What would we information architects give for an elegant or fitting worldview or world knowledge in a business domain? Faust, the protagonist of the book of the same name by Goethe, was willing to give his soul for that. And Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, could know that is the consequence. Besides lawyer, poet, humanist and literature writer he was a scientist with a new research method. A research method we can, in my opinion, use as information architects.

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My colleague Ruud van Vliet has presented the future of the information architect on LAC2008. One of his observations is that an information architect must be able to juggle with many worldviews at the same time. He must see many aspects of a universe of discourse at once, from several angles.

This calls for a holistic view and synthesis processes. But that is easier said than done. Is the human mind capable of doing this? Can I do this by looking swiftly at one aspect in detail, then switching to an other aspect, such that traces of the first view stay in memory for a while? And how do I present and base the results to stakeholders?

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‘This is the third day without website and e-mail! Do you guys not understand the consequences of running a business without e-mail these days?!’ Last week I had to call my internet provider for lack of service. And that was not without emotions.

I realized then and there that one of the consequences of entering the conceptual age will be that we have to be able to conceptualize and use emotions. In information systems this will be needed to enhance human-machine interaction but also to reason with it in those systems. As I see it now, that could even become an infrastructural component, as I expect time, accountability en context will also. You need it in that case to represent the emotional feelings related to other data. E.g. to represent ‘Client X is devastated as the bank has made her sell her house’.

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How will the market model for the energy market develop? How can the youth wellbeing in all its complexity be managed in the Netherlands?

As information architects we aim to arriving somehow at a stable set of principles, domain models or business requirements. But with the complex questions active in the business or organizational architecture, stability is hard to get. And as we are conceptualizers more and more of these questions will hit us hard. We have to be able to define and get hold of these kinds of complex worlds. How do we cope with this?

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