"Information Architect:

1)The individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear, 2)A person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge, 3)The emerging 21st century professional occupation addressing the needs of the age focused upon clarity, human understanding, and the science of the organization of information."

--Richard Saul Wurman

Wurman's Five Rules of Mapping Information

Rule #1: You understand something new relative to something you already understand.

Look at a photograph of a painting alone on a wall and try to figure out the painting's size. You can't. The only way is to compare it with something you already know.

"For most things in everyday life, scale is best understood if it's based on a relationship to a human being," says Wurman. "Scale always relates to us."

Rule #2: There are just five ways to organize information: by location, alphabet, time, category, or hierarchy.

These methods can be remembered by the acronym LATCH. Roads, towns, and bodies of water are best organized by location. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and many collections of data, by alphabet. Museum exhibits and planning documents, by timeline. Department stores and Yellow Pages, by category. And physical objects, by hierarchy -- from the largest to the smallest, from the densest to the least dense.

"I've tried a thousand times to find other ways to organize," Wurman says, "but I always end up using one of these five."

Rule #3: Don't beautify, clarify.

"Computers give us the ability to better display information," Wurman says, "but what do graphic designers do? They take a simple statistic, turn it into a pie chart, add millions of colors, shade it, make it three-dimensional, explode it into parts, suspend the parts in space, and show their shadows on the ground. Each step is a step away from understanding."

What should they do instead? "Just present the statistic." When asked if the goal is to simplify, Wurman boils over. "No, no, no! The simplification movement is just another minimalist fashion. The goal is to clarify -- make it easy to understand."

Rule #4: To decide which information is worth keeping, determine what you really want to know.

Wurman has authored, designed, and published more than 60 books. "Each one was inspired by something I didn't understand," he says, "whether it was a diagnostic test on my own body, finding my way around Tokyo, or following the Olympics on TV." The information he chose to include answered these "must-know" questions; information that didn't was discarded.

"We're taught when we're young that we're not supposed to look stupid. So we don't ask questions. Well, you'd better ask questions, and you'd better ask about things you really want to know. That way you'll convey your fascination and explain it in a way that other people will understand."

Rule #5: Most information is useless. Give yourself permission to dismiss it.

The best way to deal with information overload is to realize that it's not a mental or a physical problem, it's an emotional problem. And the only way to overcome it is to "hold on to what really interests you and make connections from there," says Wurman. "Connecting one interest to the next is how you teach yourself and others.

"It's worthless to read something you're not interested in, because you won't remember it anyway. Nothing occurs during that experience that helps your insight and understanding. Once you realize this, you'll free yourself from the guilt of not paying attention to most of the news and information that's out there."

Information Architects, Graphis Press Corp., 1996; Richard Saul Wurman, wurman@ted.com

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