Localize your products for the Indian market, or start from scratch? An article at McKinsey Quarterly [free reg required] ponders this issue. “The most successful multinationals in India have been those that did not merely tailor their existing strategy to an intriguing local market but instead cut a strategy from whole cloth.”
Computerworld: “OSI [Open Source Initiative] has expanded the size of its board from five to nine members and added representatives from the Netherlands, Brazil, Sri Lanka and Taiwan.” According to the article, OSI is hoping that the non-Americans can help bring new perspectives to problem-solving in the organization.
There are many parallels between architecture (of the brick and mortar kind) and information architecture. Both are primarily design professions, and many of the constraints around problems are similar. (E.g.: managing scope, timeframes, user requirements, ergonomics, the interoperation of complex systems, etc.)
Knowing about my background in architecture, a colleague asked if I could recommend any books from this field that may be of interest to IAs. Here is a first pass at such a list, in no particular order:
by Peter Rowe
Focuses on the design process.
Architecture: Form, Space, and Order
by Fracis D. K. Ching
Does for architecture what Understanding Comics did for comics.
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
by Christopher Alexander
You probably know this one already.
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
by Robert Venturi
A “gentle manifesto for a nonstraightforward architecture”.
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built
by Stewart Brand
I haven’t read this yet, but a lot of smart people rave about it.
If you want to get into the history of the field, you can’t read
anything better than Sir Banister Fletcher’s History of Architecture.
(If you’re into modernism, read William Curtis’ book on modern
architecture.)
You could go to your local library (or Barnes & Noble) and hang out
in the architecture section for a while, checking out some of the
monographs on famous architects. Some I like: Le Corbusier, Rem
Koolhaas, Enric Miralles, Alvar Aalto, Louis I. Kahn, Alvaro Siza, Carlo Scarpa.
Also check out the two Franks that everyone’s heard of: Frank Lloyd
Wright and Frank Gehry.
Tangentially related to architecture, but inspiring anyways: anything
by R. Buckminster Fuller. This is a good place to start.
Do you have any favorite architecture books?
As promised during the ‘05 IA Summit, there is now a mailing list for the discussion of topics related to Global Information Architecture. If you signed up to be on the list at the Summit, you should’ve received an invitation yesterday. Otherwise, you can sign up here:
http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/global-ia
Thanks to Livia Labate and Richard Hill for setting this up!
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