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Dear David, I like you account of information design and way finding and I would like to offer a little gloss on two points. 1) Decision Points: I recall, as a child, the moment when I discovered why the cows did something funny when they got to the bottom gate, they would line up and take turns at rubbing against a tree trunk. This was a very complex decision point that required them to go a little out of their way. You couldn't hurry up the process without causing twice the wasted time. 2) "the actual path people travel": interestingly, the word "method" can be analyzed to mean "the actual path travelled". Which gets us back to my earlier offering of "drift". Research is as much about way finding as it is about destinations. cheers keith >>> "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]> 11/08/11 12:11 PM >>> At 20:20 03-11-2011, jeremy hunsinger wrote: > There is a design concept or an architectural term that means 'the path that people walk, not the path they were supposed to walk. So as designers, we design a way for people to proceed through a space, but people as a whole wear their own path that is different' In the field of information design, which includes wayfinding/waygiving, some of us have been working in this general territory for a while. The way I would normally describe this is to say that we work in the dynamic space between information and people. It is what goes on in that space which is the focus of our research rather than what goes on in the design or in people's head (or feet). I tend to think of this as a dance rather than a walked path. The designer is like a choreographer, but the object of interest is the resultant dance. In wayfinding the critical 'steps' are around decision points: places in the landscape where people make decisions about their next move. Note that it is the people in the landscape, not the designers who make the decisions about the next move. Wayfinding is a very primitive skill with a long evolutionary history across many species. Human wayfinding predates and lays the foundation for story telling, navigating documents and, more recently, navigating web sites. In all of these the object of interest from an id research perspective is not in the waygiving, story, document or screen per se, but in the interaction between these things and people: the actual path people travel rather than the path they are given in the design. I have written a number of papers on this, but an easy introduction is in a paper about the relationship between readers, text and illustrations in instructional text: http://communication.org.au/publications/practical-advice/between-text-and-illustration/46,29.html. Enjoy! David -- blog: www.communication.org.au/dsblog web: http://www.communication.org.au Professor David Sless BA MSc FRSA CEO * Communication Research Institute * * helping people communicate with people * Mobile: +61 (0)412 356 795 Phone: +61 (0)3 9489 8640 Skype: davidsless 60 Park Street * Fitzroy North * Melbourne * Australia * 3068