A Sense of Place

Unlike most of the other Design Principles, a sense of place can be very difficult to define in a single sentence. This is precisely because having a sense of place is so innate to humans that it's like trying to describe how breathing works.

Jorge Arango, Peter Morville, and Lou Rosenfeld describe a sense of place in their book Information Architecture 4th Edition. They state that humans have a complex, symbiotic relationship with our surroundings based on input from our senses and our ability to choose to move from one place to another. Because we can identify the differences between places, we can also identify what we can or can't do in each of the places we visit.

We bring this awareness of place—and the placemaking drive—to information environments as well. When we talk about digital media, we use metaphors that betray a sense of place: we “go” online, “visit” a website,“browse” Amazon.com. Increasingly, these environments are also taking over many of the functions we’ve traditionally associated with physical places: we meet with our friends in WhatsApp, pay our bills in our bank’s website, learn in Khan Academy. As with physical places, we experience them as contexts that differ from one another, supporting different needs.

Information Architecture: Design for Understanding