more outlining
information overload does not mean that we have too much information
what stresses us out is not understanding how to organize it all
organization is about putting things where we know we will be able to find them later
in the physical world, this means figuring out the one best place for each thing, and, if we have time, putting references in all the next-best places
this takes a lot of time and energy, and most people are not very good at it.
some people learn to do it for a living, and a lot of the organizational tools that we use today come from their work – librarians, statisticians, information architects.
at their best, these tools create a structure that allows us to access information from multiple angles, because we are driven to look for things for multiple reasons. we might only know the author, or a keyword, or the color of the binding, and we want to be able to search according to whatever we have.
digital information is unique because it makes this multifaceted classification very easy – we don’t have to actually “put” the information in multiple places in order to access it. we only have to create pointers, and we can make as many copies as we need.
it is because it is so easy that it so quickly becomes overwhelming. we are each able to create specialized pointers, and maintain our own personal library of everything we see. we are all suddenly our own librarians, but we don’t really know what we’re doing, and the information is piling up higher by the day.
we don’t know where to put it all so that we know that we’ll be able to find it later (which means that we don’t feel organized (which means that we feel overwhelmed)), and the fact that there is more freedom about where to put things only makes the question more complex.
so my big question is: “how do we structure the digital world so that we know how to find what we’re looking for?”
which begs the related question: “how do we design a system that helps us figure out where to put things?”
i’m focusing on email to explore this question for my capstone
for a long time, we have put things in folders, which is pretty much what we do in the physical world
this model has a lot of strengths
– it is familiar
– hierarchy makes finding things easy when we know where to start
– it gives us a firm sense of where our information is
but it also has weaknesses
– it is time-consuming
– hierarchy makes finding things hard when we don’t know where to start
– it doesn’t handle things being in more than one place very well
so where else can we put things?
do we really have to “put” it somewhere?
can we just change the way we think about where it is?
building bridges to information rather than carrying information to a place
– tags, filters, and saved searches
– facets