Each month Wired invites readers to send ideas for the “Found” page, forecasting the future of one aspect of society.  September’s “Future of Shopping Centers” shows Floor 38 of the six floor McMurdo Mall, presumably in the globally warmed Antarctica of 2071, with imaginatively branded shops in a high rise of at least 40 stories and a directory that meets the findability standards of the 12^th Century.

15th Century scribe, three hundred years after the introduction of alphabetized biblical indices

In this mall directory, businesses are named at their map locations only, not under their respective categories or even in alphabetical order.  To find a store, customers must already know where it is or they must examine each floor map separately by looking at every storefront.  That’s a 12th Century technique.  In the early days of indexing, biblical indices were organized in the same order as the Bible.  Since medieval Christians believed the Bible to be perfect, this was considered the optimal arrangement, even though, in order to find something, you had to already know where it was or you had to read the entire index from beginning to end.  Then visionary preachers, needing fast information for their daily sermons, rearranged biblical indices into alphabetical order, opening a new world of findable information.

Categorical Illogic

Today’s malls usually provide detailed classification and often an alphabetical listing.  It’s a form of advertising for the stores.  On McMurdo’s Floor 38, Wired only shows four fuzzy categories:  Body, Clothing, Retail, and Food Court.  Instead of listing businesses under their categories, classifications are differentiated on the map by nearly indistinguishable light pastel hatch marks.

McMurdo Station in 2007

McMurdo’s customers will surely notice the logical error of placing retail stores in the Clothing category at the same level as the generic Retail category.  In addition, the Body classification is not accurately filled.  Wackenhut Day Care, named for the founder of a private prison corporation, would be better categorized as educational, along with two other Body businesses.  The Build-A-Child Workshop might offer human genetic engineering or it could be an educational facility with an alternate pedagogical theory to the prison model.  Rosetta Stone Cognitive Enhancements presumably sells smart drugs.  This store could market itself in both the Body and suggested Education categories, perhaps for an additional fee.

Mall Directories Today

The actual future of mall directories started appearing about 1984 when Telesyne developed perhaps the first interactive directory at the Chicago Ridge Mall in Oak Lawn, IL.  Like McMurdo, it had a touch screen, but it also talked.  Visualized trails illuminated routes to stores.  Coupons arrived via printer, along with trivia games.  It even featured a filtered search mechanism.  Customers selected a combination of attributes, such as gender, age and price, then retrieved a list of stores meeting the criteria.  Of course, it had the basics of alphabetized and categorized store lists (1).

Chicago's 900 North Michigan

The vertical McMurdo Mall has multiple floors, like the 900 North Michigan Shops in Chicago, which again includes categorized and alphabetized lists in its directory.  Rather than McMurdo’s single floor diagrams, 900 North Michigan shows all maps on the same screen  Click on a category and the alphabetized list changes to only show stores in that category.  Hover over a store name in a list and it is highlighted on the map.  Click the store name and you get an advertising page.

I understand the folks at Wired are clever branders, not organizers, but here’s one electronic feature they really should have caught.  Downloadable apps!  Now offered by Micello and PointInside, these apps live on your device so you can use the directory while strolling the mall’s innermost areas.

McMurdo Scenario

Wired located their 2071 mall at McMurdo Station, a research facility maintained by the United States in Antarctic territory claimed by New Zealand.  The mall’s logo is a red, white and blue star.  Wired did give one indication of New Zealand culture, although it has a double meaning.  Does GNC MRI offer magnetic resource imaging and or is it a retail nutrition store that only speaks Maori?

USAF and Maori touch noses during a Powhiri welcoming ceremony in Christchurch

Global warming research will be more advanced in 59 years, with McMurdo Station in the forefront.  Its warmer climate allows scientists and support personnel to bring their families, although there may not be a high turnover in mall customers since potential residents will need a job to get on the plane.  McMurdo may be a self-sustaining society, perhaps with a hospital to ease the 17 hour flight to Christchurch for surgery.  Because of the ozone hole, this may still be an interior society.

2071 Mall Directory

So we have an intelligent population with cabin fever.  Mall merchants want them to spend their spare time shopping.  How can the directory support that?  Sponsored electronic games is one idea from Telesyne.  Play the game, win a coupon.  Play stations could be adjacent to directories, maximizing the number of people who can interact with the directory at the same time.

New customers en route to the McMurdo Mall

Businesses will want extensive categories allowing multiple entries, along with an alphabetized drop-down list.  McMurdo has a simple floor plan, so showing routes may not be necessary.  However, downloadable apps could be a source for further promotions, delivered via customers’ information devices as they stroll by participating stores.

Customer recognition might be a good idea, perhaps by voice, perhaps multilingual, offering personalized specials.  In the Wired model, businesses provide brief marketing messages any time someone clicks on a brand.  This could be expanded to a promotional video on a nearby screen, inviting customers to win a coupon at a personalized game.

The directory’s display could feature specials at happy hour, an important event at McMurdo.  The only watering holes on Floor 38 are Starbucks and Soylent Julius.  We’ll probably still have a cannibalism taboo, so the latter may be serving soymilk orange drinks, contributing to improved land productivity by growing crops for humans instead of cows.  However the folks at McMurdo like stronger stuff, so Rosetta Stone Cognitive Enhancements may want pre-shift marketing messages for their smart drugs.  They might also consider automated delivery or in-apartment reminders.

Another findability resource could be full store inventories, searchable from the directory, with routing to the exact location in the store.  But remember, findability is secondary to the primary goal of getting customers in the door.  The easier it is to find stuff, the sooner a customer exits the mall.  Grocery stores in 2012 often switch merchandise around, encouraging customers to look at new products.  At McMurdo, Telesyne’s filtered search could provide customized lists of businesses that meet a set of generic criteria.  Inventory directories could then be placed inside each store.  That way a customer has to actually walk into the establishment to get precise directions.

The Organizing Challenge

In an online retail environment, the information management interface is often the primary entry for customers.  If it’s confusing or illogical, they’ll go somewhere else.  If it’s too rigid, they’ll just buy one thing and then go somewhere else.  With accurate and stimulating search mechanisms, customers linger and return often.

For their 2071 shopping center, the designers at Wired thought more about brand names than about getting customers into the stores.  To be fair, their skill sets don’t seem to include information organization.  That takes a very focused mind.  Yes, everyone can organize.  Everyone can sing too.  Some sing as performers and some sing in the shower, with vast differences in skill.  Even smart people can be bad organizers.  I once encountered a computer PhD who didn’t understand the mechanics of alphabetical order.   Wired’s clever branders selected an organizational device for their futurist vision, but they only got as far as the 12^th Century because they forgot to include an organizer on their team.

Resources

(1) Hi-Tech Mall Directory Debuts, Marketing News, 11/9/84, p. 18

Wikimedia Photo Credits:  Scriptorium Monk at Work (public domain), Ob Hill and McMurdo Station (Alan Light), Chicago 900 North Michigan (J. Crocker), Powhiri, USAF (Tech. Sgt. Shane A. Cuomo), Antarctica C-17 (Tas50)

(Today is the birthday of the Dalai Lama, a survivor of religious persecution.  So we honor the shrines of Timbuktu, recently demolished by religious vandals who think God wants them to destroy beauty.)

Three Soldiers

Burton Barr Central Library sits a mile or so from my house.  Named for a Phoenix politician who supported the library, this main branch still has a few microfilm readers.  That’s where I’ve settled in, immersed in the early days of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) as documented by the Washington Post and just about every art critic in 1980’s America.

The announcement of Maya Lin’s winning design erupted into a battle between the forces of representational and non-representational art, causing the addition of an Iron Mike, the typical soldier statue erected in a town park.  Twelve years after the VVM established itself as one of the world’s great memorials, best-selling author Tom Wolfe, a representational combatant, illogically lamented the 1980’s “ludicrous lapse of taste,” while boasting of “the throngs who came annually to see” Three Soldiers.  Frederick Hart’s statue, of course, benefits from its proximity to Lin’s VVM.

While I respect Lin’s fight for artistic integrity, I like Three Soldiers, handsome guys in the tradition of World War II movies, a good war when President Roosevelt’s four sons all served in the military.  The statue solved another controversy.  War memorials cannot be neutral because neutrality is defined as anti-war.  Wars require promotion, PR skills honed with millenniums of practice and contradicted by the reality of a list of names.

Aerial View of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

On the memorial, the names are in chronological order by date of casualty, with each day alphabetized.  I have stated many times that chronological order and the mirrored surface allow vets to join their comrades.  But thinking about local Iron Mikes made me realize that chronological order also creates a memorial for every day of fighting in Vietnam and for every battle.  When a vet finds names from a battle he survived, he discovers a personal Iwo Jima monument.  The VVM is not just one memorial; it’s thousands of memorials.

The Washington Monument

A complaint against Lin’s concept was the lack of Vietnam vets on the selection committee.  But that’s why they got this exceptional memorial.  As a consultant, I know fresh viewpoints build innovation.  Instead of learning about the Vietnam War, Lin studied other memorials with names.  She built a space to heal sorrow.  The descent into the earth and the V-shaped design, with names beginning and ending at the central vertex, all interact with the phallic Washington Monument to bring us into the comforting arms of the feminine.  The VVM is about those who died, but it was built for those who survived and for them, it’s a coming home.

* In matters of taste, there can be no disputes.

Photo Credits:  Wikimedia Commons, Three Soldiers, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington M0nument

Richard Saul Wurman, innovative organizer of the TED Conferences, publisher of the Access travel guides, and the first information architect, claimed “there are only five ways to organize information, not 50, not 500, five” (Follow the Yellow Brick Road).  To describe his five finite methods, he used the mnemonic LATCH (Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, Hierarchy), apparently not realizing that mnemonics is a sixth way to organize information.

Web designers embraced the idea, spreading Wurman’s law of five throughout the burgeoning field of information architecture, a term Wurman coined.  It’s even included as one of the Universal Principles of Design.  But LATCH fools smart people like Wurman and the UPD authors because of an error in logic.

The first three items in LATCH are examples of sequence.  The fourth method, Category, is the logical error.  Categories are not sequences.  They are labeled containers for information that must be sequenced.  Both the labels must be sequenced and the contents of the labels.  Never the less, it is Categories that makes LATCH seem to work.  If something cannot be organized by LATH, it can always be categorized because everything can be categorized.

The fifth method, Hierarchy is actually two different structures.  Sometimes Wurman uses it for a size sequence, sometimes for a series of nested categories.

In addition to the logic error, LATCH does not cover all the available arrangement methods. Along with mnemonics, which he used but did not recognize, Wurman missed random.  We can now call these seven structures MR LATCH, but we have an abundance of organizing strategies, too many for a mnemonic.

For example, much of what we think of as random is really a sequence called chaining described by George Lakoff in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things:  What Categories Reveal about the Mind.  Perhaps you are writing a grocery list.  Cereal reminds you of milk, which reminds you of coffee, which reminds you of sugar, which reminds you of cookies, etc.  In information organization, chains are generally not intentional, but you see them a lot.  People post online lists.  They don’t consciously arrange them so they unconsciously put them into a chain.

One intentional organizing strategy is shape.  Let’s say you have three lists containing items numbering 10, 5, and 5.  You put them into two columns, one with 10 and the other with 5 and 5.  You have just organized by shape because you made an organizational decision based on how something fits on a page.  Wurman used this technique in his 1990’s Smart Yellow Pages which listed community resources at the beginning of the printed Pacific Bell Yellow Pages.

Wurman also missed the Canonic structure.  This is one of our oldest arrangement techniques, post-alphabet.  Because the Bible was seen as perfect, its early indexes were arranged in the same way as the Bible itself.  A top level index list would be Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, etc.  The introduction of alphabetical order was controversial because it threatened the perception of Biblical perfection.  Canonic structures are still common.  Tables of contents, for example, are Canonic.

Speaking of numbers, they are not a sequencing method.  They are labels.  When you put Zip Codes into numerical order, you are actually organizing by Location because that’s what Zip Codes represent.

When he described his idea of five and only five ways to organize information in Information Anxiety, Wurman explained that we don’t need to be anxious about organizing information because of these “reassuring limitations.”  False limitations are what make me anxious.  Limiting organizational arrangements to four plus a label forces inexperienced organizers to look at their material in only a few ways, diminishing creativity and findability.

Illustration Credits:  Open Gates, Derek Menzies, Wikimedia, and Dame mit Kaffeetasse, Emile Eisman-Semenowsky, Wikimedia

Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, USN (1884-1941)

Today is the 70^th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.  On that day, 19 American ships were damaged or sunk; 171 airplanes destroyed; 1,178 people injured; 2,389 killed; and 14 Medals of Honor awarded.  Pearl Harbor memorials to those who died tend to list the names in alphabetical order.  This is especially significant because one of the names is Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, Commander of Battleship Division One.  The highest ranking casualty of the attack, he was the first U.S. Navy flag officer killed in action against a foreign enemy.  The USS Arizona was his flagship.

In the early 20^th Century, the Pearl Harbor memorial would have been a larger than life statue of Rear Admiral Kidd, probably not on a horse because he was a Navy man.  We started seeing lists of names during World War I, with its massive losses and better record keeping.  In that war, Rear Admiral Kidd would have been at the top of a hierarchical list of names.  But in 1962, when her memorial was dedicated, the names from the USS Arizona were carved in alphabetical order, signifying equality of service.  Rear Admiral Kidd is almost exactly in the middle, surrounded by his men.

Anchor of the USS Arizona on display at Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza, Phoenix, AZ.

In Hawaii, Pearl Harbor or World War II memorials with names include the USS Arizona, USS Oklahoma, USS Utah, the Valor in the Pacific Remembrance Circle, and the Honolulu Memorial at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.  In Phoenix, the Arizona’s anchor sits atop a base displaying the names of her dead.  The only exception to alphabetical order is the list of Arizona survivors who choose to be buried in the submerged ship.  These names are located near their shipmates on the Hawaii memorial, but for practical reasons, they are chronological.

Rear Admiral Kidd among His Men at the USS Arizona Anchor Memorial in Phoenix

The Arizona accounts for almost half the deaths from the attack.  She remains in the harbor, her superstructure removed and her hull visible under water.  Most of the bodies were not recovered and are considered buried at sea.  The USS Arizona Memorial, designed by architect Alfred Preis, straddles the mid-section of the ship without touching it.  An open air building, reminiscent of a covered bridge, it is high on both ends and shorter in the middle, to symbolize December 7 as a low point from which America recovered.

USS Arizona Memorial

At the far end of the memorial is a wall with the 1,177 alphabetized names of those who died on the ship.  Listings include initials, last name, and rank.  Most are Navy, with 73 Marines in a separate section.  Rear Admiral Kidd and the ship’s captain, Franklin Van Valkenburgh, have an extra line indicating their position in the ship’s command.

Both earned Medals of Honor, as did Lieutenant Commander Samuel G. Fuqua, who became the ship’s highest ranking officer during the attack.  When personnel abandoned ship, he made sure everyone who could evacuate did so and he was the last person off.  Many survivors credited him with saving their lives.  About 90% of those on board at the time of the attack died.  Today, when ships pass the memorial in the harbor, sailors honor the Arizona by manning the rails, standing evenly spaced along their ship’s railing.

USS Oklahoma Memorial

Don Beck’s 2007 memorial for the USS Oklahoma overlooks the harbor.  Here the 429 alphabetized names are engraved on separate pillars, with the group of pillars fronted on two sides by short marble walls containing engraved quotes about Pearl Harbor.  The visual effect is that of a ship with its sailors manning the rails to honor those who died.  Two men from the Oklahoma earned Medals of Honor.  Ensign Francis C. Flaherty and Seaman First Class James R. Ward both held lights in different turrets so the crew could escape.  They did not survive when the ship rolled over.  The Oklahoma was eventually salvaged but sunk while being towed to San Francisco for scrap metal.

USS Utah Memorial (with her exposed hull on the left)

The USS Utah is its own memorial, remaining in the harbor rolled over with its hull exposed.   There are several plaques on a pier overlooking the wreck.  One contains the names of the 58 who died including Medal of Honor winner Peter Tomich, the Utah’s Chief Watertender and a Croatian immigrant.  His citation reads, “Although realizing that the ship was capsizing, as a result of enemy bombing and torpedoing, Tomich remained at his post in the engineering plant of the U.S.S. Utah, until he saw that all boilers were secured and all fireroom personnel had left their stations, and by so doing lost his own life.”

USS Arizona Memorial Visitors Center - Remembrance Circle

Also overlooking the harbor is the Remembrance Circle at the Visitor’s Center of the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument, containing the names of all who died at Pearl Harbor, except those from the Arizona.  Here the names are essentially organized by location, although military personnel are initially divided into their respective branches.  Within each grouping the names are alphabetical.  Based on this photo of an summary plaque, the branches are organized by Department of Defense order of precedence: Army, Marines, Navy.  Today the Air Force would be in fourth place, but at the time it was part of the Army.  Because of the overwhelming majority of Navy deaths, order of precedence continues to evoke equality.  Note also that civilians are first.  At the 1925 memorial to the Revolutionary War Minute Men in Medford, MA, a civilian who died is placed last. 

Located in the Punchbowl area of Oahu, the Honolulu Memorial at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific consists of a wide staircase leading to a Liberty statue with Courts of the Missing on either side of the stairs.  The Courts contain names of those missing or buried at sea from American wars in the Pacific – World War II, Korea and Vietnam.  The World War II missing from the southwest Pacific are memorialized at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines, where the names are alphabetized within each military branch.

Punchbowl (Honolulu Memorial at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific)

The architects of the Honolulu Memorial, Weihe, Frick & Kruse, may have been influenced by Edwin Lutyens’ World War I Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in Thiepval, France.  That memorial is an open air building with a wide staircase leading to a memorial stone.  On either side of the stairs are areas which could be termed “courts of the missing,” formed by interwoven structural arches.  (I have written extensively about the Somme memorial in IsisInBlog.) 

The names in France are in a full hierarchy, beginning with British Army Order of Precedence and continuing in a listing by rank.  World War I British recruitment strategy built military units from individual towns.  So this arrangement keeps neighbors together, but it does not express equality.  At the Honolulu Memorial, names are organized first by war, then by military branch, then alphabetized.   

Those who died on the USS Arizona, and whose bodies were not recovered, are declared buried at sea and therefore missing, so Rear Admiral Kidd is on the Honolulu Memorial.  As the highest ranking officer to die at Pearl Harbor, his name is among the K’s with other Navy personnel missing from World War II.  Here he is surrounded not only by his men on the Arizona, but also by almost 12,000 Navy personnel whose bodies, like his, were not found.

Photo Credits

Heiter. (n.d.). Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, USN (1884-1941) Naval Historical Center. Photo NH 48579-KN. http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/pers-us/uspers-k/ic-kidd.htm

Victor-nv. (April 13, 2010). Anchor of the USS Arizona on display at Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza, Phoenix, AZ. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arizona_anchor_bolin_plaza.JPG

Katherine Bertolucci. (November 29, 2011). Rear Admiral Kidd among His Men at the USS Arizona Anchor Memorial in Phoenix.

Jayme Pastoric. (May 23, 2002). USS Arizona Memorial. U.S. Navy photo 020523-N-9769P-057. http://www.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=1643

Wally Gobetz. (May 26, 2010). USS Oklahoma Memorial. http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/4791732465/

Rosa Say. (August 20, 2008). The USS Utah Memorial. http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosasay/2792163602/

Wally Gobetz. (May 26, 2010). USS Arizona Memorial Visitors Center – Remembrance Circle.   http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/4781085494/in/photostream

Jiang. (December 22, 2005). Punchbowl. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Punchbowl_%281236%29.JPG

Fogg’s Principle of Tunneling:  “Using computing technology to guide users through a process or experience provides opportunities to persuade along the way.”

            This month we take a journey to tunneling in our series on B. J. Fogg’s seven tools of persuasion from his book Persuasive Technology:  Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do.  Fogg cites software installation as a tunnel.  That frequently involves staying near the computer and answering questions every so often.  You are a captive audience as the installation proceeds.  As such, you may experience promotions for other products or about the benefits of your new purchase.  You and the company share a journey of software installation, with the company selecting the sights along the route. 

              In his narrative, but not in his Principle, Fogg defines a tunnel as a committed journey, like an amusement park ride.  Once you sit in that gondola (or begin software installation), you’re committed to the entire journey.  In information arrangement, tunneling encompasses a wider definition.  You are enticed along a journey that you may or may not complete.  At any point you may decide what you are looking for is not worth the effort, or you may complete the journey, ending it only when you find what you are looking for.

One example of persuasive tunneling is the arrangement of a grocery store.  Many people pop into the store just for a quart of milk.  Milk sometimes goes bad suddenly so you pick it up on a quick errand.  That’s why milk is always at the back of the store.  If it was at the front, you would buy that one item and head on home.  When it’s at the back, you travel through the store aisles, experiencing other products and perhaps buying something else.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) provides a more complex tunnel.  Its 140 panels increase in height from 8 inches at the ends to over 10 feet in the center.  Names are inscribed in chronological order by date of casualty and alphabetical order within each day.  So it would seem that visitors take a journey from the beginning of the war to the end.

That is the case, but the journey actually begins in the center.  Maya Lin wanted the VVM to symbolize a circle so the names begin and end at the tall center panels, indicated by the only two dates on the Memorial, 1959 and 1975.  No other dates appear.  Walking along the panels, the only indication of a new day is the beginning of a new set of names in alphabetical order.  Even though this is the journey of the Vietnam War, it does not feel like a persuasive tunnel, since we only see a massive display of names. 

Many visitors believe the chronology begins at the short left panel.  That’s logical since we read from left to right, not from the center to the right to the left and back again to the center.  When we experience the VVM from left to right, the shape of the memorial helps us feel the shape of war.  A few deaths at the beginning, building to a crescendo at the center and winding down to just a few names at the end.  In this case, because we know the names are in chronological order, the shape of the VVM creates a journey along the panels, persuading us to experience feelings about the progression of war.           

Illustration used with permission from Microsoft.

Last month I introduced B J Fogg’s seven tools of persuasion as outlined in his book, Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do.  I showed how information arrangement exploits these tools with specific reference to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM).  The VVM arranges its names in chronological order by date of casualty, grouping together soldiers who served at the same time.  In so doing, the memorial demonstrates six of the Fogg’s seven persuasive tools.  This month, let’s take a deeper look at the first tool, Reduction or Persuading through Simplifying.

Reduction strategy is all about cost/benefit analysis.  How much effort (cost) achieves the benefit?  Fogg describes Amazon’s 1-click ordering method as pure reduction.  Before
this innovation, every click in the online sales process was a chance for customers to change their minds.  Will they go on to the next buying step or will they give up and click over to anotherWebsite?  At Amazon, one click seals the deal.  If a mind changes later, there’s a new cost/benefit analysis for the effort involved in cancelling the order.

Many years ago, when Ma Bell stopped being our only telephone company, the new phone services battled mightily for customers.  It became very easy to change your long distance company.  One brief request and it was done.  Sometimes you didn’t even have to bother with the request.  Sign your name to some freebie promo and you might find out later that the small print was an agreement to change phone services.  One step and it didn’t even involve thinking about phones.

Maya Lin’s VVM is a more honorable example of reduction, but her controversial proposal almost didn’t get approved.  Among many complaints about Lin’s design was the chronology, which requires the use of an index to find an individual name.  Critics wanted the names on the VVM in alphabetical order, making the memorial itself a giant index. 

MIT’s John Maeda, in his book, The Laws of Simplicity, assigns organization as the second law.  Organizing arranges similar items together and simplifies our efforts to use them.  Alphabetical order on the VVM would have made it easier to find a single name, but much harder to find a group of names.

First, a vet would have to remember names from more than 30 years ago.  Then he would have to look up each name individually, walking along the panels from A – Z.  To prepare for the effort, he might alphabetize the names of his dead buddies, the ones he remembers, so he doesn’t have to move back and forth among the 144 panels.  The names near each lost friend would have no meaning other than an alphabetic
similarity, or even the same name in some cases.  Names he can’t remember would remain forgotten.  The primary memorial activity here is similar to using a print dictionary, an exercise in the alphabet rather than an emotional experience of memory.

Chronology reduces the effort and increases the depth of feeling.  The vet only has to remember one name.  He finds that name in the printed index and goes to a panel representing the time he spent in Vietnam.  There are all his friends who died or went missing.  If he can’t remember someone’s name, the memorial remembers for him.
They are together again, the vet seeing his reflection in the polished marble among the names of those he lost.  The next time he visits, he won’t need the index.  He’ll know where to find his friends. 

Illustration used with permission from Microsoft.

Anyone in a group photo knows about spatial information arrangement.  To display who’s who, names are usually arranged by their place in the photo — left to right, in rows, clockwise.  For photos, alphabetical order would require a location statement (third row, second from the left), so it’s a lot easier and more helpful to organize the names by spatial placement.

Geography is a subset of spatial arrangement.  Here information is listed by how it appears on the land.  Written travel guides often organize the sights in the order in which tourists encounter them on the road.  The guide might put a prominent attraction first, veering from geography for the sake of customer convenience.  The authors know where the tourists are really heading, so they make things easier by incorporating order-of-importance into the spatial arrangement.

The many guides to Route 66 usually begin in Chicago and head west to LA.  US 66 followed the trail of American westward expansion, so this direction makes historic sense.  As a native Californian, now an Arizonan, and an adventurous driver, I often find myself traveling backwards on
the few remaining stretches of the Mother Road.

“Route 66,” Bobby Troup’s hit song, maintains the east-west travelogue with one exception, “Gallup, New Mexico; Flagstaff, Arizona; don’t forget Winona.”  Winona is east of Flagstaff so an accurate listing would be Gallup, Winona, and Flagstaff. 

Troup had an arrangement parameter that took precedence over the map.  He needed a rhyme.  For those lines, he returned eastward.  Even so, Troup maintains geography, signaling a change in direction with “don’t forget Winona.”  Then he heads west again to Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino.

If you ever plan to motor west,
travel my way; take the highway that’s the best.
Get your kicks on Route Sixty Six!

It winds from Chicago to L.A.,
more than two thousand miles all the way.
Get your kicks on Route Sixty Six!

Now you go through St. Looey, Joplin, Missouri
and Oklahoma City is mighty pretty
You’ll see Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico,
Flagstaff, Arizona; don’t forget Winona,
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino.

Won’t you get hip to this timely tip:
When you make that California trip,
get your kicks on Route Sixty Six!

Bobby Troup, “Route 66” in The Great American Songbook: The Singers.  Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2007, pages 274-277.

In my previous post, “Creative Literary and Pragmatic Lists”, I indicated that one creative component of a pragmatic list is the selection of a category to sit in first place.  When I added the essay to my “Directory of Postings,” I realized my first place was “Arrangement Structures > Alphabetical Order.”

Of all arrangement structures, alphabetical order is certainly the most boring.  In addition, there are people, some in the information industry, who hate alphabetical order.  They feel it has no meaning, which of course is its beauty.  But do I really want my first category to be something that is both boring and controversial?

So I need to put a category in front of “Alphabetical Order,” which is not so easy.  My Directory is hierarchical with categories alphabetized.  If I keep “Arrangement Structures” as the first major category, I need a structure that appears earlier in the alphabet than “Al.”  There ain’t one.  The alphabet is alpha.  The word is based on the Greek word for “A.”  It’s supposed to be first, which is one way it keeps its primacy.

The next idea places a different major category into first place.  It has to fit in the alphabet before “Arrangement Structures.”  My second major category is “Arrangement Theory.”  I need a word for theory that begins with a letter before “S.”  That word is “Principles.”

My first category is now “Arrangement Principles > Categories.”  Not controversial, but not very sexy either.  So I look at the first few categories of arrangement principles:

Categories
Findability
Information
Architecture
Knowledge
Development
Parameters
Perspective
Persuasive
Strategies

I could find a synonym for categories, but “Findability” is not very sexy either.  The sexiest is “Persuasive Strategies,” a phrase I use often so I can’t change it.  Then I realize all I have to do is put “Arrangement” in front of a category and my problem is solved.

Unfortunately, “Arrangement Persuasive Strategies” is awkward and changes a phrase I use often.  “Findability,” “Information Architecture,” and “Knowledge Development” also awkward, plus lots of people work in those areas.  I want to feature something where I am the primary practitioner.

That brings us to “Parameters” and “Perspective.”  “Arrangement” fits nicely in front of both.  But “Parameters” is a little amorphous.  I use it to represent the sometimes odd characteristics that must be considered in an arrangement.  For example, in “Working with Parameters,” a post about my client Snoopy, I discuss building an arrangement around Bloglines’ inability to accurately display spreadsheets.

Which leaves “Arrangement Perspective.”  How delightful.  I always promote designing arrangements from the perspective of the user.  And there’s an added bonus, a double meaning.  “Arrangement Perspective” could also mean my perspective on arrangement, which is what IsisInBlog is all about.              

Umberto Eco’s four month Louvre exhibit about lists finished its run in February.  So if you want to see his “Mille e tre,” exhibit, you’ll have to get the beautiful catalog, The Infinity of Lists, with essays by Eco about the history of lists, along with examples of literary lists and photos of lists in visual art.  One shows a painting of edible vegetation combined to make a realistic human face with a zucchini nose (p. 130).

Following the trail of Eco’s footnotes, I found a delightful book about literary lists by Robert E. Belknap, The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing.  Belknap distinguishes between literary lists and pragmatic lists, the type usually made by my readers.

We expect creativity in literature and lists are no exception.  Here’s an example from Tom Sawyer identifying the contents of Tom’s pockets as “a lump of chalk, an indiarubber ball, three fish hooks, and one of that kind of marbles known as a ‘sure ‘nough crystal’” (Belknap, p. 17).  Belknap shows how Twain’s language enhances each object, with the marble given “the privileged, anchoring, final spot” (p. 18).

We don’t usually think of pragmatic lists as creative. Yet they are composed of words and any use of words has a creative component.  Just think about placement, which Twain used for the marble.  In a pragmatic list, the first item holds the privileged spot.  First place may be anointed through an accident of the alphabet.  It might also be an example of what Belknap calls deliberate arrangement.  Even in alphabetical lists, first place can be deliberate.  Words have synonyms and some of those synonyms start with an A.

Here’s where we begin to see the connection between literary and pragmatic lists.  They both communicate.  The literary list communicates the author’s intentions and, in many cases, so can the pragmatic list.  If you are the author of a pragmatic list, what are your intentions for the list?  What do you want to give your readers?  The answers will help you build a deliberate arrangement that intentionally communicates. ~

(Today is the anniversary of the 1978 assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk at the hands of fellow Supervisor Dan White.  It happened nine days after the Jonestown massacre and the assassination of Leo Ryan, a Bay Area Congressional Representative.  Jim Jones himself was well connected in the San Francisco political scene.  At the time, I was working in Davis, east of San Francisco near Sacramento.  I remember clearly Dianne Feinstein’s announcement of the assassinations as she became Mayor of the city.)

In my ongoing research on the arrangement of names on memorials, I am reading an excellent book by James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning.  It won the Jewish Book Council’s National Book Award in the Holocaust category.   I highly recommend this to anyone interested in the nature of monuments and memorials.

On p. 54, Young shows a photo and describes a memorial at the Wittenbergplatz transit station in Berlin.  A simple sign listing the names of ten concentration camps, it begins with the phrase “Places of terror that we should never forget.”  Young writes that the camps “are in no special order, other than that the German camps are listed last.” 

As an arrangement expert, I realized listing the German camps last indicates someone thought about the order of the names.  People who like to organize tend to take another step, if only for their own benefit.  So I used Wikipedia to find a pattern, building a spreadsheet of categories that might be organizing criteria, including locations, dates of operation, numbers of prisoners, and numbers of deaths.  I discovered the camps are listed in a complex order that adds meaning to our understanding of the memorial and of the Holocaust.

(Data from Wikipedia’s List of Nazi-German Concentration Camps.  The number of deaths at Bergen-Belsen is not included in the Wikipedia table, but is estimated from the first paragraph in the Wikipedia article on Bergen-Belsen.)

The first four camps in the arrangement are located in Poland.  The fifth, Theresienstadt, is in Czechoslovakia, with the rest in Germany.  In Poland and in Germany, the first camp is the largest.  The remaining camps in the two countries are then listed by the date the camp was established. 

There may be several reasons for placing Poland first and Germany last.  Auschwitz is by far the largest camp, with the largest number of deaths, so placing it first in the full list is appropriate.  In addition, Germany is the host of the sign and perpetrator of the Holocaust, so the sign designers placed themselves last.Therefore Theresienstadt, the sole Czech camp, is in the middle. 

Why did the designers combine size and date as an arrangement?  If they wanted the largest camp first, why not list the rest in order by size?  I believe they wanted to avoid a hierarchy of horror.  Treblinka, which only had enough space to kill people, was not more benign because it was smaller.  Another option that would place Auschwitz first is alphabetical order.  But alphabetical order has no meaning.  Auschwitz is not first because it starts with an A.  It is first because it is the largest place of terror.

This arrangement is so complex, with three different placement strategies, that an honored Holocaust scholar did not see it.  What is the purpose of something so obscure?  Should the designers put a paragraph on the back of the sign explaining their intentions?

Memorials, even simple signs, are a form of art.  We don’t usually explain art on the piece itself.  We let viewers discover their own understanding.  Like most artists, the sign designers offered clues.  They placed Auschwitz, which begins with an A, first in a non-alphabetic arrangement.  They also set apart the three countries.  This sign is intended for Germans who would know the five camps in their own country.  The clues tell us there is some sort of arrangement here.  Young recognized this when he commented that the German camps were last. 

The Wittenbergplatz sign is at a transit station in a busy Berlin shopping area.  There may be thousands of commuters who see it every day.  If the sign were in alphabetical order, it would be stagnant.  Instead it has a structure that is implied but not obvious, an enigma perhaps adding more conscious thought to those thousands who every day see the words, “Places of terror that we should never forget.”