By Peter Morville
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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Lost and Found

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At the seashore, between the land of atoms
and the sea of bits, we are now facing the
challenge of reconciling our dual citizenship
in the physical and digital worlds.

—Hiroshi Ishii

MIT Media Lab

I'm sitting on a beach in Newport, Rhode Island. Seagulls and sandpipers hunt near the water's edge. The Atlantic ocean sparkles in the early morning sun. To my right, the Cliff Walk winds its way between the rugged New England shoreline and the manicured gardens of the Newport mansions, opulent "summer cottages" built with industrial age fortunes made in steamships, railroads, and foreign trade.

I'm sitting on a beach in Newport, but I'm not entirely there. My attention is focused on a device that rests in the palm of my hand. It's a Treo 600 smartphone. I'm using it to write this sentence, right here, right now. As a 6.2 ounce computer sporting a 144 megahertz RISC processor, 32 megabytes of RAM, a color display, and a full QWERTY keyboard, this is one impressive micro-machine. But that's not what floats my boat. What I love about this device is its ability to reach out beyond the here and now.

By integrating a mobile phone and Palm Powered organizer with wireless email, text messaging, and web browsing, the Treo connects me with global communication and information networks. I can make a phone call, send email, check the weather, buy a book, learn about Newport, and find a restaurant for lunch. The whole world is accessible and addressable through this 21^st Century looking glass in the palm of my hands.

But make no mistake, this device is a two-way mirror. Not only can people reach out and touch me with a phone call, an email, or a text message. Equipped with the right technology, someone could pinpoint my location within a few hundred feet. Like most new smartphones, my Treo includes an embedded Global Positioning System chip designed to support E911 emergency location services. In other words, I'm findable.

Here's where things get interesting. We're at an inflection point in the evolution of findability. We're creating all sorts of new interfaces and devices to access information, and we're simultaneously importing tremendous volumes of information about people, places, products, and possessions into our ubiquitous digital networks.

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Definition

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At this point, you may be wondering: what exactly is findability? This section is for you.

1. The quality of being locatable or navigable.
2. The degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate.
3. The degree to which a system or environment supports navigation and retrieval.

Findability is a quality that can be measured at both the object and system levels. We can study the attributes of an individual object that make it more or less findable. The title of a document. The color of a life jacket. The presence of an embedded RFID tag. And we can evaluate how well an overall system supports people's ability to find their way and find what they need. Can patients navigate a hospital? Can users navigate a web site?

Of course, the successes of findable objects and their systems are often closely linked. An orange life jacket fails to grab attention in an orange ocean, but a statistically improbable phrase jumps right out in a sea of books. Findability requires definition , distinction, difference. In physical environments, size, shape, color, and location set objects apart. In the digital realm, we rely heavily on words. Words as labels. Words as links. Keywords.

The humble keyword has become surprisingly important in recent years. As a vital ingredient in the online search process, keywords have become part of our everyday experience. We feed keywords into Google, Yahoo!, MSN, eBay, and Amazon. We search for news, products, people, used furniture, and music. And words are the key to our success.

The power of the keyword search has combined with the richness of the World Wide Web to foment a revolution in the way we do business. This revolution is not simply about moving the shopping experience online. It's about empowering individuals with information and choice. Never before has the consumer had so much access to product information

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Information Literacy

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The average child in the United States watches four hours of television every day. These kids are exposed to 20,000 commercials annually. They see 8,000 onscreen murders by the time they finish grade school. Is this a good thing? As a society, we send mixed signals. On the one hand, we condemn the evils of television. Authorities such as the American Academy of Pediatrics warn that TV viewing may lead to more aggressive behavior, less physical activity, and risky sexual behavior. Newspaper headlines blame television for our epidemics of violence, obesity, and illiteracy. And yet, we let our children watch it. Perhaps we question the authorities and doubt the headlines. Perhaps we lack the time or energy to intervene. Or perhaps we trust that things will be okay because all the other kids are watching too. Perhaps.

Whenever I hear about the dominance of television and the decline of literacy, I experience a disconnect. While I do fear for the health of this media-saturated generation, I don't worry about their ability to read and write. Our culture does not reward illiteracy. On the contrary, it's almost impossible to function in modern society without mastering the skills of written communication. If you can't fill out a form, you're in trouble. The literacy rate in the United States is 97%. It's 99% throughout most of Europe. Basic literacy is not in danger. However, it's also not enough.

Our children are inheriting a media landscape that's breathtaking and bewildering. Books, magazines, newspapers, billboards, telephones, televisions, videotapes, video games, email messages, text messages, instant messages, web sites, weblogs, wikis, and the list goes on. It's exciting to have all these communication tools and information sources at our disposal, but the complexity of the environment demands new kinds of literacy. Gone are the days when we can look up the "right answer" in the family encyclopedia. Nowadays there are many answers in many places. We can find them in Microsoft Encarta or in the Wikipedia. We can find them via Google. There is so much to find, but we must first know how to search and who to trust. In the information age, transmedia information literacy is a core life skill.

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Business Value

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Let's say you're unmoved by the idealistic call for greater literacy. Our children may be our future, but you've got budget problems and business challenges today. Why should you care about findability? Why should you learn more about social software, semantic webs, and search engine optimization? What can findability do for you?

We begin our quest for business value in the unlikely domain of a federal government agency. Yes, we're back at the National Cancer Institute where I recently had the good fortune to collaborate with a great team of people on redesigning the cancer.gov web site. I was brought in to lead the information architecture strategy. My goals were to improve navigation and usability, and reduce the number of clicks required to access key content.

The in-house team at NCI had done a great job analyzing patterns of use. They understood who visits, why they visit, and where they spend their time. They knew the majority of site visitors are people recently diagnosed with cancer (and their friends and family members). And their data showed the home pages for specific types of cancer were among the most visited. So, among other goals, they wanted to reduce the time and number of clicks it took to navigate from the NCI home page to cancer type home pages.

Now, being a findability fanatic, I couldn't help inquiring about how people find the web site in the first place. My clients didn't have much data on this topic, but they told me not to worry about this type of findability. Our site comes up as the first or second hit for searches on "cancer" on Google and Yahoo! they told me, so we're all set.

But I did worry, and I did a bit of digging. I used Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool to get a sense of the types of cancer-related searches being performed on public search engines. Sure enough, the generic query on "cancer" was the single most popular search (i.e., 180,000 queries per month). But queries on specific types of cancer were also very common (e.g., 132,000 on "breast cancer" per month). In fact, when you totaled the searches on specific types of cancer, they outnumbered the generic searches by a 5:1 ratio, as Figure 1-1 shows. This makes sense. If you're diagnosed with breast cancer, you're very likely to search on "breast cancer" rather than explore the more general category of cancer.

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Paradise Lost

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Have you ever been to Lost and Found ? It's a shadowy place we discover only through loss. It's filled with hats, mittens, watches, toys, and rings of gold and silver. And it smells of hope and fear and musty books. A child's first visit is a powerful experience. A valued possession has been lost. Perhaps in the classroom or on the playground. A frantic search leads to tearful resignation. Finders, keepers; losers, weepers.

But wait. A classmate steps forward. Have you tried the Lost and Found? Understanding is instant. A place for lost things. That makes sense. A short walk to an office with a cardboard box under a table. There it is. That's mine. A happy ending.

Of course, sometimes finders are keepers. Sometimes things get lost between the cracks. It depends what you lose and where and when. The idea of Lost and Found is universal. It's a social institution that transcends place and time. But the instantiation is another matter. A cardboard box in your local school. A steel cage in a foreign airport. The idea adapts to suit its environment. Each instance is defined by location.

Or at least it was until that disruptive technology known as the Internet came along. People from all over can now report and seek items using the Internet Lost and Found. The site sports an international database of pet and property listings, and the stories of success touch the heart and mind. An 83-year-old woman recovers a beloved heirloom necklace. A 10-year-old boy is reunited with his English Springer Spaniel. Dogs, cats, watches, wallets. Lost in the world. Found in cyberspace. Our digital networks locate physical objects. Keyword search isn't just for documents anymore. Technology has entered the shadow lands of Lost and Found, and we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Some speak of a coming techno-utopia, a magical era when all our problems will fade into the sunset. The end of poverty and starvation. No more sickness and disease. Global peace. Eternal life. In the words of Ernest Hemingway in

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Chapter 2: A Brief History of Wayfinding

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Not all those who wander are lost.

—J.R.R. Tolkien

Labyrinths and mazes are two distinct creatures. In the modern world, we are most familiar with the maze, an intricate and often confusing network of interconnecting pathways or tunnels designed to challenge the skills of all who enter. Mazes are multicursal. They offer a choice of paths, along with a disorienting mix of twists, turns, blind alleys, and dead ends. In a maze, it's hard to find your way and easy to become lost.

In contrast, a true labyrinth is unicursal, like the one in Figure 2-1. There is one well-defined path that leads into the center and back out again. The labyrinth is an ancient symbol with a 3,500 year history in religion and mythology in such diverse places as Egypt, Peru, Arizona, Iceland, India, and Sumatra. It combines the imagery of circle and spiral into a meandering but purposeful path, a reassuring metaphor for our journey through life.

In practice, we use the terms interchangeably. Our most famous labyrinth was really a maze, designed by the skillful architect Daedalus to entomb the Minotaur and its victims. Only by relying on Ariadne's ball of thread was Theseus able to escape after slaying the beast at the center. Like today's mazes of hedge and corn and ink, the labyrinth of Crete was a puzzle, inviting competitors to test their skills.

Semantics aside, our fascination with labyrinths and mazes stems from a primal fear of being lost. Over the course of history, the ability to venture out in search of food, water, and companionship, and then find our way home again has been central to survival. For animals and humans alike, getting lost has typically been a very dangerous prospect.

Our wayfinding instincts testify to the power of evolution. The diversity and sophistication of natural orientation and navigation skills is breathtaking.

Figure 2-1: A true labyrinth presents a single path to the center

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All Creatures Great and Small

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Before we lavish attention on Homo sapiens, it's worth taking a look at the wayfinding skills of a few other species with which we share planet Earth. Their solutions to the challenges of orientation and navigation can illuminate our own. For example, have you ever wondered how ants find a feeding site and then return home? Lacking maps and street signs and cell phones, these tiny creatures regularly travel thousands of times their own body length to arrive at a pinpoint goal.

After decades of research, behavioral biologists have begun to figure out how. Studies show that ants use a combination of geocentric and egocentric techniques. Geocentric navigation (also called allocentric or exocentric) relies on external environmental cues such as landmarks and any available map information. Ants make intensive use of visual landmarks. In effect, ants take snapshots as they proceed from one location to another, and they're able to rely on those visual memories to retrace their routes. Before leaving home, an ant takes a visual snapshot of the panorama as seen from the nest. Upon return, the ant finds its nest by positioning itself so the current image of the environment matches the stored snapshot. If the image is smaller than the snapshot, the ant moves closer. If the image is larger, the ant moves away. Research shows that ants make use of multiple, successive snapshots to find their way along each foraging route.

However, this use of visual landmarks is not sufficient. Some landmarks move. Others become blocked from view. In many environments, memorable features are hard to find. The Sahara desert, home to the Cataglyphis ants, is particularly hostile to landmark navigation. And that's where egocentric navigation comes in. Egocentric navigation relies on self-awareness of distance and direction traveled and is independent of the immediate surroundings. Ants employ an egocentric strategy known as path integration to retrace their steps. This strategy is made possible by two remarkable senses. First, ants possess the biological equivalent of an odometer that tells them not just how many steps they have taken but the ground-level distance traveled during each segment of the journey. Second, ants possess a skylight compass that relies on the position of the sun as indicated by polarized light to compute direction. By combining knowledge of distance and direction, ants have a basic ability to retrace their steps independent of landmarks. Of course, these senses are imperfect, and errors can rapidly accumulate during the course of a trip. It's the sophisticated combination of strategies that allows for error correction and ultimate wayfinding success.

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Human Wayfinding in Natural Habitats

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What single characteristic distinguishes humans from all other animals? Our labels reflect attempts to answer this question. Homo habilis or "handy man" suggests the importance of tool use. Homo erectus or "upright man" emphasizes hands-free, heads-up, bipedal locomotion. And, Homo sapiens or "thinking man" invokes the value of intelligence and the capacity for language. In truth, we have much in common with our fellow creatures, including identical chunks of DNA and a common evolutionary heritage dating back four billion years. And for most of our history, we've wandered the same natural habitats without the benefit of compass, map, or signpost. It's no surprise that animals and humans share similar navigation skills and behaviors.

Unfortunately, we know very little about the two million year "prehistory" of human wayfinding. Prior to the invention of written language 5,500 years ago, we are left only with crumbling skulls and educated guesses. Our understanding flows primarily from modern studies in anthropology, archaeology, psychology, biology, and neuroscience. For example, it's a safe bet that early humans were dependent on the five basic senses. Though we talk about our "sense of direction," research has shown no convincing indication it exists. Lacking the polarized vision of ants and the magnetoreceptors of turtles, we have had to rely heavily on an awareness of our own movements (path integration) and a meticulous attention to environmental clues.

Today, much of this tacit knowledge, this ability to "read" the natural environment has been lost. Most of us can't set course by the position of the sun or the vegetation and moisture patterns on north and south facing slopes. Consequently, we underestimate the richness of available cues and marvel at the mysterious skills of our ancestors, such as the Polynesians who navigated open ocean voyages without instruments. In tiny canoes, they explored the vastness of the world's oceans, discovering such uninhabited and disparate islands as Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, Hawaii, and New Zealand. Employing an ancient art of navigation, these seafaring explorers relied solely on careful observation of natural signs to reckon direction and location. The sun, moon, stars, and planets served as broad navigational framework. Ocean swells, winds, landmarks, and seamarks such as schools of fish, flocks of birds, and clusters of driftwood provided more localized clues.

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Maps and Charts

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From the lighthouse to the chronometer, our inventors kept at it until we could compute distance, direction, and position from anywhere in the world. Of course, most of these wayfinding devices would have been relatively useless without the remarkable invention we know as the map. Though the oldest existing maps are preserved on Babylonian clay tablets from 2500 B.C., shown in Figure 2-2, the first maps were undoubtedly created thousands of years before in early hunter-gatherer societies, where crude diagrams sketched in the dirt were used to show paths and destinations within a local area. This ability to transform "cognitive maps" gained from personal experience into symbolic visual representations provided humans with a powerful cooperative advantage. Maps enabled us to share wayfinding experiences and geographic knowledge, thereby extending our communal ability to explore wider and wider regions without becoming afraid or getting lost. We could tell each other where to find food and we could warn of dangers to avoid.

Figure 2-2: Clay tablet map from Ga-Sur (2500 B.C.) on left; redrawing with interpretation on right (images from http://www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/AncientWebPages/100D.html)

For many centuries, maps and mapmakers played a powerful role in defining the elements and edges of the known world. As Alfred Korzybksi, the father of general semantics, famously remarked: "the map is not the territory." No map can depict every physical feature of even the smallest area. All maps are estimations, generalizations, and interpretations. Maps are not so much about attention to detail as the selection of detail (Figure 2-3). Mapmakers choose which landmarks and paths to show and which to hide, and they decide where to draw the boundaries. On some maps, like the one in Figure 2-2, those boundaries marked the limits of one's territory: to venture outside the lines was to enter a no man's land between tribes. On other maps, those boundaries marked the edge of the world, literally (Figure 2-4). For much of antiquity people believed in a flat earth and feared falling off the edge. Maps reflect and shape the beliefs of a community or civilization. Beyond this place, there be dragons!

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The Built Environment

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In his 1960 book, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch inspired a generation of architects, planners, designers, and citizens to envision urban spaces as a functioning whole. Using the concept of environmental legibility, he focused attention on the structure and organization of a city's wayfinding systems. Drawing upon extensive studies conducted in Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles, Lynch brought to life the orientation and navigation experiences of real people in real cities. He contrasted the anxiety and even terror caused by disorientation with the sense of balance and well-being produced by the easily recognizable patterns of a legible city. And he created a vocabulary for describing a city's elements that laid the foundation for modern wayfinding design.

Paths

The streets, walkways, transit lines, canals, railroads, and other channels through which people occasionally or regularly move.

Edges

The walls, shores, fences, barriers, and other boundaries that create linear breaks in continuity, both separating and relating two distinct regions.

Districts

Major sections of the city that possess a common identifying character (e.g., The Financial District, The North End, China Town).

Nodes

Intersections, enclosed squares, street corners, subway stations, and other transportation hubs that serve as points of reference, transition, and destination.

Landmarks

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Wayfinding in the Noosphere

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Have you heard of the hippocampus ? It's one of the most ancient parts of the brain, located deep within the temporal lobes and adjacent to the amygdala. This horseshoe-shaped structure plays a central role in learning, memory, and wayfinding. We know rats rely on the hippocampus for maze navigation. It's essential for both path integration and the processing of cognitive maps. We know neurons called "place cells" are intensely active when a rat revisits familiar locations. And we know animals and humans experience severe disorientation when the hippocampus is damaged.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans have shown an enlarged posterior region of the hippocampus in taxi drivers, and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans show increased hippocampal activity when drivers are asked to recall routes around the city. In recent years, researchers have conducted similar experiments in virtual environments. Sure enough, when subjects are exploring a virtual maze or the artificial terrain of a video game, those same neurons light up. Does this constitute evidence of a biological basis for the validity of wayfinding metaphors on the World Wide Web? Not quite. Virtual mazes and semantic spaces are not equivalent. But it does remind us that when we enter the artificial noosphere, we bring our natural instincts and our physical bodies with us.

A Jesuit paleontologist and philosopher by the name of Teilhard de Chardin popularized the notion of the noosphere or "sphere of human thought" back in the early 1900s. Similar to the atmosphere and biosphere, the noosphere is composed of all the interacting minds and ideas on earth. It's a provocative and romantic concept. But is the noosphere real? Or is it just a metaphor, a figure of speech for relating our experience of the physical world to the ethereal realm of knowledge?

Well, there's a distinguished linguistics professor at UC Berkeley who would take issue with its dismissal as

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The Web

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The principles of wayfinding are clearly relevant in immersive virtual environments, from video games to architectural walkthroughs to battlefield simulations. But do they apply to the everyday Web? Does our knowledge of orientation and navigation in the physical world have value in the digital worlds of web sites and intranets? We've certainly created a multitude of spatial metaphors to explain the Web, from Al Gore's information superhighway to the proliferation of home pages, site maps, and breadcrumbs. And web designers have aggressively embraced metaphor by creating information architectures, blueprints, and navigation systems.

And yet, some researchers have begun to question the usefulness of these metaphors. Andrew Dillon and Misha Vaughan assert that "navigation is a limited metaphor for hypermedia and website use that potentially constrains our understanding of human-computer interaction." They argue that unlike physical navigation where the destination is the goal, in semantic spaces, the journey is the destination. They suggest, as an alternative, the concept of information shape and the harnessing of perceptual cues embedded in genre. As we'll discuss later, there is real potential in these ideas. The exploration of new metaphors and the courage to design beyond metaphor are both critical to innovation in web design. However, the positioning of shape and genre as replacing rather than complementing the navigation metaphor is a mistake. All metaphors have limits. All metaphors can be taken too far. But that does not negate their core value.

There is no question that people experience the Web as a type of space in which they move. A paper called "Metaphors We Surf the Web By" presents detailed evidence that web users remember and talk about the Web in terms of spatial navigation. We use a mix of trajectory metaphors (e.g., "I went to the IBM home page") and container metaphors (e.g., "I found that inside Yahoo!"). We construct cognitive maps. We remember (and bookmark) landmarks and anchor points. We traverse paths or clickstreams in search of information objects. And we often become lost and disoriented.

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The Baldwin Effect

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At the dawn of the 20^th century, James Mark Baldwin, a pioneering developmental psychologist, began a line of inquiry into the coevolution of genes and culture that continues to this day. Baldwin asserted that organisms could survive ecological challenges by relying on acquired knowledge and skills, often learned from others, and that this may then channel natural selection to favor unlearned versions of the same behavior. This mechanism, now known as the Baldwin effect, suggests that organisms can learn to shape their environment and consequently alter the path of evolution. For example, we know dairy farming emerged before the spread of lactose absorption genes and created the selection pressures that favored them, not the other way around.

For those of us living in the modified ecologies of the 21^st century, the Baldwin effect has special meaning. As a species, we have transformed our environment beyond recognition. We cannot help but wonder about the role and rules of natural selection in a society where the average life expectancy exceeds 75 years. And we must constantly struggle to reconcile our ancient survival instincts with modern reality. Behaviors that once kept us from starvation and predators now lead us into stress, obesity, and drug addiction. Evolution cannot keep pace with the environment. We must rely heavily on our intelligence, the gift of language, and our ability to learn and unlearn. For the proving grounds have shifted from natural and built environments to the noosphere, a world defined by symbols and semantics, a world that in certain respects does not exist, as Figure 2-16 reminds us.

Figure 2-16: René Magritte's assertion that "This is not a pipe" invites us to question the distinction between image and reality (© 2005 C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York)

When pondering the reality of the noosphere or the substance of cyberspace, it's worth throwing memes into the mix. Richard Dawkins, one of the world's most prominent biologists, describes memes as follows:

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Chapter 3: Information Interaction

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Documents are, quite simply, talking things.
They are bits of the material world—clay,
stone, animal skin, plant fiber, sand—that
we've imbued with the ability to speak.

—David M. Levy

University of Washington iSchool

Let me tell you a story about the laws of Moore and Mooers . Once upon a time, in 1965 to be precise, an engineer named Gordon Moore boldly predicted the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits would double every year. In his landmark paper for the journal of Electronics, Moore conjectured:

Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers—or at least terminals connected to a central computer—automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment. The electronic wristwatch needs only a display to be feasible today.

Though his specific prediction was a bit optimistic—transistor density has doubled roughly every two years—his overall vision has played out remarkably well. The number of transistors per circuit grew from 50 in 1965 to 410 million in 2003 and is fast approaching 1 billion. In the four decades since his paper was published, Gordon founded and grew a rather successful company called Intel; home computers, the Internet, mobile computing (and electronic wristwatches) became reality; and Moore's Law attained mythic status. Its exponential growth curve has been a favorite prop among techno-evangelists for implying the imminent arrival of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and the paperless society. Faster is better, they argue—more is more.

This brings us to the second law, first formulated by Calvin Mooers in 1959.

An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.

Sometimes we don't want new information, he argued—less is more. Now, Calvin Mooers was also a computer pioneer and entrepreneur. He coined the terms "information retrieval" and "descriptors," wrote some of the earliest interactive programming languages, and founded the Zator company to develop and market his ingenious automatic punch card information retrieval system. But despite his significant contributions, Mooers is little known outside the information science community, and neither is his law.

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Defining Information

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What is information? Consult a dictionary and enter a strange loop of circular definitions resembling the impossible structures of M.C. Escher, shown in Figure 3-1. Data is information is knowledge is information is data. Ask an expert and receive a philosophical treatise on the fine distinctions between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. Ask a colleague and they'll question your sanity. But go ahead anyway. Ask someone to define information. Then poke holes in their definitions. Keep at it. Don't let them off the hook. I'll bet it's easy and fun, in a disturbing sort of way, like shooting fish in a barrel.

Our inability to precisely answer this question speaks volumes about the subject. Information surrounds us. We can cite examples ad infinitum: articles, books, cartoons, databases, encyclopedias, files, gestures, holograms, images, journals, knowledge bases, laws, maps, numbers, ontologies, paintings, quizzes, rules, signs, texts, users, variables, web sites, xeroxes, yaks, and zebras. We use information. We create information. But we can't draw a circle around the category and agree what's in and out. Take yaks and zebras for instance. Scholars argue that under the right circumstances, animals can enter the category we call documents. We'll revisit this bizarre claim later, but for now, let's agree to disagree about the definition of information.

Figure 3-1: Relativity (left) and Sky and Water I (right) by M.C. Escher (© 2005 The M.C. Escher Company-Holland. All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com)

It's not that good people haven't tried to crack this nut. In fact, the field of information science was first defined in the early 1960s as:

The science that investigates the properties and behavior of information, the forces governing the flow of information, and the means of processing information for optimum accessibility and usability. The processes include the origination, dissemination, collection, organization, storage, retrieval, interpretation, and use of information.

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Information Retrieval

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When Calvin Mooers coined the term "information retrieval" in 1948, Hollerith (IBM) punch cards were the state of the art. First invented in 1896 by Henry P. Stamford, these edge-notched punch cards enabled people to search insurance records and library collections by metadata. Each notch constituted a descriptor (also known as an index term or metadata tag). In early versions, the user would thread a 16 inch needle through a stack of cards. The relevant notched cards would drop from the collection. A subsequent search of this result set enabled further narrowing (the Boolean AND). Non-relevant cards retrieved by this process were called "false drops," a term we still use today.

To those of us living in the age of Google, the world of punch cards seems distant and quaint. In fact, things have happened so fast in recent years, even 1993 seems like a lifetime ago. Back then, I was learning "online searching" at the University of Michigan's School of Information and Library Studies. We searched through databases via dumb terminals connected to the Dialog company's mainframe. Results were output to a dot matrix printer. And Dialog charged by the minute. This made searching quite stressful. Mistakes were costly in time and money. So, we'd spend an hour or more in the library beforehand, consulting printed thesauri for descriptors, considering how to combine Boolean operators most efficiently, and plotting our overall search strategy. A computer's time was more precious than a human's, so we sweated every keyword.

Meanwhile, NCSA was developing the first graphical, multimedia interface to the World Wide Web, released as the Mosaic web browser in 1993. This killer application launched the Internet revolution that transformed our relationship with information systems. A browser for every desktop. A web site for every company. Billions of pages searchable via Google. For free. And hundreds of millions of untrained users searching for digital cameras, scientific papers, uncensored news, and photos of Britney Spears. The technology and context for retrieval changed radically. And yet, the central challenges and principles of information retrieval, forged in the decades between punch cards and web browsers, remain valid and important. And because they derive from the fundamental nature of language and meaning, they are unlikely to change anytime soon.

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Language and Representation

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Words intended to represent concepts: that is the questionable foundation upon which information retrieval is built. Words in the content. Words in the query. Even collections of images and software and physical objects rely on words in the form of metadata for representation and retrieval. And words are imprecise, ambiguous, indeterminate, vague, opaque; you get the picture. Our language bubbles with synonyms, homonyms, acronyms, and even contronyms (words with contradictory meanings in different contexts such as sanction, cleave, and bi-weekly). And this is before we even talk about the epic numbers of spelling errors committed on a daily basis. In The Mother Tongue, author Bill Bryson shares a wealth of colorful facts about language, including:

The residents of the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea have a hundred words for yams, while the Maoris of New Zealand have thirty-five words for dung.

In the OED, round alone (that is without variants like rounded and roundup) takes 7 pages to define or about 15,000 words of text.

English retains probably the richest vocabulary, and most diverse shading of meanings, of any language.... No other language has so many words all saying the same thing.

Interestingly, when this ambiguity of language is subjected to statistical analysis, familiar patterns indicative of power laws , shown in Figure 3-3, emerge. First observed by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto in the early 1900s, power laws result in many small events coexisting with a few large events. Later summed up as Pareto's Principle or the 80/20 Rule, power laws have since been applied to a wide variety of phenomenon including wealth disparity (80% of money is earned by 20% of the population), scientific publishing (a small number of journals contribute the vast percentage of scientific output), and web site popularity (80% of links on the Web point to only 15% of web pages).

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The People Problem

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Early studies of information retrieval systems featured quantitative approaches characteristic of the physical sciences. Mathematical formulas for precision and recall created an aura of objectivity for the nascent field of information science. And yet behind every formula lurked a variable that resisted isolation. Today we call this infuriating variable "the user" and we recognize that research must integrate rather than isolate the goals, behaviors, and idiosyncrasies of the people who use the systems.

Upon admitting the people problem, relevance was the first casualty, for measures of relevance are highly subjective. Ask individuals to evaluate the relevance of search results, and their responses will vary according to what they already know and what they want to know. Even the same individual may evaluate the same results differently as her knowledge and interest changes over time. Now this doesn't mean we should dismiss the metrics of precision and recall. For defined audiences and contexts (e.g., engineers using the HP intranet), sufficient agreement among users exists to make relevance measures meaningful. But we should proceed with an understanding that relevance is subjective, situational, and dynamic. Like beauty, relevance exists in the eye of the beholder.

Perhaps the most important thing we know about users is that they vigorously embrace what our friend George Kingsley Zipf called the Principle of Least Effort :

Each individual will adopt a course of action that will involve the expenditure of the probably least average of his work (by definition, least effort).

This fits with Calvin Mooers' insight that people will not seek information that makes their jobs harder (even if it may benefit the organization they work for). And it explains the relentless migration to more accessible, usable information systems. Why visit the library when Google's on your desktop? In fact, numerous studies have shown users are often willing to sacrifice information quality for accessibility. This fast food approach to information consumption drives librarians crazy. "Our information is healthier and tastes better too" they shout. But nobody listens. We're too busy Googling.

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Information Interaction

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In 1995, Nahum Gershon coined the term "Human Information Interaction" (HII) to denote "how human beings interact with, relate to, and process information regardless of the medium connecting the two." Since then, the term has been widely adopted by the traditional information science and retrieval communities. Gary Marchionini of the UNC School of Information and Library Science explains "the IR problem itself has fundamentally changed and a new paradigm of information interaction has emerged."

This paradigm is characterized by highly interactive interfaces, user-centered methods, and a sensitivity to the dynamic, multi-channel nature of information seeking behavior. Researchers in Human Information Interaction draw insight and inspiration from the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) while recognizing they face unique challenges. As Elaine Toms suggests, "(the) unstructured, complex problem-solving task (of information seeking) cannot be reduced in a predictable way to a set of routine Goals, Operators, Methods, and Selections (GOMS)." In other words, the complexity of information interaction is not expressed well in typical models of human-computer interaction. HCI approaches are optimal for software applications and interfaces where designers can exercise great control over form and function. HII approaches are optimal for networked information systems where control is sacrificed for interoperability. In such environments, users may find and interact with information objects through a variety of devices and interfaces. The emphasis shifts from interface to information.

Fortunately, we're not starting from scratch. Thanks to pioneers who anticipated the current paradigm, we've inherited a wealth of information interaction information. In particular, Marcia J. Bates deserves credit for shaping our understanding of information seeking behavior. In a 1989 article entitled "The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques for the Online Search Interface," Marcia Bates exposed the inadequacy of the classic information retrieval model characterized by a single query, shown in Figure 3-6.

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Chapter 4: Intertwingled

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Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged—people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.
—Theodor Holm Nelson

As a sociology student at Harvard in the early 1960s, Ted Nelson enrolled in a computer course for the humanities that changed his life. For his term project, he tried to develop a text-handling system that would enable writers to edit and compare their work easily. Considering he was coding on a mainframe in Assembler language before word processing had been invented, it's no surprise his attempt fell short. Despite this early setback, Ted was captivated by the potential of nonsequential text to transform how we organize and share ideas. His pioneering work on "hypertext" and "hypermedia" laid an intellectual foundation for the World Wide Web, and his views on "intertwingularity " will haunt the house of ubicomp for many years to come.

We experience Nelson's intertwingularity every time we click a hypertext link. We move fluidly between different pages, documents, sites, authors, formats, and topics. In this nonlinear world, the contrasts can be dramatic. A single blog post may link to an article about dinosaurs, a pornographic video, a presidential speech, and a funny song about cabbage. We routinely travel vast semantic distances in the space of a second, and these dramatic transitions aren't limited to the Web. Our remote controls put hundreds of television channels at our fingertips. Terrorism on CNN. Click. Sumo wrestling on ESPN. Click. Sesame Street on PBS. Click. And our cell phones relentlessly punctuate the flow of daily life. One minute we're playing soccer with our kids at the neighborhood park. Seconds later we're in the midst of a business crisis half way around the world. The juxtapositions are worthy of shock and awe. Business and pleasure. Reality and fiction. Humor and horror. And yet, we're not shocked. We've become accustomed to dramatic transition. We expect it. We enjoy it. We're addicted.

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Everyware

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In April 2001, after the agonizing process of closing my former company, I managed to escape into the sanctuary of Yosemite National Park. I enjoyed the romantic notion of figuring out what to do with the rest of my life while hiking in the wilderness. So, armed with a bottle of water and some beef jerky, I headed for the snowy peaks in search of transcendental moments and healing visions. Upon reaching the summit, I found myself alone, amidst the most breathtaking panorama I have ever seen. I sat for a while, enjoying the beauty and tranquility of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Then, I reached into my pocket, pulled out my cell phone, and called my mom. Can you hear me now?

These days, people use cell phones everywhere: in planes, trains, automobiles, grocery stores, golf courses, and bathtubs. During a half-marathon last summer, I saw a fellow runner with a cell phone held to his sweaty ear. In today's society, such behavior barely raises eyebrows. Conspicuous consumption is hip. Leather holsters, swivel belt clips, colored faceplates, and personalized ringtones transform consumer appliance into hi-tech fashion statement: everyware for everybody who's anybody. Until yesterday. Haven't you heard? Cell phones are passé. GSM smart phones are where it's at. Web, email, calendar, contacts, stereo, camera, television, and global positioning system in a single device. Moblogging from a ski lift in the Swiss Alps? Now that's cool. Checking email while driving? Not so cool, though I'm guilty as charged. As William Gibson says, "the street finds its own use for things." And that's part of the fun. The search space for novel uses of mobile devices is immense and stretches well beyond findability into art, business, education, entertainment, healthcare, politics, and warfare. We can read, write, buy, sell, talk, listen, work, play, attack, and defend.

In Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold emphasizes the potential of mobile communications to create a social revolution by enabling new forms of cooperation. He describes the emergent behavior exhibited by

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Wayfinding 2.0

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Speaking of journeys, it should come as no surprise that wayfinding is among the most fertile soils for technologies of intertwinglement. For even as we advance into a connected century, we continue to spend great scads of time moving our physical bodies through space, and despite the ready availability of maps and street signs, we still manage to get ourselves lost. Lost in cities or inside buildings or on the way.

One of my more memorable experiences happened a couple of years ago on the way to the doctor's office. You see, our youngest daughter was born with an underdeveloped tear duct system that failed to properly drain the lubricants of her eyes. She would often wake in the morning with one or both eyes sealed shut with guck (that's the technical term). Blocked tear ducts are a common problem in infants, but fortunately 90% of cases resolve themselves. Unfortunately, Claudia was in the 10% that require surgical probing, an outpatient procedure in which a blunt metal wire is inserted through the tear duct while the child lies wrapped in a blanket screaming bloody murder.

Suffice it to say, my wife and I were not very happy as we piled into the minivan and headed for our visit with the pediatric ophthalmologist. And after 20 minutes of trying to reconcile our map, shown in Figure 4-2, with the territory, we were considerably less happy. So, we're late. We're lost. Claudia is presciently crying in the back seat. My wife is trying to decode the worse than useless map. And I'm calling the doctor's office on my cell phone to ask for directions while our minivan swerves violently through city streets.

Figure 4-2: The map to the doctor's office

This is the gritty reality of transmedia wayfinding at the dawn of the 21^st century. Concrete mazes rendered barely navigable by the combination of lousy maps, illegible signs, missing landmarks, and desperate phone calls. Perhaps I exaggerate, but only to make an important point. Wayfinding remains an inefficient and even dangerous activity. At best, we waste time and endure needless stress. At worst, lives are lost when distracted drivers intertwingle their cars with immovable objects. There must be a better way, and fortunately we appear poised on the brink of breakthrough. After eons of bumbling around the planet, we're about to take navigation to a whole new level. Wayfinding 2.0. And it begins with location awareness.

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Findable Objects

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My favorite artifact from the future is the Wherify Wireless GPS Personal Locator for Kids, shown in Figure 4-9. It's a watch, clock, pager, and tracking device all in one. You can buy it on Amazon. It's available in Galactic Blue and Cosmic Purple. With a special key fob, you lock it on your kid's wrist. And then, from the comfort of your home or office, you track your child's location via the Internet, as shown in Figure 4-10. Features include:

• Choose from a standard street map or custom aerial photo.
• Define preset times for automatic "locates."
• Use "breadcrumbs" to see travel routes and location history.
• Unlock the locator remotely once your child arrives safely at soccer practice.

Is this the greatest product ever or what? As Wherify explains, "Now you can have peace of mind 24 hours a day while your child is the high tech envy of the neighborhood!"

Of course, knowing where they are and knowing what they're doing are very different things. The latter will require video and audio surveillance. Don't worry. That's coming.

Are you freaking out yet? Do you find this product disturbing in a profound Orwellian sense? Or, are you on the other side of the fence? Do you see it as yet another miracle of modern convenience? Perhaps you're already on Amazon, placing your order.

That's what I love about this product. It forces us to think about how we want to use technology. As parents, we go to great lengths to protect our kids. In an imperfect world, we use the available raw materials to craft solutions that work for our families. One size does not fit all, as illustrated by this amusing confession of George Brett:

My folks used a chicken wire pen for me. Sounds bad, but then again we lived near a large lake and my older cousins wanted me to join them

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Imports

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At the soft edges of cyberspace, we're importing vast amounts of information about the real world while simultaneously designing new interfaces for export. It is this great intertwingling of physical and digital that promises a radical departure from the present, for we're talking about nothing less than adding eyes and ears to our digital nervous system. The amount of information on today's Web is insignificant in relation to the oceans of data that will pour into cyberspace through a global network of sensory devices. Change won't come overnight, but our children will inherit a different world.

I stole a glimpse at this future a few years ago through the eyes of our eldest daughter, Claire. It was Christmas break, and I finally had a chance to play with my new laptop and wireless network while concurrently entertaining Claire. In the spirit of "embracing the genius of the AND," I decided to try out some webcams, eventually settling on the Live Earthcam at Times Square, shown in Figure 4-13. So, I'm sitting on the couch in Ann Arbor with our two year old, and we're streaming a real-time video feed from New York City, and she loves it! Traffic lights orchestrate an ebb and flow of people and cars, while honking horns punctuate the constant buzz of the big city. For some time, Claire and I are simultaneously in Ann Arbor and New York. This is not the willing suspension of disbelief. It's not like television or the movies. We are experiencing real places in real time. The people are not actors. There is no script. Claire is fascinated by the bright yellow cars, and I explain they are "taxi cabs" and they help people get from place to place. When one appears on screen, she yells "taxi cab, taxi cab." And this experience is seamlessly transferred into the real world where cries of "taxi cab, taxi cab" ring out on trips to the grocery store for the next several years. And each time this occurs, I'm struck by the oddity of a lesson learned at home through a virtual window onto Times Square.

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Exports

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We will experience a growing trade deficit with cyberspace as we deposit far more data than we can ever withdraw, but that's not to say that exports won't be equally fascinating as we design new interfaces to networked information. After all, the future of interface is not just about huge flat panel monitors and tiny PDA screens. It's about listening to your car navigation system. It's about reading the New York Times on e-paper. And if David Rose has his way, it's about feeling your email. Let me explain.

I first met David Rose in 2002 at the AIGA Experience Design Summit held at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. David is founder and chief creative officer of an MIT startup called Ambient Devices . At the conference, he captured our attention with a brilliant show-and-tell featuring a colorful array of products and prototypes. First up was a beautiful frosted glass orb that slowly transitions between thousands of colors to show changes in the weather, traffic, or the health of your stock portfolio, shown in Figure 4-16. Simply plug the orb into a power outlet, and it's instantly up and running on a nationwide wireless network. Then, visit Ambient's web portal to customize your orb. You can even track news, pollen forecasts, and the presence of colleagues on Instant Messenger. Designed to leverage the cognitive psychology phenomenon of pre-attentive processing, this crystal ball delivers glanceable, back-channel information. This is calm computing at its best.

But David didn't stop with the orb. He had a whole table full of groovy gadgets, including an inbox-connectable pinwheel that spins faster and faster as your messages pile up (until the hurricane force compels you to check email) and a web-configurable health watch to remind people when to take their

Figure 4-16: The Ambient Orb

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Convergence

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