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Try an analogy:
A concrete gallery has entrances and exits. It has a perimeter and one understands where it begins and where it ends. The artworks are within. Each individual artwork carries a whole set of meanings and associations and a person can confront these individual pieces.
~ Imagine an individual artwork to be a web page. Imagine the gallery or exhibition to be the entire web site.
People have realised that an exhibition as a whole, above and beyond the individual artworks, can hold meaning too. That meaning can also be the collection of the art works within. And the exhibition, as a whole, can also hold concepts, ideas or themes. Meaning also lies in the way those artworks have been laid out within the gallery space.
~ Now you have artworks as individual web pages and an exhibition in the way pages link to pages. The ideas, emotions, concepts, and experiences are not just the presentation of information on individual pages. The ideas, emotions, concepts, and experiences are also between the clicks.
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A website as a whole can be created in such a way as to contain ideas, concepts and themes in the way that it is put together. Here’s a really basic illustration.
The experience is affected by the layout of the site and how elements link to each other. Like a real gallery that physically begins and ends around an exhibition, a website can have very definite beginnings and endings. How links are connected, what content is displayed, choice of names and ordering…these are all deliberate.
The point is:
The information architecture of digital spaces can be part of the meaning of a website just as much as the content on the individual pages.
If digital curators are showing that meaning lies in the way that we conceptualise and structure sites then information architects should start to look at what those meanings could possibly be.
~ In a commercial sense it may start to say a lot about the way we structure sites for commercial companies.
~ It opens the possibilities of how we could be saying things for clients.
~ And what could the structures that we see already be saying?
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