Our comprehensive Aligned Groups Framework fosters agency by focusing on three key imperatives: cultivating human agency, communicating holistically, and reflecting on whole creative processes. This structured approach to AI Ethics builds good governance and management processes that give your teams confidence they are leveraging AI in ethically consistent ways.
Read moreIt Takes a Village: Unlocking AI Success Through an AI Center of Excellence
The successful implementation of artificial intelligence in any organization requires more than just technology - it also needs a vibrant, diverse community working with shared purpose.
Read moreInformation Architecture Is a Best Practice Now, So Bring on the Metrics
Value can’t be assumed, the user experience wins are not enough. Organizations have the right to define and map their needs in the context of how the organization exists and succeed. Digital ecosystems are increasingly a core factor in that, so of course their value is an important question and people who have broader needs are asking it.
Read moreOTC: Not (Yet) Explaining Information Architecture
OTC (Ontology—Topology—Choreography) doesn’t explain Information Architecture. Rather, it explains how the things we address when we work on an information architecture get their thingness: through involvement in human inhabitation of places (choreography), by way of their being situated in inhabited environments (topology), and on account their belonging within a nexus of afforded and appropriate uses (ontology).
Read moreThe Politics of Classification
Large Language Models put the power of natural language processing in the reach of everyone, but with great power comes great responsibility — which makes this guest lecture by Andrea Resmini at Dan Klyn’s information architecture class at the U-M School of Information all the more important. There is no “universal” way to classify something. It is essential that humans curate and steward the classifications made by AI.
Read moreHow Conceptual Models Avoid Failure in Digital Projects
It is no longer enough to simply get a digital project past the finish line! They must also deliver a satisfying outcome. So while the biggest failure of past projects was a failure of SCOPE, today’s failures are about ALIGNMENT – that is, ensuring that the project outcomes reflect the needs and expectations of those who commissioned its creation. This article talks about how conceptual models help align teams so that they can produce delightful, successful products.
Read moreCommunicators in Higher Education are Pivotal to Ethical AI Integration
Daniel Heck, TUG’s AI Ethicist, discusses the critical role of integrating artificial intelligence into higher education and its importance in setting the standard for how to do so ethically. Drawing on his insights from the recent Counselors to Higher Education Summit in Nashville, Daniel emphasizes the importance of authenticity, human agency, and building trust as cornerstones to integrating Artificial Intelligence into our work. Challenges and opportunities certainly exist when leveraging AI to enhance educational experiences. The focus, however, should be on leveraging AI to augment and enhance human understanding and interaction rather than to replace these human elements.
Read moreEthical AI: Beyond Application to Integration
There has been a lot of attention paid to the ethical application of AI technologies in society, and rightly so. Machines can only judge based on the way they’ve been trained, and there are too many examples where this has been done poorly to ignore. Guidelines, even regulatory laws, are an immediate necessity, and every company harnessing AI must vigilantly plan to protect against abusive applications of this powerful technology.
Read moreIAC 2023 Through the Eyes of The Understanding Group
This month we asked the TUG team to summarize their time at the Information Architecture Conference (IAC) and share the most impactful sessions for them. The team definitely had a few thoughts they brought home with them, and we’re happy to share those with you this month. Our hope is that if you could not attend, you could see the conference through their eyes and what made them think.
Read moreIA in a World of Bullsh#t
Early in my career, a housemate told me about his adventures teaching a robot arm to build a tower of blocks using an AI framework for developing systems that exhibit intelligent behavior. Define a block. Define a tower of blocks. Find the block. Pick the block up. Place the block. Place another block, and so on to make a tower. Oh wait, the arm doesn't know about gravity so it tries to start at the top and work downward. Teach the arm about gravity. Oh, that is a glass table top, so learn to start there instead of crashing through to start on the ground. And so on.
Read moreGuide New Product Development by Adding Information Architecture
TUG helps organizations get better alignment on the vision of the software they want to create. In the built world, this is achieved through PLANNING that produces MODELS - representations of a place that can be used to scope out the engineering and crafting tasks needed to create the thing the design describes. The Understanding Group relies on models to get broad clarity as well, although in the case of software, it’s not a single model or specification, but multiple models.
Read moreMaking Use of Blueprints to Improve your Agile Projects
All software development operates from some initial vision that is expressed through varying kinds of specifications. Whether these are traditional waterfall requirements, user stories in a backlog, or a checklist, they all represent an attempt of human minds to express to builders a need. And most of them, in one way or another, largely fail to do so.
Read moreDon't Let Your Organization Blindly Build Software
TUG argues that the failure to produce novel products that match an initial vision is caused by a disconnect between the intent of the organization and the development teams trying to realize it.
Read moreRigorous Modeling Frameworks for Deep Understanding
New problems in business — especially in internet-heavy contexts, where the concepts involved are changing at massive speeds — are the kinds of problem sets that demand rigor. Rigor is a way to validate, verify, and align understanding of complex concepts. Only after the "what" is developed and the "how" begins to come up during design and creation should formal models get in the driver's seat.
Read moreInformation Architecture and Incremental Website Improvement
Web technology is increasingly modular and flexible. So what remains is developing a language for design and architecture that best supports that flexibility. One starting point for this language is to see sites like many architects see buildings: as layered structures with different degrees of stability.
Read moreFix Your Digital Strategy with Information Architecture
The most difficult part of technology isn’t keeping up with what’s new. It’s being thoughtful about how technology is going to change the structure of what we can do to serve humans in digital places.
Read moreFour Objections Developers have about Information Architecture
Software developers often raise common objections about Information Architecture—but they aren't really problems at all. They say things such as: “This is just a waterfall process”, “You can’t understand anything until you try to build it”, “We’re just going to have to start requirements over again”, and “We already have an architect.” These objections speak to the primary tension in software development with projects: Making is not the same as understanding.
Read moreWhy do we still build websites like it’s 1999?
When you build websites, are you letting technology drive your decisions? Or are you considering the purpose and language of your site BEFORE you start to code? Language is tricky. People use the same word to mean different things, and different words to mean the same thing. When we talk to people in real life, we use the context of the discussion to understand what is meant. On a website, that’s harder. The information architect’s job is to build that sensible, coherent system of language to help your visitors get oriented.
Read moreCan Good Web Design Create Joyful User Experiences?
How do we create joyful user experiences with good web design? It's in the balancing of our human desire to gain mastery with making interfaces "easy." The next revolution in web design is Joy.
Read moreFind Your Information Sweet Spot
By understanding how your users process information, you can architect a site that hits the sweet spot for making the complex clear. One of the biggest challenges when designing a website is trying to translate the broad objectives into how actual work is done there.
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