Color Me Anxious

The book Information Anxiety II, by Richard Saul Wurman, presents some really interesting ideas.

He hypothesizes that there is a progression of understanding from Data to Information to Knowledge to Wisdom. The book also discusses the 5 methods of information organization, known as LATCH:

L – Location
A – Alphabet
T – Time
C – Category
H – Hierarchy

Organization by color falls under the Category method, but I feel color provides such a deeper understanding of relationships that it should be a sixth category. I’m not referring to the inherent color of objects; color assigned (or maybe inherent to) information creates relationships full of meaning. For instance, a set of blue, blue-green, and green information ‘chunks’ are perceived as more closely related to one another than red, yellow, and blue ‘chunks.’

1/19/2005