Goals of information architecture prototyping The goal of this information architecture prototyping project is to develop methods for designing information architecture of content heavy interfaces. This information architecture prototyping topic has been my special interest for many years.

 information architecture prototyping article

My current goal is to use an understanding of how people make categorization judgment to inform the design of information architecture (IA). I plan to use theories and methods from Cognitive Neuroscience. Currently, I plan to do a three stage review of literature:

Stage 1: involves identifying the need. What are the ways in which human categorization research could informal IA design? What are the ways in which such an understanding is currently used in IA. How to go from the user's conceptualization of a domain to the the metadata in a given database.

Stage 2: involves doing a review of the research on human categorization. There are four areas that I plan to review: (a) a cognitive psychology (the behavioral research documenting human beings' uncanny categorization ability) (b) computational perspectives (the computational modeling of human categorization ability) and (c) a neuroscience perspective (the recent research on what neural substrates support this ability) and, (d) currents applications of human categorization research.

Stage 3: involves making the link between what we know about human categorization and IA needs. I hope to be able to distill some general principles of human categorization that might be useful for IA design. Furthermore, I hope to borrow methods for studying domain specific concepts that can be utilized by practicing information architects. Over the next few months, We plan to review the three major literatures refereed to above, and develop my own thinking about how such methods can inform the design information architecture prototyping architecture.