From Physical to Digital Environments (and Back) Towards a cross-context information architecture

Information architecture is not just for the Web: information architecture has a larger impact on many offline activities and affects our daily experience in many different ways. Its contribution becomes crucial where complexity, unfamiliarity and information overload stand in the way of the user. The goal of this paper is to outline a unified model of information architecture able to orthogonally traverse the diverse contexts we encounter daily, from digital to physical spaces, providing a conceptual framework for the design of cognitive and informational continuity between environments that allows users not to shift constantly between different, often colliding patterns (Rosati 2007). Within this model we propose to apply organizational and interactional models typically used on the Web to the design of physical objects and spaces. We believe this evolution of information architecture is a strategic part of the general evolution of design, from the design of objects to that of processes (Sterling 2005): by enabling coherent bridge-experiences (Grossman 2006), information architecture can provide better and more satisfying Human Information Interaction (HII) in both worlds, online and offline.