was
basically up for grabs.
We had to wait well into the ‘30s for Procter & Gamble to
figure out that popular radio shows offered them an
audience, decide to run a few commercials, and give birth
to the very concept of the soap opera.
Meanwhile, radio stations, many of which we’d consider
little more than amateur “blogs” today, moved from 5 in
1921 to more than 500 in 1923. More than 2 million
broadcastcapable radios had been sold by 1924. Before the
Internet, the radio was without doubt the greatest open
medium of the 20th century.

Tim Wu
I guess you can see the pattern now. This is what Tim Wu,
calls the Cycle, capital C, in his book, “The Master
Switch”.
The excitement of reaching strangers, the feeling of
connection, the wonder, the opening up, the coming down of
barriers was there in the 1860s for the telegraph, in the
1910s for the radio, and in the 1990s for the Internet.
There is emphasis on kinship and goodwill, and very few
expectations “to cash in”.

“all technology starts out open
and gradually becomes closed”
This is the Cycle. All technology starts out open and
gradually becomes closed. A few visionaries declare this
technology to be the ultimate tool that will lead to world
peace, the masses rejoice, then barriers, legal and
financial, are introduced, and the playground becomes the
private property of a few.

Nicholas Negroponte
I guess you could say that it was just logical then that in
1997, speaking at a tech conference in Brussel, Nicholas
Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab proclaimed that “the
Internet will do no less than bring world peace by bringing
down national borders”. It was not the first time we were
saying that.

“the Internet will do no less than
bring world peace by breaking down
national borders”
Now, hear me well: this might actually be that one time
when we pull it off, but we, the makers, educators, the
researchers, cannot be naïve souls who cannot see the
bigger picture. We shouldn’t be drinking our own koolaid
(snake oil).
Any uplifting example of how the Internet has made us more
free can be countered with a contrary case. Massive all
encompassing structures of order and control are in place:
we now have in place the ultimate, allinone tool for
tracking us all 24/7.

“eternal vigilance is the price of liberty:
power is ever stealing
from the many to the few”
If “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”, are we
being vigilant?

George Orwell
Problem is, it seems we’ve been so worried about George
Orwell’s “1984” and Big Brother, we shallowly thought the
battle we had to fight implied coercion. A bureaucratic,
oppressive regime which sees all. I can’t shake the
impression we’ve been mislaid and that Aldous Huxley’s
“Brave New World” is where we ended up.

Aldous Huxley
Huxley presents us a view of the future where all of
mankind is enslaved through pleasure. In the brave new
world we are slaves because we want to be. We love our
selfies, our memes, our narcissism. Oh wait, he didn’t
mention selfies. He actually mentioned ageism, the
prominence of commerce as a value, constant psychological
manipulation, and an abundance of material goods. The World
State is a benevolent dictatorship that wants everyone
happy. You get the point.

“1984” was published in 1949, “Brave New World” in 1931,
right after Huxley visited America (he.), but these
optimistic and pessimistic visions of how technology will
change humanity and society have been with us since
forever. Plato’s considered writing a deleterious tekne.
Young Greeks would hear many things and will learn nothing.
Gutenberg’s press was suspected to be a ‘confusing and
harmful’ device, overwhelming people with information.
If these visions of bliss and despair have been with us
forever, shouldn’t we just be happy apping away? Working
on our neat little taxonomies? Be done with it?

(A. Bartholl , Museum of Moving Image)
Well, no. The problem lies with the increasing reach of
information architecture specifically and of user
experience in general as we progressively digitize the
world.
Filing your tax return twenty years ago would have probably
involved paper forms, an accountant, a visit to the tax
office, a visit to the bank, plenty of physical bits. The
same you could say for education, or healthcare. I filed my
tax return before getting on the plane to Atlanta, and all
I did was login to two different websites, authenticate
myself using an app, check a spreadsheet, and click
“submit”. My receipts are an email and a text message.
Experiences become crosschannel experiences in blended
spaces, and information architecture is the invisible
structure that holds them together.

This is not just about ecommerce or personal
gratification. For better or worse, we make or unmake
people’s lives. We cannot afford ourselves to be shallow.

Luciano Floridi
Forty years ago, in 1976, Richard Saul Wurman saw this
information tsunami coming. More recently, Floridi has
called this tsunami the fourth revolution, the Turing
revolution, the one making us realize that we are connected
agents, informational organisms, sharing a global
environment made of information.
As much as the playfield of the industrial revolution was
physical space, and the city, architecture and city
planning, our playfield is the digital / physical
infospace. This is the one revolution bringing along a need
for designing information as the primary material of our
age. That sounds like something information architecture
could do to me.
But are we being vigilant?

self-awareness
It is time we take a long, deep breath, and slow down.
Because our second sin is selfawareness, or rather the
lack of. Look back, tie our tradition into those those of
design and architecture, look forward and let our gaze go
yonder without fear of being shallow.

(Urartu cuneiform, Wikipedia)
As I said, Floridi calls the technological layer we work
with ICT, information and communication technology, and he
says that we’ve been having ICT since we started writing.
ICT allowed the externalization and the preservation of
thought, and as such, the accumulation of knowledge. It is
not a long stretch to see how the printing press, the
telegraph, the telephone, the radio, and the Internet are,
if you allow me again, the simple perfecting of this base
ICT.

Information is all over the place. It’s not confined to
screens, nor to pointtopoint interactions with individual
devices.
The world that we live in is a postdigital world, where an
app is an avatar for a distributed taxi service,
information is becoming embodied, and our responsibilities
grow by the day.
The cultural paradigm has moved on from postmodernism to
digimodernism.
From irony, detachment, and pastiche, to the raw, visceral,
and unfinished. Our digimodern artifacts are constantly
changing, volatile, cocreated. Digimodern completely
removes the idea of the individual author from the picture:
Facebook is an ever unfinished constant stream of
multitudes.
This shift also implies that value, individual value,
organizational value, social value, is increasingly being
created systemically, elsewhere, in different ways.
But what do we mean by value? That’s the one tricky
question, one that cannot be escaped.
All design, and therefore all of information architecture,
involves value choices. These in turn imply there’s an
ethical dimension to what we do.

we are good at micro
but pretty bad at macro
I posit here that as a community, and in the exercise of
our competencies, we are good at micro ethical and
political decisions, but rather bad at macro. We care for a
gendered form, we somehow fail to move that attention from
being tactical to being strategic.
We seem stuck between plain business sense and sudden bouts
of idealism, and that is because somehow we do not really
have a way to assess if and how that strategic attention
would make the world a better place and still pay the
bills.
If we look at the way business ethics is generally framed,
I’d argue that much of what we do oscillates between
unapologetic stockholder theory and unbound social contract
theory. Let me explain using a baseball example because
this is boring stuff.

Stockholder theory postulates that a company only works
towards the goals set out by those who invest money in it.
As long as it’s legal, we’re fine. Things involve a few
actors only, by the home plate.

Stakeholder theory maintains that a company should consider
the extended network of people who have a stake in the
company, from employees to suppliers to the local
community. The outfielders are in. This is what user
centered design is mostly about.

Social contract theory reverses all this: society allows a
company to exist as long as it provides more value than it
costs. This involves everyone, including those on the
bleachers and beyond. As broad as they are, these theories
offer managers a moral compass, the “Don’t do evil” thing.

Peter Morville wrote one of his “Strange connections”
pieces in 2000 on the Ethics of Information Architecture.
You can always count on Peter to look a bit further down
the road.

More recently, in 2015, Cennydd Bowles wrote “The ethics of
digital design” for the UK Design Council. Mimi Launder
wrote an interesting piece called “The ethics of UX: when
is it good design and when are you just tricking people?”
for Digital Arts in early 2016. You probably know of more
examples, some good, some less than good. We do discuss
ethics, sure.
Regardless, much of our discussion of ethics seem to be
centered around a defensive and very narrow view of “don’t
play foul with your customers”, be a good boyscout. That is
definitely a good thing, but it is not the conversation we
need to have. This is not progressing. This does not give
us leverage for a discussion with the business side, nor
gives a way to engage with society. This is not
acknowledging the change in scope that our practice has
been going through. Our third sin is naïve agency.

naïve agency
Naive agency is one of number of “questionable, naive
approaches to ethical reasoning” that a study on the
“Consequences of Computing” carried out in the 90s.
Naive agency means that all moral authority is surrendered
to someone else, such as a boss, for whom we are but
agents. It doesn’t matter if enthusiastic supporters or
reluctant victims, we just surrender our agency. This
probably rings familiar to anyone in this room.
It is a bleak, joyless view of our field and profession,
and one that terribly clashes with the tradition of design
and architecture as they have been defined in the past two
hundred years. As an aside, it also clashes with the
individual responsibility that is enshrined in democratic
legal systems.
Ready? I have to take you to a few bad places

Jamie Bartlett
This part relies a lot on Jamie Bartlett’s “The Dark Net”,
a great book you should read, on Trottier’s “Social Media
as Surveillance”, and on a couple of months of leisurely
investigations on my part. And believe me when I say that
this has been one hell of a painful experience with very
practical drawbacks. It’s not a trip to Disneyland.
You also want to Tor your way into this, if you plan
exploring, unless you want your ads to give you nightmares
for months to come. Even the idea of a SWAT team invading
your home at 3am to take you away because of your browser
history is nothing compared to the concerned looks family
members share after inadvertently peeking at your screen
when the ads algorithms kick in for good.
These examples describe blended information spaces: they
are postdigital, connecting activities in real life and in
physical places with infospace trivially, effortlessly;
they are all embodied experiences that transcend the idea
of the screen as a separate world; they all are digimodern
in nature, actordriven, volatile, supposedly representing
“life as it is”.
Information architecture plays a strategic role here.
They illustrate our three problems: shallowness, lack of
selfawareness, and naïve agency.
They are all also prone to make some of you, and me for
sure, uncomfortable at times. That’s why I chose them.
Let’s start with camming.

Camming is performing in front of a webcam for money or, as
professor Feona Attwood told Bartlett, a “better kind of
porn: somehow more real, raw and innovative than the
products of the mainstream porn industry.”
Camming plays into everything digimodern and the socio
technical changes of the information revolution. Cammers
are overwhelmingly young women in their twenties.
Specialized websites host their shows and provide the
technological platform allowing them to offer what is a
tightly choreographed experience supported by the
simultaneous stream of live video and live chat and
sustained by a crosschannel array of ancillary platforms,
from Instagram to Snapchat, with live audiences that number
anywhere between a few individuals to the thousands.
Performers grow a fan base, with the most affectionate
members becoming familiar figures they recognize and call
by handle.
Even if predicated on the “girl next door” fiction and
played out mostly by nonprofessionals, or by any extent by
people extraneous to the regular mainstream porn world,
with regulars who appreciate the rough edges, the
silliness, and sometimes the inadequacies as much as
anything else, these are nonetheless business transactions.
One of the most widely used cam platforms is set up so that
the performer can easily handle large crowds by splitting
them up in freeriders, those who have no tokens, no money
to spend, and that are greyed out in the chat window, and
those who are ready to give. Performers can “turn the greys
off”.

A rather sophisticated information architecture is in
place: viewers who have money to spend but who have not
tipped more than a given amount of tokens in a given amount
of time are listed in light blue. Viewers who spend
liberally and regularly are listed in dark blue. As
Bartlett calls it, this is a “boardspecific class system”.
We’d call it a classification system, in which dark blues
are more likely to receive the gratification of an
immediate reply from the performer when they say something
in the chat box.
On top of everything, the main platforms all throw in
plenty of systemwide leaderboards. This produces
interesting effects on the tipping, which very often peaks
or ebbs unrelated to what’s happening on the screen.
Performers add top tipper’s prizes, maintain a top ten on
their homepages, and the list of “most valued tippers”
appears in the chat box during a show every now and then.
Regulars constantly try to outtip each other to gain a
performer’s favors. This is the Internet equivalent of your
raunchy reality show, and not that much different from
whatever the Kardashians of the world do with their
Instagrams. In a typical 2 hour show, Bartlett recognized
that no more than 5 minutes contain actual, explicit sexual
behavior. As he puts it, “things go wrong, there are
mistakes, there’s chat, cats wander in and out”.
Is all of this ethical? What is the role of design in here?
Preventing exploitation? That of the performers, who are
clearly objectified to a degree, or that of the viewers,
who are clearly pushed to spending more and more money?
What are the questions that information architecture should
try to answer? What rock do we want to stand on?

The answer cannot be “this is bad”, we shouldn’t take part.
Someone has to designs even the worst of experiences. What
is worse for a prison and for its inmates, an ethical
architect who has a political stance to make or a clueless
drone who’s just happy with the paycheck?
You draw your own conclusions, but I wonder: is naïve
agency, shallowness, lack of selfawareness taking us
anywhere good?
Okay, deep breath.

“Sorry you’re here” is a phrase made (in)famous by more
than one “pro” selfharm site since Andrew Beals created
alt.suicide.holiday, or “a.s.h”, on the Usenet in 1991.
In the late 90s, proana (for anorexia) and promia (for
bulimia) websites started to make their appearance on the
Internet. While different, they tended to present these not
as illnesses or symptoms of some distress, but rather as
lifestyle choices.
Proana websites very often link to procutting websites,
especially popular with teenage girls.
Within these subcultures, the tricks and tips shared
between members are by and large the most harmful and
destructive elements. “Extremely destructive and unhealthy
ideas and behaviours” are offered as wellmeaning support
through direct social interactions and personal feedback.

(Image: http://img00.deviantart.net/a4ee/i/2012/138/0/d/self___harm__by_xmaryxedgex-d506uyp.jpg)
In such places, the more this suffering is expressed
publicly, the more sympathy and attention one receives. The
more the likes, the more the thread bubbles up.
Findability is a problem that can lead to serious
consequences.
Very clearly, the Internet has not created any of these
behaviors, but it is changing how they are expressed,
experienced, and understood.
What should we do?
Infospace doesn’t have depth. It’s broad, but shallow.
Everything is a google search away. If you know where to
look, everything is as accessible as everything else.
Is findability secondary to, what, think of the children?
Should we educate? Should we censor? Should we prosecute?
Isn’t the strength of the Internet its neutrality, the fact
it carries everything, shows everything, makes no
distinctions?
You draw your own conclusions, but I wonder: is naïve
agency taking us anywhere?
Alright, almost there. Stretch. Here comes a nice picture,
but then it gets worse. Then it gets better.

It’s the little details, they matter, as my friend Alberta
loves to say.
I live in Sweden. That makes me a half a viking, at least
in size. One of the things Sweden seems to be infamous for
is the fact that information about your taxes, your
property, or your whereabouts is publicly accessible.
I can text a specific government service and in the space
of a few seconds know how much our current prime minister
made last year. Or text someone’s plate to another number
and know everything about the car and who owns it. No
questions asked. Anyone can do that. Not bad for a country
where you could possibly never speak to your neighbors and
still be considered ok.
In polite conversations with Americans, this openness
usually elicits that “those funny Swedes” look that I’ve
come to know all too well, followed by a quick change of
topic. I get it. Some information is better kept private.
Then I come to your US of A, and I find this:

It has a search engine, so I tried it out.

Pretty useful, hu? And what pretty graphics. Busy
neighborhood, too.
Is findability a value again now? Because I feel safer? I’m
not sure.
We all agree these people did bad things. But where should
we draw the line?
Should we have a website for political offenders? And what
about one for people who think that separate but equal is
segregation? After all, that was the law, right?
Where does the principled disagreement this country knows
so well get to become enshrined in a taxonomy that simply
furthers othering, producing damage, as David Bloxsom told
us yesterday in a workshop.
I’ll stop here. I think you get my gist.

(Image:: Mashable)
These are not new problems. Nor are they unknown to
information architecture. Bowker and Star, in their
fantastic “Sorting things out”, discuss how any
classification is inherently political. Taxes, medicine,
education, media. The more invisible they are, the more
they are one with the fabric of reality, the more they are
effective.
This is what I think a contemporary political stance around
information architecture should reverse: when everything is
black boxes keeping us happy for someone else’s advantage,
we should be making informed decisions, and we can only do
that if ...

make the architectures explicit
make the processes visible
make them actionable
we make the architectures explicit, make the processes
visible, make them actionable. allowing consent, which is
at the basis of any ethical behavior, and a degree of
personal control.
But how can we do this if we are not seeing these walls
ourselves?
If we are naïve agents for someone else’s wants?
The consequences of our work are producing larger and
larger ripples every day. This postdigital, digimodern
world is all about distributed control. People create
connections and emergent structures, not us. Masses produce
content, not us.

(Image:: Newsweek)
While it’s relatively easy to police a street, the
consequence of our actions are visible. Our presence
manifest. When physical and digital blend, those who
control the architectures of information unseen ultimately
control society.
Social media, this fantastic instrument for global
surveillance, is also producing something new: social
convergence. In the space of the city, we all learn about
the bad neighborhoods, or maybe just the places that are
not good for us, whatever they are. Online, no such thing.
Cops and thieves, family and terrorists, girls hurting
themselves and men hurting girls, they all share the same
place.
What do we think of this? Do we approve? Do we turn away?
Do we care?
Any profession, any field, any discipline responds to a
series of moral imperatives.
As creating information architectures is a profession, I
believe we have the responsibility to shape our professions
and what it creates in ways that are socially responsible.
We can’t leave it to others.

(Image:: Newsweek)
We understand design is a generative act. It brings into
the world something that does not exist. As such, it’s not
neutral. Not only it expresses individual, organizational,
and social power relations, but it changes the very
landscape it becomes part of.
If it’s true that every person ultimately wants to leave
the world a better place for having lived, isn’t it about
time that we look beyond the limited horizons of the
genderrespectful forms, as important as they are, and
start taking in the responsibilities we have in shaping our
society? Is structure and control and a general sense of
joyful exploitation what we want to leave behind as our
legacy? Do we really want to be remembered as the ones who
could do something and didn’t?
Making the architecture visible and reintroducing an ethic
based on consent in our work means creating structures
that thrive on disclosure, openness, clarity, and
understanding. We can’t work from shallowness, lack of
selfawareness, and naïve agency.
Is this even possible? I think it is.

Hotel Yeoville is a neighborhood in Johannesburg, South
Africa. 65% of the inhabitants are African immigrants,
“isolated and excluded from mainstream South African
society and their dominant engagement is with each other
and with their home in far away places”.
Terry Kurgan, a South African artist and photographer,
started a project to trasnform what was a space of
dislocation, insecurity, uncertainty, transience, neglect,
crime, contest, exploitation and the transgression of
boundaries, into something different. She wanted to capture
the space of romance, nostalgia and memories of another
city altogether that old Yeoville residents still shared.

The project investigated, recorded and made visible the
experience of the people who are living there, and brought
their reflections to policymakers, city planners and
designers. It explored the internet cafés of the area, over
20 cafe’s in a 57 block radius, the concepts of communal
computing, longdistance communication, and shared spaces
of use. It represented, exhcnaged, supported, and resulted
in an exhibition, a book, and a community website.
Jason Hobbs, who was the information architect in
residence, spoke about how the project was the catalyst for
a more humane, meaningful and socially engaged approach to
information architecture at the IA Summit 2008 in Miami.

Now, some ten years later, Jason Hobbs and Terence Fenn’s
firm has tranformed that initial seed in a model they use
to approach problems systemically, ethically, and
politically. Their Firma model is currently being used to
tackle information architecture problems number in a number
of projects in South Africa. There’s some effort involved,
but it can be done.

(Image: Wikipedia)
A final thought. If you have been to Paris, you might have
visited Place des Vosges. It’s an incredible, literal
square in the Marais district, built in the 17th century on
what was originally one of the royal residences.

(Imae: placesinparis.com)
In place of private property of the king and queen, the
people of Paris received a public place. In infospace, this
process is reversing itself. Maybe Wu is right, that’s the
Cycle at work. What was public becomes private.

But we shouldn’t make the mistake to treat a private
corporation’s own playground as it were public soil. This
is a mistake that 20th century architects did not do with
their materials: a clear view of the ethical and political
priorities of the time led to a massive re
conceptualization of mass housing and an idea of the city
as a system structured through architecture. This is our
mould: what they did with space, we will have to do with
information.
In 30 years, Facebook or what will be there in its place
will possess an amount of information that is unprecedented
in the history of mankind. In 40 years, it will be the
largest cemetery ever known to any culture so far.
Maybe we should reclaim public soil in infospace, maybe we
should start a revolution, maybe we should simply be
thoughtful, selfaware, engaged. Whatever the answer to
this might be, we are needed.
We have a role to play here and it’s about time we become
the architects we say we are. After all, we all want to
leave the world a better place, isn’t that so?

Thank you
I’d love to know what you think. Ping me @resmini.

The Ethics and Politics of Information Architecture

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