InfoFoundry

• Published:March 26th, 2008
• Comments:No Comment
• Category:Information Architecture

One of the things that I really love about Information Architecture is that it is firmly rooted in the Arts rather than Science. Like any art form, there’s room for best practices and conventions in there, but the real beauty lies in the knowledge of convention and subtle disruptions and improvements on that best practice that add to an overall picture.

One of the things that makes IA an art in the way that anthropology is part of the Arts Faculty in a university is understanding the cultural viewpoints that lead to websites. For example I have been looking at the Beijing Olympics website a lot at the moment, and there is a clear tendency towards what seems to be somewhat of an Eastern mindset that the page value lies in how much information is available in one space and the variety of the media that is used to portray that information. It is why the official Beijing 2008 website sits on the hefty side of 500 or so kilobytes. But this whole subject has led to looking at some of the Olympic posters from the years gone by. And this in turn provided the forum to look objectively at the way that different cultures dealt with providing a poster (piece of advertising) that would encompass such a grand global occasion. It is really an interesting case study into a subject where a static medium – in this case a poster to represent the Olympic Games – has been treated across different cultures. In a similar way that XHTML and CSS combine to portray a front page or a contact page and what is valued in that data across the many cultures of the world. But have a look and see the progression through the decades and also the subtle nuances of culture.

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