The Five Hat Racks
By Richard Saul Wurman
The principle of the five hat racks suggests that there are a limited number of ways information can be organized. As you can guess by the name, it says there are exactly 5 ways to organize information, those 5 ways being by Location, by Alphabet, by Time, by Category, and by Continuum.
Read Steven Bradley’s concise summary of RSW’s approach to information architecture in his blog post Organizing Information.
Then go back to the source and read this excerpt from Information Anxiety: [pdf].
Rather than submitting discussion questions, bring in a collection of a dozen or more images (along with the metadata corresponding to the LATCH attributes) describing a group of related items in your life. Good choices include books/movies/music, the contents of your fridge or nightstand, art supplies, etc.
In next week’s class, we’ll be assembling different taxonomies from your collections using the various ‘hat rack’ axes.