Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Things should be easy to find - an information architect could agree with that.

The recent problems surrounding Google maps sound, from a distance, silly. That crazy Indian president! What is he talking about?

But culture is a funny thing. At the IA retreat a few weeks ago I showed a screenshot of the levis website. Totally offensive to me (from Belgium), none of the attendees noticed a particular problem. The thing with culture is, what makes 1 person from 1 culture angry, won’t mean a thing to someone from another culture.

I wrote about the Maori a while ago. A really important concept in Maori culture is “tapuâ€?. It means that certain knowledge shouldn’t be shown to just anyone.

I guess I’m trying to say: this idea that information should be freely available is a cultural one. And it’s not always necessarily (this is painful to say) right.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 19th, 2005 at 10:33 am and is filed under Information architecture, i18n. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.