Beyond the Page

I was at the Future of Information Architecture Retreat in Asilomar, CA, this past weekend. It was a fantastic event with lots of great people and ideas (I'm happy to see others saying the same thing). Here's a cleaned up version of my presentation:

• Beyond the Page (PDF, 7.3 MB)
  Some thoughts about the page, its place in IA literature and tools, and the need to move past the page metaphor to better methods of architecting online information.

As presentations go, it was so-so (more on that in a minute). But since delivering it and having a chance to think about everything that was said over the weekend, I'm even more convinced that the basic idea is right.

The page isn't dead--we'll have browsers for a long, long time--but the page is dying as the predominant metaphor for organizing and presenting online information. Structured content, dedicated content apps (like aggregators) and rich internet applications are squeezing in from the edges. Blogging software has given personal websites a much more robust (and XML-friendly) architecture than a lot of corporate sites.

For Information Architecture, these are interesting times. A lot of what we talked about at the retreat was extending IA not just beyond the page, but beyond the web. Into more devices, more things, into interaction design and industrial design, and across media. IA will hopefully evolve and adapt to the challenges (retreats like this one are a big contributor to the Baldwin Effect). If not, I kind of expect it to be marginalized by interaction design. Though that's a topic for another post.

Anyway, all the interesting discussion forced me to change quite a bit of my presentation. I'm glad I did, since a lot of the ideas I heard were better than the ones I brought.

I once read about the four tensions you feel when giving a presentation: between you and your material, between your audience and your material, between you and your audience, and between your audience members themselves. I felt a lot of the first two, and so didn't achieve the velvety chocolate smoothness I usually bring to my sets. But it was tons of fun nonetheless.

(Thanks to Chiara Fox, Scott Robinson, Christina Wodtke, Sarah Rice, Donna Fritzsche and everyone else who helped organize the event. Oh, and here's an example of coordinated social classification.)