Lists & hierarchies

Items don't always fit

We categorised things in the room by our basic emotional response:

  • Like
  • Don't like
  • Neutral

That was pretty easy.

Now let's try using new categories:

  • Tool
  • Food
  • Decoration
  • Content

Here's our list, reorganised:

Things in front of me right now:

 

Tool:

-Case full of cables and hard drives

-Cup of coloured pens

-Index cards covered in notes

-Laptop

-Screen

-Headphones

-Scissors

-Unused keep cup

 

Food:

-Bag of oats

-Orange that looks too dry to be appetising

 

Decoration:

-Daniele's Patagonia cap

-Small fabric owl from Kyoto

-Ugly mural on the building across the street

-Tree

 

Content:

-Copy of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

-Set of cards from the game Dialect

-Completed tax form

Writelike

It's an environment with a lot of tools: that makes sense, since it's a workplace. Other than that, there is a mix of items in all the other categories.

But if you look a little more closely, this list gets kind of creaky and problematic.

For example:

  • Laptop is under 'Tool' but should it be under 'Content' because it contains hundreds of GB of books, documents, music, photos, and video? It's both things, but is it more of one than the other? How would you decide?
  • Daniele's Patagonia cap is under 'Decoration', but should it be under 'Tool' because it keeps the sun off Daniele's eyes? How would you decide?
  • Does tree belong in 'Decoration'? Is it a tool for cleaning the air? Does it need a different category because it's a living thing?
  • Is that completed tax form 'Content' because it contains data or is it a 'Tool' because its purpose is to send that data to the tax office? (Would it make a difference if it was unfilled?)

There are no absolute right or wrong answers to these questions: there are only arguments for different criteria, and then decisions on which criteria to use and how to apply them.

You have a go. Here's your list from the previous page. Change the categories to Tool, Food, Decoration, and Content repository then reorganise the items.

Was it harder to decide where some items go? How did you make your decisions?

Things in the world have multiple dimensions, and they often don’t fit neatly into a categorisation system.

That means if we want to categorise them, we have to make decisions and apply criteria.

That means making a list is often a complex act: a combination of observation, analysis, and creativity.

Now all of a sudden lists stop being quite so easy, right?

Let's push it a bit further.

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