Information Architecture, Spring 2023

The working assumption is that everyone should be working with their team on your respective projects. That is the primary homework that everyone should be contributing to.

Individually this week, you have a homework assignment related to our field trip to the City Tech Science Fiction Collection. During today’s class, you learned how we organized and keep track of the items that constitute the collection. And, you had a chance to get your hands dirty by working with materials in the collection to perform data collection.

Your homework is to write a 250-word memo addressed to Prof. Ellis that reflects on your experience today and how you might apply some of the techniques discussed during the field trip to other domains–it could be where you work now, where you would like to work in the future, a personal project that you would like to begin, etc. Copy-and-paste your memo into a comment added to this blog post before next week’s class.

If you were absent, you can use the materials on the SF Collection’s website to discuss the way the materials are organized and then discuss how you might apply those techniques to other domains.

This week, each team should write a collaborative memo in your Google Drive shared folder that includes a description of what work each team member has done on the project during the past week. If you haven’t completed what you were responsible for, note that in the memo and give a date for when you will complete the delegated responsibility. This is about accountability to your team and keeping me informed about the progress of your team’s work as a whole. Each team member should copy-and-paste their team’s single update memo into a comment made to this homework blog post.

For your reference, I typed up the outline that we discussed last week and included it below.

Final Team Project Outline
(Modified Proposal)

I. Introduction
   A. Purpose
   B. Topic
   C. Roadmap

II. Core Proposal 
   A. Background
   B. Problem
   C. Solution (LARGEST PART--include site description, site map(s), and wireframe(s)

III. Other Proposal Parts
   A. See Online Technical Writing Textbook

IV. Information Architecture Reflection
   A. Justification, explanation, and evidence for why you propose to do the things in the way your team chose.
   B. Quote and use parenthetical citations.

V. References
   A. Anything quoted and parenthetically cited should be listed here in alphabetical order. Cite using APA format.

• Other notes
  • Don’t be afraid to change course with your proposed site as you work on the project. What you read and learn might give you new ideas that you can incorporate. However, don’t allow feature creep to make your project too unwieldy.
  • While you might be using a divide-and-conquer strategy to creating content for your report, remember that your report is a collaborative effort. Get your content on the page, but all team members can edit, change, alter, improve, etc. the copy provided by any other team member. Check your ego at the door, so to speak, and treat your report as collectively owned–including the writing that you contribute.
  • Give reasonable deadlines and meet those deadlines. However, if you can’t, communicate that to your team and provide a new deadline.
  • Don’t drop the ball–your team is counting on you!