In contemporary design practices, digital ecosystems are often designed in isolation from the analog environments in which they are used. This tendency to prioritize friction-less, screen-bound interactions optimized for clarity and speed frequently neglects the sensory, spatial, and embodied dimensions of human experience.
This research project was funded by Emily Carr SIG explore grant resulting in a poster presented at the Information Architecture Conference 2024 (IAC24) and talk presented at Information Architecture Conference 2025 (IAC25).
Design Journey
Problem Statement
Digital tools are often designed for seamless, screen-bound interactions, which can flatten our experience and reduce opportunities for deep engagement, especially in environments that demand presence, movement, and reflection. This limits how designers account for context, place, and the full spectrum of human cognition in complex information environments.
Goal
This research aimed to move beyond fixed hierarchies in information architecture, embracing fluidity, relationships, and complexity. By exploring how spatial cognition and information architecture intersect in blended environments, we sought to help participants experience and map the transitions between digital and physical spaces, revealing richer ways to design for contemporary information ecosystems.
This practice-centered approach draws from Andrea Resmini’s influential precedents, who advocates for a spatial turn in information architecture to address the complexities of designing for today’s hybrid environments. Resmini emphasizes the need to integrate techne (practical knowledge) and episteme (theoretical understanding), grounding design thinking in spatial awareness.
What is Blended Spaces?
A blended space simply means any place where the digital and physical worlds are combined into a single experience. More formally, blended spaces are hybrid environments in which physical and digital elements are meaningfully integrated so that users perceive and interact with them as a coherent whole (Resmini, 2014). For example, a museum that uses augmented reality to display historical scenes over real artifacts, a retail store with digital price displays and app-based navigation, or a city tour that overlays geo-tagged stories onto buildings all create blended spaces that merge information and environment into a unified, richer experience.
At its core, the Blended spaces framework is concerned with experience-level blueprinting, more than device-level detailing, which is relevant to information architects more than ever in this modern age.
-
Do all interactions with digital tools take place within blended spaces?
+
Blended spaces users are individuals and groups navigating both physical environments and digital tools. Core users include students using digital lessons, museum visitors with smart guides, hospital patients with digital maps, shoppers seeing digital labels, and office workers in smart rooms. Supporting them are teachers, IT staff, curators, and building managers. Others, like policymakers, researchers, funders, and community members, shape or are impacted by these systems. Together, they co-create environments where digital and physical worlds merge.
At the heart of this exploration is the Blended Spaces Vancouver Walk-shop, an exercise designed to move participants beyond classrooms and screens. It invites them to experience firsthand how physical and digital information environments intersect, shaping our cognition, movement, and spatial understanding (Hilton, 2014).
The Walkshop was conceived as a three-hour interactive field activity designed to blend indoor and outdoor environments, introduce friction through analog documentation, and surface how tools shape navigation, memory, and perception. Three distinct groups Digital, Analog, and Hybrid, were created to explore different modes of interaction, each following a separate route to prevent overlap while leading to shared destinations. To guide participants, we created a handbook containing prompts for each stage of the journey, encouraging them to reflect, answer questions, and record their observations. These prompts supported tasks such as documenting a tree, finding specific books in the library, and reflecting on how each method of navigation shaped their experience. The prompts ensured that participants engaged with both their surroundings and the tools they were using, making their interactions more intentional and reflective.
Although the Walkshop emphasized navigating outdoor spaces, some of the most insightful moments occurred inside the library. The digital group frequently used their phones to look up authors, translate titles, and confirm details in real time, illustrating how naturally digital tools extend memory and understanding. The Vancouver Public Library made the relationship between physical space and information architecture especially visible, its spatial organization embodies how knowledge is structured. Andrew Hinton in his book understanding context, argues that information isn’t just something we interact with on screens, it’s embedded in the world around us. Every environment, whether natural or built, carries cues, structures, and signals that guide behaviour and meaning-making.
Navigational awareness is shaped by the tools used during an experience. In the workshop, participants alternated between sketching, note-taking, and taking photos, revealing how each method influenced the pace and depth of engagement. Analog tools encouraged slower reflection and richer conversations, while digital tools enabled faster interactions but often felt less intuitive, particularly when tasks like annotating photos were avoided. This demonstrated that the way moments are recorded affects how they are perceived and remembered. It aligns with Merleau-Ponty’s view that perception is central to experience and that physical interaction with space fosters deeper cognitive engagement. As Beatty et al. (2010) highlight, the relationship between tools, context, and behavior shapes creative problem-solving. Designing for blended spaces therefore calls for tools that balance technological capabilities with environmental realities, fostering more connected and meaningful experiences.
Capturing everyday scenes, the group reflected on how design in blended spaces can’t follow fixed pathways. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome describes how connections form in unpredictable, branching patterns. In practice, this means that navigation, meaning-making, and memory in hybrid environments don’t follow a single route but emerge from many intersecting influences, social, spatial, and digital. This perspective encouraged us to consider more adaptive, nonlinear approaches to designing experiences that feel alive to context.
While moving through the neighborhood, the group faced a decision: whether to follow Google Maps’ suggested shortcut or stay together. In that moment, navigation became more than a technical choice, it was shaped by trust, conversation, and shared judgment. Dourish (2001) describes how collective action blends people, tools, and place into a social world of meaning. Here, the act of pausing, debating, and deciding together highlighted that even in digital environments, wayfinding depends on relationships and consensus as much as on data.
When we added digital, analog, and hybrid tools in the design, it added friction. Adding choreography, topology and ontology added complexity which gave us a way of learning deeper as I talked in the library project. Choreography is the little dance through the space, like we noticed dog-walkers on the sidewalks, squirrels climbing trees, and cars moving around. These different kinds of motion, human, non-human, and machine seemed to share the space in overlapping ways. Topology is how things are laid out, so we noticed fixed points like street names, the Native Education College, and the Ceramic Studios. These gave a sense of layout or structure, while changing elements like traffic and blooming or fading plants added layers of detail and texture. Through the lens of ontology which is the meaning of things, certain roles and places stood out, babysitters, and librarians. They opened up questions about how we move through and make sense of the spaces we’re in.