Samsung recently filed a patent for visual gestures with a cell phone. Unlike the iPhone where the gestures take place on the touch screen, the patent uses the phone’s built in camera to recognize preset motions. While it’s a clever idea, imagine seeing someone “speaking” sign language to their phone. Interacting with the phone this way may seem strange in public and it remains to be seen how users will react to this feature if it ever makes it onto an actual phone.

Web 2.0 brought about user-generated content and as such, an interesting phenomena occurred – instead of information architects coming up with the terminology and labels of a website, the actual users helped define and create part of the information architecture through user-defined tags. The term is known as Folksonomy and was developed by Thomas Vander Wal during a mailing list conversation from the Information Architecture Institute. Wikipedia defines it as the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content and has been called everything from collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, social tagging, and more.

Perhaps the best examples of folksonomies at work can be seen at Del.icio.us and Flickr.

Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking manager, allows Users to tag keywords that describe and organize content with any vocabulary and words of their choice.

Flickr, a photo management web application, allows users and friends/family to tag their photos with their own keywords.

Folksomomies directly reflect the vocabulary of the users but critics argue that it lacks a hierarchical structure and the uncontrolled vocabulary leads to ambiguity. At a time where social networks and communities are growing, folksomonies are here to stay. They encourage users to participate and organize information based on their needs and vocabulary. While I do expect to see more sites utilizing them, there is a still a need to shape and organize other information and navigation on a website. Thus, while the role of the information architect may shift a little, they should embrace folksomonies for what they are and what they can become.

Today I became a member of SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction. Truth be told, I really just wanted to subscribe to the Interactions Magazine but the subscription included a complimentary membership which also allows for discounts to events and access to other material.

The Everyday Information Architecture Flickr group contains photos and videos of how we find, collect, evaluate and share information of design solutions for organizing and structuring everyday life and environment.

According to Tom Sterwatm the Chair of the sub-committee of the International Standards Organisation (ISO), the new version of ISO 13407, the International Standard for Human Centered Design (which will be called ISO 9241-210 to bring it into line with other usability standards), will use the term “user experience.”

The term user experience is now widely used, especially by major players in the industry including Apple, IBM and Microsoft. However, in many cases, the term is contrasted to usability which is often depicted as a much narrower concept focusing on systems being easy to use.

Other exponents explain that user experience goes beyond usability by including such issues as usefulness, desirability, credibility and accessibility.