信息组织架构 信息组织架构 31uxmattersMy IA Summit 2006 Experience Part 3 The Conference Day 2(2).docxVIP

Lakoff’s Women, Fire, Dangerous Things: What Every IA Should Know Presenter: Donna Maurer “We think in categories. Most symbols—words and representations—do notdesignate particular things or individuals in the world. Most of our words and concepts designate categories.”—Donna Maurer In her talk on “ \o Lakoff’s Women, Fire, Dangerous Things: What Every IA Should Know Lakoff’s Women, Fire, Dangerous Things: What Every IA Should Know,” Donna Maurer, shown in Figure 2, distilled the essence of Lakoff’s book and repackaged the information for designers. Thank you, Donna! She said, “We think in categories. Most symbols—words and representations—do not designate particular things or individuals in the world. Most of our words and concepts designate categories.” According to Donna, Lakoff’s book “is about categorization and cognition challenges the classical theory of categorization contains a number of core insights into the way categories work in our brains is fundamental for the type of work IAs do can be paradigm shifting” Figure 2—Donna Maurer presenting Lakoff Donna discussed classical categorization, cognitive models, prototype theory, challenges to classical categorization theory, and basic-level categories, then provided summaries of their implications for IAs. Prototype Effects Donna made the following remarks about prototype effects: “Recognize that they occur, and you’ll be less stressed about why categorization is not neat. ‘Miscellaneous,’ ‘everything else’ categories are cognitively real—just not easy to use as navigation. Use prototypical items when communicating. They are strong communicators, as they represent a category well. Use less prototypical items to describe edge cases.” “Lakoff not only gives us new techniques for doing IA, he gives us a mechanism for reflection on the craft itself.”—Dan Brown” Basic-Level Categories The concept of basic-level categories is very applicable to the work information architects do. Donna had this to say about usi