Chris How | Blog | Ça va pas la tête

I often hear of the struggle to gain a sensible work / life balance. For me this doesn’t mean precluding one from the other, but occasionally taking useful elements from one and applying them in the other. A case in point is trying to use a logical categorisation system for both our CD collection and spice drawer. Essentially creating a domestic taxonomy.

When it comes to creating any information hierarchy there are two major factors that come into play. Understanding the people who’ll use it and then coming up with a system that makes task completion more efficient. At home this means my wife and I (the system inputs) finding the chosen CD or spice (the task) quickly. Sounds simple doesn’t it?

With only two people needing to use the system what could go wrong? Well for starters getting my wife to: A. realise there’s a better way, B. stop rolling her eyes at the word taxonomy and C. not flippantly saying just sort them alphabetically.

The CD conundrum. With over 250 CDs to choose from how do you find the one album you want to play? Following a lead from record stores a system of sorting alphabetically by artist, subdivided by genre seemed easy to set up and follow.

That is until you get into the detail. Does the Cinematic Orchestra fit into jazz, ambient or general music? (I despise the term ‘Rock and Pop’); does Robbie Williams sit under R for Robbie or W for Williams?

However in most cases and with a little learnt behaviour the categorisation works. If you’re wondering the Cinematic Orchestra, for me, are in the general music section leaving jazz free for the be-bop greats. As for Robbie he can sit anywhere as finding him is not a task I need to complete.

All I need to do now is to get my wife to stop randomly putting CDs back where there’s space on the shelves and the system might just work.

The spice selector. Like an apothecary’s cupboard our spice drawer spews forth tubs, bottles and vials of spices, so finding what you need in the midst of cooking isn’t easy.

My wife’s suggestion is to just arrange them alphabetically. But then where do black mustard seeds go? Under B or under M? My more elaborate solution was to investigate spice behaviour with an ethnographic study. The findings were illuminating. For the most part we use spices in sets depending on what we are cooking. For example cumin, cardamom and turmeric belong almost exclusively to an Indian set. Likewise cinnamon, baking powder and arrowroot to a cake set.

The solution seemed easy, to divide the drawer by food geography with spices that straddle culinary borders, such as coriander seeds (Indian and Mexican), sitting in an imagined subset of a Venn diagram.

Potentially I felt I was teetering on a categorisation that would do for the kitchen what the ISBN did for libraries. That was until it was user tested, or more specifically wife tested. With no buy-in (in fact more buy-out) the system collapsed and we’re back to kitchen chaos.

Perhaps the moral of the story is by all means bring your work life into your home life but you are more likely to be successful by avoiding the word taxonomy.

This entry was posted on October 5, 2008 at 9:15 pm and is filed under IA stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.