Menu

Subscribe

Reading #4

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.

  1. I find that one of the hardest things for websites to balance is being able to reach the correct page no matter where you start vs having too many duplicate links. What are good ways of resolving this?

  2. There seem to also be other ways of organizing information, though some of them could perhaps be seem as partial combinations of the others. How about narrative constructions, which are often not quite linear and not quite weblike (but perhaps similar to layers of sorts)? I also find that I sometimes enjoy interacting with snippets of information from various categories when they are presented at random - certainly not a good search function, but good for sparking interest or opening up new search venues. Are there other good examples of presentations that may not fit totally within the LATCH structure?

  3. Cause/effect in context of feedback loops is also a somewhat complex category to represent, since there is no single linear directionality. Are there good ways of getting this across quickly and intuitively?