Asilomar

November 04, 2002 | 0 Comments

Life can be strange. Here I am at home today, trying to get some things done around the house, and trying to relax, recover and not think about work. My mind keeps wandering to the IA of our Medical Staff extranet down at the hospital. A project that has made much headway in the last few weeks. We’re starting to get somewhere and it makes me very happy. Anyway - last week we held a meeting and knocked out the first draft of our IA - it’s fairly complicated because we have several different levels of security we need to deal with and two fairly separated “trees” - for lack of a better word - of information. If that weren’t enough we need to A) fit this into our current look and feel, and B) get this into the CMS.

It’s a bit sticky from a design standpoint as we already have a rather (ok a very) inflexible layout going. It’s almost like no matter what we come up with it’ll not be perfect, you know? But, the good news is that we are redesigning the whole darn thing and this will be temporary. In anycase I came up with a navigation scheme that both looks nice and seems to be fairly usable. The tricky part is getting all of that to reflect the IA in the best possible manner. Marrying the design with the IA and keeping it usable is a rough road with this project.

There is very little I can do about the design, at least for the time being, so I began to think about how we might shift the IA around a bit to make it make more sense. To be honest, I don’t think there is much we can do - and I think it’ll be fine, the IA isn’t really the problem, it’s the 4 year old site design we still have to work around. Anyway, I was trying to get some pictures hung on my awfully barren walls (yeah it’s been over 3 months and I’m not settled into my new place) and I had a thought, so I went over to ia slash to check something out.

What I saw was an announcement for the launch of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture. I read though some of the materials there and thought to myself wow, this is really great! I myself have often thought that IA could use something like this. I mean there are so many Web developers and designers out there who practice IA every day and don’t even know it.

I spoke with a good Web developer friend of mine about IA a month or so and his idea of what information architecture was way off. He just didn’t get it at all, and it took me awhile to convince him that it was something he should think about and try and put some effort into understanding.

In anycase - I was reading the explanation of the phrase “asilo-mar” on ia slash and an epiphany hit me. I looked down at the print was getting ready to hang on the wall and here is what I saw:

Asilomar print