These are relationship types drawn from conversations with Nathan Shedroff (who had worked with Richard Saul Wurman of LATCH fame) and Dave Gray (Xplane)… these notes showing my collection of ideas and trying to normalize them….
and from Sunni Brown’s Doodle Revolution. So elegant!
Nathan had worked with Richard Saul Wurman, and teaches at CCA as I do, making him easy to ply with wine and conversation. He and I spent a lot of time dissecting LATCH and asking if it was actually MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive- Barbara Minto). He was always suspicious of alphabet, and wondered if disorder was a kind of order.
Dave Gray has long ago kicked the tires on LATCH, and came up with his own approach, as delineated in Marks and Meaning (a must buy for any Visual Thinking nerd!
He states that you can only organize things 3 ways, value, grouping and structure.
“Value is organizing by sequence (not always a process, but always a sequence). Structure is organizing as a system, by relationships.” Dave Gray
From Gray’s distillation of Value, Group, Structure you can move to Brown’s chart showing Relationship, Comparison, System.
Many information architects seem to struggle to find the through-line from information organization to information display, but it is a mistake to think you can do one well without the other. Organization is a physical activity, best supported through spacial manipulation.
This will probably be an essay at some point, as this footnote has gone on too long…
