idea 2006: provocation and revelation

"IDEA 2006: A conference on designing complex information spaces of all kinds."

I recognized the tune immediately, but it took a while to sink in.

Amon Tobin was playing over the speakers in the Seattle's Best Coffee attached to the lobby of our hotel in Seattle. It was Monday morning, just before IDEA 2006 got started and Darren and I were about to get a quick bite to eat.

I smiled and said to Darren, "Hey - Amon Tobin." I guess I was a bit surprised to hear him playing in a coffee shop -- perhaps Seattle coffee shops really are a lot hipper than Vancouver ones. Or perhaps I don't spend enough time in Vancouver coffee shops to really notice what they're playing.

At any rate, it seemed like a fitting prelude to the conference, as we crossed the street and walked into the Seattle Public Library Central Branch, an enourmous chunk of imposing glass and metal designed by Rem Koolhaas. It was my second time in the building, having made a quick visit there the year before when I was down at another conference in Seattle.

My initial impressions and reaction to the building during my 2005 trip was one of mild anxiety, discomfort, and a slightly nauseous feeling. It really was an overpowering experience - I didn't know what to make of it and was quite happy to have left it. It did not seem like an inviting or welcoming public space. I remember thinking that I wouldn't want to spend much time in a library like that. While impressed with the size and scale of the space, it was all a bit much. It was a bewildering moment and one that was unique in my interactions with architecture to date.

But with a second visit now under my belt, I think I appreciated the building a bit more. Not really from a functional perspective, as I didn't search for books or try to study or use the facility other than sit in the Microsoft Auditorium for 2 solid days. But it was fun to walk around and experience the space during the break times. It's still overwhelming and large and intense, but this time I knew what to expect, and found it a far more manageable experience. The bright yellow escalators, wide open spaces, and obtuse angles didn't freak me out quite as much.

Darren and I chatted that first night about how Amon Tobin's music seemed like an appropriate metaphor for the Library. The first few listens of Tobin's music had the same kind of visceral aesthetic effect on me as the building: it was catchy, at times somewhat familiar, at other times odd and experimental, and some of it downright unsettling. Both shared the qualities of being unconventional, dramatic, modern, visionary, and, at times, aggressive and disturbing. Both could be accurately described as "complex information spaces."

And what better place to discuss those topics than a building like that.

I know this sentiment isn't shared by all - Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware and recently declared former IA commented on conference attendee Andrew Otwell's blog, "Unless the intention was to be pointed and ironic, holding an event on information architecture in a building already notorious for its lapses in the understanding of everyday use is akin to having a PETA meeting in an abattoir."

The critiques of the building are numerous and I even managed to document some of its shortcomings and subsequent adaptations. Those little taped up signs are indications that the building is learning, although perhaps not as quickly as some would like. As Stewart Brand says, "Almost no buildings adapt well. They're designed not to adapt; also budgeted and financed not to, constructed not to, administered not to, maintained not to, regulated and taxed not to, even remodeled not to. But all buildings (except monuments) adapt anyway, however poorly, because the usages in and around them are constantly changing."

Nonetheless, I found the building to be a significant and meaningful venue as its controversial nature was perfectly aligned to one of the most important themes of the entire conference. That theme emerged in a few slides during David Guiney's presentation about the US National Park Service. David did two presentations: the first was Designing Across Multiple Media for the National Park Service. The second was Addressing the Challenges of Designing for the National Park Service. (Both presentations have MP3's available on the website, but no slides yet).

It was during these presentations that he threw up a few slides on interpretation, one of the cornerstone concepts of the National Park Service. On the slides were quotes from the founder of interpretation, Freeman Tilden. In his 1957 book, Interpreting Our Heritage, he outlined six principles of interpretation. Bolded below are the ones that caught my attention.

1. Any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile.

2. Information, as such, is not Interpretation. Interpretation is revelation based on information. But they are entirely different things. However, all interpretation includes information.

3. Interpretation is an art, which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical, or architectural. Any art is to some degree teachable.

4. The chief aim of Interpretation is not instruction, but provocation.

5. Interpretation should aim to present a whole rather than a part, and must address itself to the whole person rather than any phase.

6. Interpretation addressed to children (say, up to the age of twelve) should not be a dilution of the presentation to adults, but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best it will require a separate program.

In a room full of designers, software developers, architects, museum design professionals, and even a solitary (but charming and Canadian) archaeologist, here was a profound statement of principles about the relationship between designer, information, and audience. So much of the activity around the profession of information architecture and user-centred design in my experience is based on tasks, goals, functions, and flows. It's about attempting to control the user's experience to such a degree that some claim to be able to actually design an experience. And here was a set of principles, first articulated 50 years ago that seemed as relevant and as fresh as anything we'd seen or talked about at the conference.

David joked about the use of the word "provocation" and how that was not a word that had a positive connotation for him personally, as he remembered the act of doing something that "provoked" his mother as a youngster. But the key point is the result of the provocation, the result of the dialogue, the result of the exercise of being given enough information to make up your own mind, forge your own connection: the revelation.

Intepretation gets people to work for the pay-off. Make them forge their own connections with the material, the exhibit, the landscape, the information. This approach acknowledges the ambiguous and messy domain of creating meaning, our inability to control anyone's experience of our information, of their sense-making. But in acknowledging the mess, interpretation does not give up hope - it is an optimistic philosophy, one that puts faith in the intelligence of the user, the "average" audience member, the recipient and participant of our designs.

Interpretation has faith.

In practice, it's hard to get away from the narrative element of the exhibit, monument, wayside signage or website. And where there's narrative there's bias. But the principles of interpretation appear to take into account the effect of the narrative, sometimes increasing the volume of the storytelling, like in the video excerpt David showed about the civil rights protestors; other times allowing the audience to assemble their own narratives by simply presenting artifacts: models, maps, pictures, paintings, recreations, exhibits, and yes, websites.

There's a lot of interesting reading to be done about interpretation out there and in the past few days following the conference, I know I've only skimmed the surface. It's a subject that I'd heard of before (I dated a parks interpreter), but never really considered it from a design perspective. In my brief review to date, it appears to be an area rich in ideas for designers of all varieties. Witness this list of keywords found in this gem on the NPS Interpretive Media Institutes website, entitled "The Effectiveness of Nonpersonal Media Used in Interpretation and Informal Education, An Annotated Bibliography":

Study [bibliography] variable keywords include the following:

affect, attention, attitude, attraction, awareness, behaviour, beliefs, comprehension, knowledge, learning, legibility, perception, preference recall, recognition, retention, satisfaction, time, use

Or this passage from a paper I found on the California Parks website, referencing Kenneth Ames' 1997 book "Ideas and Images: Developing Interpretive History Exhibits":

Often the interpretive meaning---its relevance---is overlooked in museums and visitor centers. Kenneth L. Ames commented in his book, Ideas and Images: Developing Interpretive History Exhibits:

The place of interpretation remains unclear in part because many institutions have only a vague notion of what "interpreting" means. For many it seems to mean merely doing descriptive history or narrating stories. Stories can be important but to truly interpret something, to truly interpret that story, we have to dare to suggest what it means. To interpret something means ultimately to evaluate it, thoughtfully and critically. This means museums have to step outside their own culture and its prevailing wisdom to discover and evaluate the ramifications of whatever topics they study. It means they have to take an informed stand based on responsible and extensive analysis. Putting it in different terms, interpreting means demonstrating why something matters, how it has made a difference. Ideally, interpretation helps us gain not just knowledge but that rarer and more precious commodity, wisdom.

Interpretation does not just inform us but pushes us to a deeper and more subtle understanding of some aspect of the world around us. Really interpreting is a difficult and challenging business. Only a few museums really grasp this. Only a few grasp it because most history museums still bear traces of their unreflective, celebratory origins. And regardless of their public posture, many museums still adhere to---or are trapped in---old ways, old assumptions, old values.

Workbook for Planning Interpretive Projects in California State Parks (1997 - Mary A. Helmich)

There you have it. Interpretation Architecture, the other IA.

Look for my manifesto any day now...

Again, a big thanks to Peter for bringing together some great speakers, every single one of whom had something interesting and provoking to contribute to the dialogue of IDEA 2006. I'm already looking forward to IDEA 2007.

idea2006