Why bother with information architecture? — RenaissanceCMS. I was happy to be asked to write something on information architecture generally for Rob’s blog. It’s easy to forget that not everyone takes for granted the usefulness of IA, so I have tried to inspire people who aren’t sure what it is or what it can do.

Rob creates charming ethereal designs as well as working on marketing, branding, and visual identity and being generally ethical and sustainable. I particularly liked his latest post on tagging. I tend to approach folksonomy from a management and retrieval point of view, and so find myself arguing that just because it is cheap, doesn’t mean it can replace all other KO systems. However, I have been thinking about image retrieval, and one area where social tagging is useful is in labelling vague and abstract ideas like “mood”. If most people tag a photo as “sad” or “mysterious”, that is probably going to be useful for creative people who don’t need a specific image but are just after something that evokes a “feeling”.