SI 658 001 WN 2024

Information Architecture

Thingness & Worldhood (PDF)
with Dan Klyn (Lecturer), Damon Carucci (Ph.D GSI) &Bhumika Kaushik (MSI GSI)

Information architecture practitioners are highly valued contributors who get to play senior roles on digital product design teams. Because IAs know how to shape the meaning and intelligibility of complex products and services.  

Which must be nice for them. 

But as graduate students, what can we-all do together, in just 13 weeks, that'll help us start to build info-architectural skills and utilize info-architectural methods in the work we do as makers? 

A good question contains the seeds of its answer, and the way we’ll address the question in the paragraph above is so dumb, so obvious, you're likely to have missed it. 

To influence what things mean and how things are understood, we'll first need to learn a lot about things. 

What even is a thing? What do we mean when we say that's not a thing? On what basis does a thing get its thingness? Who and what else, beyond those who make and/or possess things, is involved when it comes to shaping what things mean and how they’re understood? 

And if we accept the info-architectural precept that the creative organization of information creates new information, doesn’t this mean that simply changing where things are changes what things mean? 

Course Description

Up until quite recently, things could be relied upon for their having been involved in the goings-on of human beings & other living creatures on Earth. 

Indeed, “modern” humans are said to have our origin in thing-ing. That is, in dwelling: in being able to stay in groups with things & people in particular places. 

We (humans) couldn’t have sustained these gatherings, and alas, may soon lose the ability to gather at scale, without our capacity to agree that certain gatherings, some things, are more meaningful than others. 

What’s the role of information, architecture, and information architecture in humankind’s ability to stay together with things? In reliably knowing what things even are? In making things be more or less meaningful in time & in touch with how the world turns?

The conceit in SI658 in Winter 2024 is that info-architectural analysis of 91 things from the students’ real lives will show us something about the intertwingularity of worldhood & thingness that we’ll all be able to use to take more purposeful action in our work beyond the classroom. To see what we've always seen, but perhaps never really seen.