Architecture versus Ecology

I'm pasting in some writing I've done on the architecture/ecology section. It needs work which may be easier when some of the other sections develop. The trick is showing environment as a necessary and different metaphor.

______________________________________________________________________________

why environment?

We rely on the use of environment as not just another information metaphor but as more representative of the information contexts within which our students compose. The common metaphors for understanding and envisioning information systems are architecture and ecology. While these metaphors influence our use of environment, we see environment as more reflective of the networked situations of our digital writing/writers. As the WIDE Research Center Collective notes in their argument “Why Teach Digital Writing?” the networked computer created a “changed writing environment.” This environmental approach allows for the continued dispersement of writing in both small and large applications, creating a plastic metaphor for the writing we encourage in our writing and rhetoric major. As outlined in the “CCCC position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments,” composing digitally refers to a variety of literacies, applications, genres, classrooms, and technologies. This variety requires a more networked metaphor, such as environment. In what follows, we highlight the key aspects of information architecture and ecology in order to differentiate and illustrate information environment.


• not [information] architecture

Coined by Richard Saul Wurman, information architecture represented initially an attempt to expand the field of architecture into information spaces. Through architecture, Wurman offered a defense against, or a “guide for,” information overload described in his book Information Anxiety. As Wurman writes in Information Architects, “I don’t mean a bricks and mortar architect…I mean architect as in the creating of systemic, structural, and orderly principles to make something work—the thoughtful making of either artifact, or idea, or policy that informs because it is clear” (16). In particular, an information architect engages in the “building of information structures that allow others to understand” (17).

Of late, information architecture has blossomed in the networked possibilities of the World Wide Web (Rosenfeld and Morville; Lipson and Day; Morrogh). As a modern taxonomy and strategy for handling the vast information of this “information age”, information architecture represents both a field or professional activity (one can be an information architect) and a metaphor (Morrogh). The Information Architecture Institute reflects these dual understandings of IA in its definition:
• The structural design of shared information environments.
• The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability.
• An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

Some in the field of technical communication have pushed for information architecture as a useful and productive area of study and example for the education of technical communicators. Michael Salvo, in particular, pushes for the inclusion of information architecture in our technical communication pedagogy. In his “Rhetorical Action in Professional Space: Information Architecture as Critical Practice,” Salvo convincingly describes information architecture as a “user-centered art of rhetorical design” (41). Rather than merely describing situations, information architecture, according to Salvo, allows for and illustrates the potential for action on the part of technical communicators in the designing of information objects. In other words, it is a “critical rhetorical strategy for intervention” that “ensures opportunities for agents to participate in long-term design and planning” (Rhetorical 54). In an effort to jettison the overused concept of community, Nicole Brown, in “The Regionalization of Cyberspace: Making Visible the Spatial Discourse of Community Online,” points to information architecture as a strategy for “defining” and “constructing” “informational paths,” as well as “conceptualizing online learning spaces and the writing and reading that occurs in these contexts.” Salvo, in his “Teaching Information Architecture: Technical Communication in a Postmodern Context,” illustrates these educational opportunities as he describes the possibilities information architecture holds for educating technical communicators.

While I am convinced by both Salvo and Brown of the possibilities for information architecture, especially by Salvo’s claims for its importance in technical communication pedagogy, the concept holds less promise for our purposes in designing and implementing a writing and rhetoric major. The technical communication bridge described by Salvo does not necessarily translate to a more programmatic approach, especially the focus on web-based communication. With its history in architecture and online information, information architecture might be too technical or professional for our programmatic and pedagogic needs. Information architecture revolves around a (professional) concern for users interacting with/in online contexts that does not capture the online and offline networked environment within which our major operates.

* not [information] ecology

Seemingly more closely aligned with an environmental approach, information ecology represents an oppositional metaphor, in many cases, to information architecture. Even within Salvo’s illustration of the possibilities information architecture offers technical communication, he introduces information ecology in order to distinguish the two metaphors (Teaching). Gaining one of its first treatments by Marilyn Cooper in her 1986 article, “The Ecology of Writing,” ecology provided an alternative to the solitary author of cognitive models of writing. Ecological systems, according to Cooper, are “inherently dynamic,” and reflect the fact that “all the characteristics of any individual writer or piece of writing both determine and are determined by the characteristics of all the other writers and writings in the system” (368). Focused on the act of writing, Cooper described a model of writers mediating information systems as they compose.

Although Cooper was not looking at information technology in particular in her conceptions of an ecological approach to writing, she was providing an alternative to the cognitive model of writing. Similarly, Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day, in their book Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart, rely on information ecologies as a metaphor for our interaction with and understanding of information technology. They define an information ecology as “a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment” (49). Rather than focusing on technology, information ecologies highlight human interaction with technologies. The authors push for people to “get involved in the evolution of their information ecologies—jump into the primordial soup, stir it around, and make as many waves as possible” (58).

In the field of technical communication, the ecology metaphor has been employed in the study of workplaces, especially the proliferation and evolution of genres within workplaces. In particular, Clay Spinuzzi has developed the analytical framework of genre ecologies as means for investigating compound mediation in workplaces through a “community-centered interpretive view” (Compound). Through his investigation (tracing) of genres in organizations, he shows how genres mediate the interactions between humans and technology (Tracing). In other words, genre ecologies are the “dynamic and unpredictable clusters of communication artifacts and activities” mediating humans’ interactions with complex technologies (Spinuzzi and Zachary 170-1). Echoing Wurman’s vision of information architecture, Spinuzzi and Zachary see genre ecologies as a means for analyzing and aiding the (over)flow of information.

• [information] environment

Salvo criticizes an information ecology approach as too descriptive, limiting the involvement of users in the design of artifacts and systems. For our purposes, many information ecology approaches take an overly technology-centric focus. Even in the genre ecologies metaphor, technology, or genre, is given too much agency. We want to focus on writing and the writing done in local environments. Ecology works for describing a scene and examining how technology functions in that ecology but, at least in the work of Nardi and O’Day, the concept relies on its biological roots. Just as humans and nature share an ecology, humans and technology share information ecologies. While Spinuzzi bypasses this biological approach, he relies on genres as the mediating artifact for examining an open/ecological system. As writers enter different environments they have different technologies, needs, goals, audiences, etc. Environments are more transferable than ecologies while at the same time giving agency back to the writer, without reasserting a cognitive approach.

Our understanding of environment echoes Jon Udell’s depiction in “The New Freshamn Comp”: “A social application [such as wikis/Wikipedia] works within an environment that it simultaneously helps to create. If you understand that environment, the application makes sense. Otherwise it can seem weird and pointless.” Writers and applications work together to create and sustain environments, as those same writers work through or within environments. As Johnson-Eilola and Selber write, “Technologies are no longer tools to users; they are environments, spaces, worlds, and conversations” (emphasis added x). Through rhetorically-based education we can prepare writing and rhetoric majors to engage with and build these environments in a more informed and productive manner that does not hinge on making them symbolic-analytic workers solely.

Relying on Johndan Johnson-Eilola, we see environments as more similar to his depiction of the datacloud. Writers inhabit information environments and rely on information as a resource. Johnson-Eilola labels our work with information in these environments as “rearranging, filtering, breaking down, and combining” (4). These activities are required as users reconstruct technologies within specific contexts. In essence, users are designers/writers in environments. In his depiction of information environments, Earl Morrogh separates the users from the designers, or information architects; he then defines information environments as “physical and/or computer-mediated information space within which context is defined by real and conceptual structures” (109). While we agree with Johnson-Eilola that the “moment of use” is crucial to the “specific nature of uses,” we see that moment of use and reconstruction due to the numerous forces in that moment as culminating in an environment. Therefore, unlike in Morrogh’s use of environment, writers are the users and designers of an environment. As writers work within an environment, the “separation between online and IRL is tenuous” resulting in a “spilling over” of relationships, communication, documents, and identities. Environment more closely encapsulates this inhabitation of information represented by the datacloud.