19 July 2019 Alessandro D'Annibale
On July 12th we met Luca Rosati, information architect and user experience designer. For twenty years he has been working on web projects for large companies and public administration on topics of information architecture, usability and user experience design.
Luca presented us his last book “Sense-making. Organizing the sea of information and creating value with people “, which revolves around two fundamental ideas: the first is that the relationship between information is more important than information itself: organizing information means first of all placing information in relation to them and with people; the second is that creating relationships is essentially an human practice: to organize information we must involve people.
A point of view with respect to our society that is experiencing a paradox: the overabundance of information results in a lack of meaning, because this disordered flow of bits disperses and disintegrates through a plurality of channels and devices, generating a fragmentation of the ‘information. A news can reach us through social networks, feeds, aggregators of various types and so on. And it can reach us on devices as varied, from smartwatch to smartphone, from tablet to computer. Information as such has now turned into a commodity, a raw material. What adds value to the information is the (cor) relationship with other information, a relationship that can give the single card a picture and therefore a sense that otherwise would not have. As physicist Carlo Rovelli writes, “an object exists as a node of a set of interactions, relationships”.
We are part of this network of relationships, we contribute to shaping it with our behavior. The organization of information therefore requires a plural and collaborative design, which needs the involvement of people, of all stakeholders. Thus, the heart of the book is composed of design methods with people, but revisited in a “sustainable” key. The methods illustrated in the book favor lightness, that is, the ability to combine quality and speed of execution. Both because they can be adopted also in medium-small projects; both because a research that takes too much time reconciles poorly with company rhythms. Furthermore, these methods are not limited to tests, but also include activities that can be carried out in the early stages of design to develop design inputs with people.
A very interesting meeting, which has provided us important insights and fundamental comparisons in the work we carry out every day.