Old slide with the old version of OTC displaying on it: I put a red line thru the word Taxonomy and put the word Topology there instead
Like any good concept, OTC—a conceptual framework I created in 2010—has been improved through a bit of correction as it’s matured.
In 2019, Andreas Resmini and I proposed a wholesale swapping-out of a good 1/3 of it in a talk we gave at The IA Conference in Orlando.
The arguments we made for replacing my original term “taxonomy” with the word “topology” were based in what we’d both been finding out about the spatiality of meaning; about emplacement, and situatedness, and worldhood in our various research and practice peregrinations.
The title for our talk was borrowed from an obscure article by Edward Tufte, whose designerly frustrations helped us frame our diatribe against “the two-dimensional poverty of endless flatlands of .. screens.”
Andreas Resmini preparing the projection equipment in the room we presented in at the IA Conference in Orlando in 2019.
We gave away squishy yellow balls with OTC on ‘em to help attendees think about the thingness of things
I’ve thought and taught and talked about OTC as a jointly-authored framework ever since that time in Orlando, and for his part Mr. Resmini’s been hard at work knitting OTC into a broader argument for immanentizing a spatial turn in information architecture “so that we can better respond to the novel challenges of designing 21st century digital / physical and blended spaces.”
It’s really nice when an idea is useful, and proves to have some staying power, but at the same time: isn’t it great to be able to try things and to see them fail? The whole reason I formalized OTC back in 2010 was as part of a failed attempt to win a contest to “Explain IA”.
In the time that’s elapsed since 2010, and especially since evolving OTC with Resmini’s help more recently, it has become clear to me that it’s appropriate for my contest entry to have failed. Because OTC doesn’t explain IA. 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).
When things are dealt with in this OTC way, what comes subsequently into view is the set of structures that allows us to stay in a place and to keep things together with us in a real/actual world of significance and shared meanings. That set of structures is what we work on and with when we try to make improvements to an information architecture.
Confused yet? I know, right?! Richard Saul Wurman says that people who have great expertise are often the lousiest explainers.
The fact that I haven’t yet used the winning entry from 2010’s “Explain IA” contest (above) in my ongoing work as a teacher and workshop facilitator is lousy, too (sour grapes!).
So many years later, I’m now noticing that Lou Rosenfeld’s profanity-laced intrusion into the video at around the 00:57 mark (“A bunch of g-d clumpers clumping and splitters splitting”) pairs pretty nicely with what Jesse James Garrett says in his foreword to Advances In Information Architecture about the essence of IA being association and juxtaposition. Perhaps this is how to start to explain IA? Of course it’s a false dichotomy if you push on it too hard, but Garrett uses association and juxtaposition quite persuasively in his argument that humans have been using and making information architectures for at least 30,000 years.
Surely, there is more to see than what’s yet been seen from and of IA here at the end of history. And far more yet to be learned from our history, and from the many disciplines that feed into contemporary IA practice.
Looking back at the script from my original video/contest entry, I wouldn’t say most of this stuff the same way today, in a contest to explain IA. I doubt the me of now would even enter the fray. There are so many things that I said way-back-when that I’m still working on, and that I continue to be interested in, and that I’m certain I’ve not got figured out yet.
Especially the bit about how, in our line of IA work, ontologies are contrived. I don’t think I quite knew what I was saying when I chose my words in 2010. Naturally my birthday twin and beloved colleague Jason Hobbs doesn’t give me credit for being first with contrived-ness being the distinction in the difference between how IAs and civilians use the word ontology. Given how little rigor I put into explaining my explanation, it’s only fair that you look to him and to Terence Fenn for more of what that’s all about; the O in OTC.
And gosh, I’m pretty sure Resmini and I still disagree (stardate: 2023) about the primacy of choreography in the workings of OTC as a model for the design of cross-channel ecosystems. I’d be glad to introduce you to him if you need to know more about the C. There’s a late story of Calvino’s I sent him a few months ago, with a pedant’s glee, on account of how well I believe that it shows how the O in OTC is the prime mover in complex ecosystems (like stories). He wrote me back enthusiastically, with a counter-claim that the story in fact shows how choreography is the boss, as creator of the ecosystem’s topologies. Harrumpf!
As for me, what I’m most keen to keep learning about is located on the seam between the O and the T. In the crossing-point from sense- into place-making and back again. Concurrently I’m going back through what Wurman did around Information Anxiety before and at the turn of the 21st century and smushing it up with the one bit that got published from Denise Scott Brown’s shelved book on urban design from the mid 1960s. The lot of it is spatial, topological, urban-designey: the stuff I don’t yet know enough about and that I suspect is essential to explaining information architecture.
So, here I am still working on OTC. Now more than ever.
It’s only in this sense that I can indulge in consideration of my failed Explain IA contest entry as a reverberating (if not resounding) success.