Name: Nelson Zagalo's review of Intertwingled by Peter Morville
Item: Intertwingled
Rating: 3
Author: Nelson Zagalo

Peter Morville

This is a book about everything. Or, to be precise, it explores how everything is connected from code to culture. We think we're designing software, services, and experiences, but we're not. We are intervening in ecosystems. Until we open our minds, we will forever repeat our mistakes. In this spirited tour of information architecture and systems thinking, Peter Morville connects the dots between authority, Buddhism, classification, synesthesia, quantum entanglement, and volleyball. In 1974 when Ted Nelson wrote "everything is deeply intertwingled," he hoped we might realize the true potential of hypertext and cognition. This book follows naturally from that.

Information Changes Everything

Intertwingled

Cassandra Tang

Nelson Zagalo

An interesting book that starts great, presenting large rhetorics on information and society, exploring connections between the world made by humans, machines and nature. I strongly believe in Ted Nelson quote "everything is deeply intertwingled”, however as with most enlightening quotes, it helps to see macro properties but should not be expected to help solve micro intricacies.

Peter Morville is an information architect, which is very nice because it manages well the presentation of his argumentation, in the structuring, designing, and pushing for is own ideas. Morville intends to bring his own working methods to deal with information into the large world, which gives us an interesting new approach to the way we can understand world, but doesn’t go any far than that. The problem with trying to apply information management methodologies to the world is in forgetting the difference between human made and nature made.

Nature has no purpose beyond surviving, something much different from the purpose of the things we make, and mainly of the way we manage to motivate ourselves in the making process. Of course we’re also driven by survival, but we’ve evolved to go further than that through self-realisation goals. 

I must say this is an excellent book for people working in information architecture. All the discussions in the book are valid and interesting for the domain, but it should be advertised as that, and not push for something larger that it cannot deliver.

Cassandra Tang &
Intertwingled by Peter Morville

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Cassandra Tang &Intertwingled by Peter Morville

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Cassandra Tang &
Intertwingled by Peter Morville