ChaP ter 9 Designing Cross-channel User Experiences FIGURE 9.1 J. Bentham, Panopticon. the tWO DIMeNSIONS OF INFOrMatION arChIteCtUre When we information architects think of the design of an information space, we usually think first of some kind of taxonomy or tree, focusing attention on the parent­child relationships between a set of primary items that we identify as constituting the skeleton. However, alongside this vertical dimen- sion there is the complementary horizontal dimension discussed in Chapter 8 (Figure 9.2). This axis is of extreme importance in ubiquitous ecologies and is concerned with the way two or more items, despite belonging to different or vertically distant categories, present a logic­semantic correlation (Rosati 2007) capable of tying them together regardless of the channel they happen to be part of. Nonetheless, these links and relationships are more difficult to assess and certainly less structured than those that can be found along the vertical axis; this horizontal dimension is the one where most of the magic of user-generated innovation and unpredictability happens. This is where we really go berry-picking. Pervasive Information Architecture © 2011 Elsevier, Inc. All rights reserved. 195