Amazon Description
This is a book about everything. Or, to be precise, it explores how everything is connected from code to culture. We think we’re designing software, services, and experiences, but we're not. We are intervening in ecosystems. Until we open our minds, we will forever repeat our mistakes. In this spirited tour of information architecture and systems thinking, Peter Morville connects the dots between authority, Buddhism, classification, synesthesia, quantum entanglement, and volleyball. In 1974 when Ted Nelson wrote "everything is deeply intertwingled," he hoped we might realize the true potential of hypertext and cognition. This book follows naturally from that.
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Contents
Chapter 1: Nature
Explores the nature of information in systems from the wolves of Isle Royale to Uber in Silicon Valley. Explains why systems thinking is essential if we hope to create sustainable change.
Chapter 2: Categories
A deep dive into classification and its consequences. Flows from organizing for users to organizing ourselves (governance). Covers embodied cognition, meditation, and moral circles.
Chapter 3: Connections
The history of links from hypertext and navigation to planning and prediction. Explores self-justification and the cobra effect. Blames music and synesthesia on the architecture of the brain.
Chapter 4: Culture
Offers models for understanding and changing organizational and national culture. Covers ways of knowing from authority to intuition and ways of changing from tiny habits to positive deviance. Features a thick description of design ethnography.
Chapter 5: Limits
A journey beyond the limits of understanding and growth that includes iatrogenics, teleportation, and meatballs. Tackles big fish from pollution and corruption to extinction and collapse. Explains why our myths are the root cause and our only hope.