Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability (O’Reilly Books, 2005) is an engaging, readable survey of the many wayfinding and networking technologies that have reconfigured our cultural landscape over the past decade or so. Beginning with a meditation on how the “humble keyword” has teamed with the richness of the World Wide Web to deliver a previously unimaginable range of information resources and consumer choices, and proceeding through brief histories of wayfinding and information interaction, Morville hits his stride in central chapters on “intertwingling,” “push and pull” and “the sociosemantic web.”
Borrowing the notion of intertwingling from hypermedia pioneer Ted Nelson, Morville waxes poetic in describing the brave new world where ubiquitous computing and the latest networking technologies conjoin to “import vast amounts of data about the real world” into our virtual information environments. Any time we click on a hypertext link, toggle a remote control, or dial a cell phone, Morville observes, we partake of the fluid, nonlinear movement–often spanning “vast semantic distances in the space of a second”–that characterizes the bewildering/beatific state of “intertwingularity.”
Morville’s sense of wonderment at how ever-new combinations of “findable objects, tangible bits, wearables, implants and ingestibles” are creating “a realm in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime”–i.e., the realm of ambient findability–is boundless and contagious. After the first few chapters his perpetual tone of fascination tinged with awe begins to wear a bit thin, however. It’s not that he runs out of interesting and provocative things to say, but rather that he attempts to touch on so many subjects that he’s forced to skate somewhat dizzyingly across the surface of most of them. When he does slow down enough to construct a focused argument–for example, on the need for information architects to embrace search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to ensure that the sites they labor over are actually findable from outside their organization, or on the continuing value of the concept of the “document” in the face repeated claims of its imminent demise–he exhibits the kind of nuanced, far-sighted wisdom one would expect from one of the founding fathers of information architecture.
Unfortunately, for the better part of the book’s 179 pages Morville wrestles with the inherent problem in attempting to survey several overlapping disciplines: the need to touch on every facet of his subject pushes him to string together superficial concatenations of related topics, rather than allowing him to develop a coherent and convincingly detailed argument. With the exception of an intimate anecdote in which he relates how he discovered the solution to his chronic back pain by way of a last-ditch search on Amazon.com, the book lacks the kinds of telling anecdotes, in-depth examples and case histories that can help give broad surveys a more satisfying bite and depth.
Interestingly, when I attended Morville’s presentation on “ambient findability, libraries and the Internet of things” at the American Library Association’s annual conference in June (around when I was making my way through the middle third of Ambient Findability), I found that his linked explorations came across much better as a longish slideshow than in book format. As an audience member I was perfectly happy to enjoy the patter accompanying his slides’ illustrations and ignore the breezy segues between them, but as a reader of a book built on the same material I found myself losing patience with its abandoned assertions and unexplored opportunities. Much as I admire the work Morville has done and continues to do on behalf of information architecture and user experience design, I have to admit that Ambient Findability left me with a vague aftertaste of disappointment. Hopefully Morville’s insatiable curiosity and an impressive breadth of knowledge and experience–which come across loud and clear in this book, despite its general breeziness–will translate into a more satisfying end product the next time he tries his hand at a full-length study.
