Information Architecture & Sacred Space

by Dan Klyn

When the first big wave of COVID19 pandemic slammed into the Midwest of the United States in the Winter of 2020, the University of Michigan instituted a shift to all-remote instruction. Buildings were locked up, campuses were closed, and students were sent home.

This wholesale retreat from shared spaces in the built environment was announced in the fourth week of our 14-week term, and I think it's fair to say—with my former students' evaluations as corroborating evidence—that the consequences in the course I teach were disastrous.

In each of the previous 20 semesters of teaching information architecture at the School of Information, I'd done it a different way. It’s been my practice to develop a new syllabus for each new group of learners in order to better align the students' work with what's happening in my research.

So the catastrophe in Winter 2020 wasn't so much a matter of disruption to a tried-and-true patten: it wasn't that at all. The problem was that I'd planned nearly all of the activities and learning objectives for the semester around a particular set of experiences in a particular place on the U-M campus, under particular conditions.

My research is focused on the spatiality of meaning in information architecture. I think of what I do as part of the broader “spatial turn” in contemporary scholarship toward an acknowledgment of the role of geography, situatedness, and emplacement in all kinds of human enterprise.

Regrettably, when access to the particular place (the North Campus quadrangle) and to the particular shared experience (daily lunchtime performances of the carillon) I’d designed the course around was rendered impossible on account of lockdown, the structural integrity of my plan for the term was undermined in ways I was not creative enough to fix in real time.

It simply hadn’t occurred to me that “betting the farm” (as it were) on embodied access to places on the U-M campus and to its built environments could be so risky.

What a terrible, cluttered, makeshift hellscape!

And yet, at the same time—it seemed to me, as I grappled with its surreality—the picture could provide a tangible set of constraints for my students to work with in the all-remote, 14-week course I’d begun designing for Winter 2021.

Are internet-connected tablet computers affixed to tripods an appropriate modality for connecting thousands of human beings facing profound health crises (and often impending death) under quarantine conditions? If what’s going on in the photograph is wrong, could we use spatial and architectural strategies to propose some better way of coping with the forces in the environment that caused the iPads-On-Sticks to show up in the way that they did?

The photo provokes a strong reaction by all who encounter it, but I have yet to hear anybody laugh at it.

According to Nietzsche, laughing at this picture would constitute sacrilege. But what does “sacred” even mean? And more pragmatically, could an increase of sacredness in the scene depicted in our photograph lead to a decrease in the awfulness of the experiences those iPads-On-Sticks afford?

In designing an outline for the course in Winter 2021, I ended up doing the exact opposite of what I’d set out to do in Winter 2020. Instead of putting the students in different groups to analyze shared experiences in one particular place, we set them up to work as individuals; to analyze personal experiences with whatever sacred space meant to each of them, individually.

By November of 2020, design of the course had become a co-creation with Ph.D. student instructor Kaiwen Sun. When we did the math, the approach we’d decided to take—where each graded assignment would be scheduled as a private dialogue with the two of us—added up to us spending 45 hours together in real time across three assignments, listening to and talking with all of the students individually over the course of the 14-week semester.

What we’d signed ourselves up for was a profound time commitment and scheduling challenge. But by the end of the term, after all of the students had presented their final projects in 1:2 dialogues with us, it was clear to Kaiwen and I that our scheme had delivered the goods. The thoughtfulness of the students’ problem statements and solution concepts went further and hit harder than we’d hoped. Without a doubt, the privacy and intimacy of the format we’d developed made it possible for the students to be creative and take risks in ways that complimented the highly personal and often emotionally-charged concepts around sacred space the course allowed us to explore together with each of them.

Examples of student work from Winter 2021 will be appended to this report once permissions are secured; for now, suffice it to say that we looked at the picture of the iPads-on-sticks 30 times, and found 30 ways to change the situatedness of things (including but not limited to information) in that space to make that scene more bearable. More human. Attaining to—and sometimes accomplishing—a sacralizing of what had become the “new normal” experience with internet-connected technologies and end-of-life caregiving during a global pandemic.

Somewhat invisibly to the students, the other prime mover in our Winter 2021 equation that added up to the successes we now look back on with such fondness was the extra financial support that the School of Information provided as the course got underway, and then again in the middle of the term in the form of honoraria for an unanticipated (but terrific) pair of guest speakers.

At the beginning of the term, UMSI funding allowed me to visit several different kinds of sacred space within a 500-mile radius from where I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Architectural historians and scholars seldom agree on what makes a given building worth studying, but everybody agrees that buildings need to be experienced in person if they are to be understood. The photos and stories I collected from sacred places and spaces in Illinios, Wisconsin, and Minnesota enlivened my lockdown-depleted appreciation for what the built environment can teach information professionals about complex adaptive systems. And more crucially, the research (and reflection time in the car while driving to the next site!) allowed me to develop a candidate framework for the students in Winter 2021 to use in their research into sacred space.

At the outset of the trip, I’d printed out and began studying two contrasting frameworks (Stroik and Eliade) for decoding and understanding sacred space, with an eye toward hybridizing or blending the best bits of these into something that would work in the problem-solution context we’d set up for Winter term in SI658 around iPads-On-Sticks.

To my way of thinking, an ideal framework would help explain the sacredness of any space that people have hallowed, and should prove useful in each of our students’ personal analyses of sacred space from their own lives.

I thrilled to think of what we would learn from banging on a candidate framework 30 different ways in the coming weeks, and came up with a provisional approach that sported a cheesy acronym: HIRES.

By the time we’d reached the half way point through our Zoom-based semester together in the Winter of 2021, the participants in SI658 were equipped with two theoretical frameworks: one for explaining information architecture, and the other for explaining sacred space.

And then, quite unexpectedly, an opportunity presented itself in the 7th week of the semester that resulted in equipping us with a third framework!

This 3rd framework was custom designed for our class by a pair of guest speakers that (with the help of UMSI funding) we were able to swap into our course calendar opportunistically, and it provided a powerful way to see and start to understand the improvised, quasi-public sacred space that had radiated out from the intersection of 38th and Chicago in Minneapolis; from the place where police had mercilessly lynched George Floyd.

Jeanelle Austin and her colleague Acoma Gaither joined us from Minneapolis via Zoom and took us on a visual tour of the places and spaces that comprised George Floyd Square. In their lecture, Ms. Austin and Ms. Gaither—who worked as curators of the artifacts, offerings, tributes etc. people bring to the Square—helped us understand sacred space through a framework they developed just for us. CLiPP. The four dimensions of CLiPP stand for Community, Liberation, Public Grief, and Pilgrimage.

Through analysis of their individual experiences of sacred space using the HIRES and/or CLiPP frameworks in a scorecard-like fashion, the students began to home in on some of the key variables that effect relative degrees of sacredness. When the time came to make the transition from analysis into synthesis, the befuddling questions they’d begun the course with were now graspable. As it happened, each student’s point of view on what’s wrong with the picture of the iPads-On-Sticks emerged quite naturally as they developed their individual analyses of and takes on what constitutes good information architectures, and what sacred space means.

The range of solutions the students developed played out across a continuum from digital to physical, and ran the whole gamut from zoomed-in focus on things appearing on screens to wide-angle consideration of the choreography of the people and equipage in the hospital room with the patient who’s using the screen.

It was a joy to behold, this spectrum of solutions-rendered and problems re-stated. But as you might have predicted, we did have one outlier in SI658 in Winter term. From the safe space of the “cone of silence” created within the 1:2 dialogues that Kaiwen and I hosted for our students, one of our fellow learners rejected the premise of iPad-On-Sticks.

This student had done good work in each of the preceding assignments, and decided to use this final 20-minute dialogue with Kaiwen and I to expand on what that picture of the iPads-On-Sticks said to them about the state we’re in as a species, and about the conundrums we face as information professionals. In this student’s final analysis, all of the available design options and outcomes would be profane because they’d proceed from incorrect premises about the value of human lives and the role of designers in supporting human wellbeing.

In my own final analysis of what happened in Winter 2021, I think the greatest flaw in our instructional design was inextricable from its greatest innovation. One would prefer that all of the students could listen-in on each other’s dialogues, and that the 29 students who agreed to solve the iPads-On-Sticks problem could have heard from this lone voice of refusal from among their ranks. But of course, the liberties taken in this dissent may well have been engendered by the privacy and candor that were inherent to how Kaiwen and I facilitated each 1:2 dialogue.

The extraordinary luxury of spending 20 minutes in dialog with each of our students at the beginning, middle, and end of the term in Winter 2021 will loom large in my thinking about how to do things in 2022. The many disruptions to life in the wake of COVID19 somehow made it possible for Kaiwen and I to find an “extra” 45 hours of synchronous time to work together with our students, above and beyond each week’s class sessions. Shortening our weekly course meetings to 2 synchronous hours instead of 3 helped us “pay for” the investment we’d make in these dialogues with the students, but still: it was a massive undertaking and I wonder if either of us will be able to do something like this again.

I owe Kaiwen an enormous debt of gratitude for co-creating what may turn out to be a singular teaching and learning experience in Winter 2021. The near-unanimity and ebullient tone of the student evaluations from Winter 2021 bear vivid witness to the irreplicable role that Ms. Sun played in delivering an unforgettable 22nd semester of information architecture under my watch at UMSI.

Bibliography

• Alexander, Christopher. The Timeless Way of Building. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980

• Arango, Jorge. Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places. , 2018.

• Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. New York: Penguin, 2014

• Bloomer, Kent C, Charles W. Moore, and Robert J. Yudell. Body, Memory, and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979

• Calvino, Italo, William Weaver, and Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities. New York, N.Y., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974

• Covert, Abby. How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody. s.l: Createspace, 2014

• Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Athlone, 1988

• Dreyfus, Hubert L, and Sean Kelly. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York: Free Press, 2011

• Garrett, Jesse J. The Elements of User Experience: User-centered Design for the Web and Beyond. Berkeley, Calif: New Riders, 2011

• Goldhagen, Sarah W. Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives. New York, N.Y.: Harper, 2017.

• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011

• Hinton, Andrew. Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture. Sebastopol, Calif: O'Reilly, 2015

• Kahn, Louis I, and Richard S. Wurman. What Will Be Has Always Been: The Words of Louis I. Kahn. New York: Access and Rizzoli, 1990

• Laurel, Brenda. Computers As Theatre. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley, 2014

• Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 2005

• Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Intentions in Architecture. London: Allen and Unwin, 1963

• Otero-Pailos, Jorge. Architecture's Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010

• Resmini, Andrea, Sarah A. Rice, and Bernadette Irizarry. Advances in Information Architecture: The Academics / Practitioners Roundtable 2014-2019. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2021.

• Resmini, Andrea, and Luca Rosati. Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Morgan Kaufmann, 2011

• Resmini, Andrea. Reframing Information Architecture. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2014

• Safdie, Moshe, and John Kettle. Form and Purpose. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1982

• Schwarz, Rudolf. The Church Incarnate. London: Henry Regnery, 1958

• Scully, Vincent J., The Shingle Style and the Stick Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971

• Steenson, Molly W., Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017.

• Seamon, David. Life Takes Place: Phenomenology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making. New York, N.Y: Routledge, 2018.

• Venturi, Robert, and Vincent Scully. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York, N.Y.: Museum of Modern Art, 2019

• Waldrep, Shelton. The Dissolution of Place: Architecture, Identity, and the Body. London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2016

• Wurman, Richard S. Follow the Yellow Brick Road. New York, N.Y: Bantam Books, 1992

• Wurman, Richard S. "Hats." Design Quarterly. (1989)

• Wurman, Richard S, and Peter Bradford. Information Architects. New York, N.Y.: Graphis, 1997

• Wurman, Richard S. Information Anxiety. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1989

• Wurman, Richard S. UnderstandingUnderstanding. Chambersburg, PA: Ingram, 2017