Tom’s Wordpress Blog

I think it’s working. The ideas about collaborative web filters I wrote about last week, that is. This morning a feed from one of the filters belched out Four Modes of Seeking Information and How to Design for Them - Boxes and Arrows. On the surface, the topic author Donna Maurer explored was information architecture. More specifically, it was broad design approaches for sites that help people find what they’re looking for. But to me, I see a relationship between some of these ideas and my practice in the Feldenkrais Method.

Maurer paints us four categories for seeking information:

• You can know what you’re looking for and be able to describe it;
• You can have some idea of what you’re looking for but not be able to articulate it;
• You can have virtually no idea of what you’re looking for, probably because you don’t know that thing exists;
• You know that you’ve seen the information before, but can’t remember where.

It was the second (exploratory) and especially the “don’t know what you need to know” ideas that caught my attention. Feldenkrais is not a household word, and probably not likely to become one any time soon. But, almost anyone might want to at least hear about the potential benefits , especially people with arching backs from sitting at their computers for long stretches without a break. I want to explore this further.

I would probably never have never stumbled across these ideas with the collaborative web filter feed article that caught my eye. Guess I didn’t know what I was looking for, but found it nonetheless. See, it’s working already.

Technorati Tags: feldenkrais, findability