“The beginning of all understanding is classification.” -Hayden White

Categories are, first and foremost, a human invention. There are no categories in the natural world. Even the worlds we create artificially evade classification. The more complex any collection of information, the more difficult it becomes to invent a structure of categories which can describe the data without contradiction, ambiguity or misrepresentation.

Those who have little experience with the subject dismiss it immediately. After all, how hard can it be to divide information into logical categories? Especially when you already know everything there is to know about the products, services or pieces of information you are trying to organize! Nonetheless, anyone who has tried to sit down and order data in a logical manner has seen the problem all to clearly. For any given set of data, there are multiple ways in which it can be organized, each one as logical as the other.

The trouble comes when it is believed that one scheme must be placed over the other; when one attribute must be considered more important than any other. Informationarchitech refuses to adhere to strict dichtomies, in the belief that information is infinitely malleable, and like meaning itself, is forever in flux.

Static categories are out of date, a leave-over from the brick-and-mortar days in which we had to place particular items in separate aisles of even the most general of stores. Now we must begin to understand virtual categories, which are created or dropped in an instant’s notice, according to the needs of a given moment. Whether you have an existing category structure that needs significant pruning, or have just been bombarded with a set of data that you have no idea how to order, Informationarchitech is here to help.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Information Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.