I found "Information Architecture" very user friendly, and it's language and rhetoric is encouraging and inclusive, welcoming its audience into its field.
My only problem with it, I believe (besides its flagrant misuse of the term "deconstruction") is the vagueness of its diagrams.
It seems to me that most of these diagrams and figures are rhetorical devices used to present the illusion of clarity, as well as to achieve the traditional appeal of a "textbook," but, when actually looked at, don't make much sense.
Let's take figure 2-2 on p. 25 for example (it's the venn diagram that includes Content, Users, and Context.) What is this supposed to be? What do the overlapping sections of this diagram represent? Outside of a list of three concepts that are important to information archetecture, there isn't any information being delivered here.
The same applies to figure 2-1 on page 21. What is this? Outside of a listing of fields that either deal with web design or don't, I don't see any other purpose for this cluster of terms, nor do I see one for the specific cluster that this diagram takes.
I guess what I'm complaining about is a symptom of a larger ambiguity characteristic to the book as a whole (well, up through chapter 5, at least), where I find myself encountering a series of pleasantly presented and easily readable bits of concepts and facts, but I'm having to invent my own associations between them in order to give them a theoretical or practical unity. Maybe that's because I'm used to that kind of unity in the Web Style Guide and in the articles we've read in class. I'm not sure. Does anybody else share these concerns?
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hey Carl, I must admit I was confused by that venn diagram, but then again, I am usually confused by venn diagrams! (I mean, what's their point, really? The only time I've ever found those helpful was in categorizing linguistic terms.) That cluster of other terms seems to be all inclusive, but maybe that was just to show how many different people with different skills can eventually get involved in the field of IA--but you're right, I've been constantly applying the information to something I could relate to outside the chapters' text.
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