The future of wayfinding
We’ve got pretty good at helping people find their way through today’s
digital world. Information architecture, taking cues from physical
architecture, has built a toolkit of wayfinding aids including menus,
breadcrumbs, signage. But things are about to get a lot more interesting.
The boundaries between the abstract digital world and the real physical world
are becoming blurred. GPS has made the A-Z map redundant. RFID chips will soon
enable a world of “spimes”, where our environment can tell us all about
itself and how we should interact with it. Geolocation offers an immersive
augmented reality where data combines with space in revolutionary ways. Our
landmarks are now both physical and digital. One day, a church spire; the next,
a WiFi cloud. Our old wayfinding methods will soon be as outdated as the
sextant.
Even now, people are beginning to use new technology to annotate and enrich
their surroundings. Location-driven technology is most powerful in the hands of
local users, and it is our responsibility as designers to ensure that these
systems are accessible and collaborative, yet safe.
Given this quantum leap, we need new approaches to wayfinding, information
scent and navigation. This session will explore how we can we use information
architecture to shape the chaos. How can we design systems for both the digital
and physical world that allow users to orientate themselves, understand the
choices available, and feel at home?
Participants will take away a new understanding of the exciting challenges
ahead of us, including the role of mobile devices, the ubiquitous information
age, and the privacy implications of our new location-critical lives.
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This session is aimed at intermediate to expert information architects and user
experience designers interested in pushing the boundaries of their field. It
aims to advance IA and UX practice by exploring the future applications of our
work in the fields of ubicomp, mobile design and embedded real-world
information systems.
This session was previously presented at EuroIA 2009, with a companion article
published at
http://johnnyholland.org/2009/09/15/wayfinding-through-technology/.
Presentation deck and speaker biography are attached.
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