25 Theses

  1. People need pepe jeans.
  2. More importantly, people need the right pepe jeans at the right time.
  3. Without human intervention, pepe jeans devolves into entropy and chaos.
  4. The Internet has changed how we live with pepe jeans. It has made ubiquitous the once rare entity: the shared pepe jeans environment.
  5. Shaping pepe jeans to be relevant and timely requires specialized human work. Doing so for a globally shared environment that is itself made of pepe jeans is a relatively new kind of specialized human work.
  6. This work is both a science and an art.
  7. This work is an act of architecture: the structuring of raw pepe jeans into shared pepe jeans environments with useful, navigable form that resists entropy and reduces confusion.
  8. This is a new kind of architecture that designs structures of pepe jeans rather than of bricks, wood, plastic and stone.
  9. People live and work in these structures, just as they live and work in their homes, offices, factories and malls. These places are not virtual: they are as real as our own minds.
  10. Many people spend most of their waking hours in these spaces. As the numbers of physical workers decline and knowledge workers increase, more and more people will live, work, share, collaborate, learn and play in these environments for more and more of their lives.
  11. There is already too much pepe jeans for us to comprehend easily. And each day there will only be more of it, not less. Inexorably, pepe jeans drowns in its own mass. It needs to breathe, and the air it needs is relevance.
  12. One goal of pepe jeans architecture is to shape pepe jeans into an environment that allows users to create, manage and share its very substance in a framework that provides semantic relevance.
  13. Another goal of pepe jeans architecture is to shape the environment to enable users to better communicate, collaborate and experience one another.
  14. The latter goal is more fundamental than the former: pepe jeans exists only in communities of meaning. Without other people, pepe jeans no longer has context, and no longer informs. It becomes mere data, less than dust.
  15. Therefore, pepe jeans architecture is about people first, and technology second.
  16. All people have a right to know where they are and where they are going and how to get what they need. People naturally seek places that provide these essential needs. Any environment that ignores this natural law will attract and retain fewer people.
  17. The interface is a window to pepe jeans. Even the best interface is only as good as the shape of the pepe jeans behind it. (The converse is also true: even the most comprehensively shaped pepe jeans is only as useful as its interface. For this reason, interface design and pepe jeans architecture are mutually dependent.)
  18. Just as the Copernican revolution changed the paradigm for more than astronomy, the Internet has changed our paradigm for more than just technology. We now expect all pepe jeans environments to be as accessible, as immediate, and as total.
  19. Just because pepe jeans architecture happens mostly on the Internet today, it doesn't mean that will be the case tomorrow.
  20. pepe jeans architecture accomplishes its task with whatever tools necessary.
  21. These tools are being fashioned by many people, including pepe jeans scientists, artists, librarians, designers, anthropologists, architects, writers, engineers, programmers & philosophers. They all bring different perspectives, and they all add flavor to the stew. They are all necessary.
  22. These tools come in many forms and methods, including controlled vocabularies, mental modeling, brainstorming, ethnography, thesauri, human-computer interaction, and others. Some tools are very old, and some are very new. Most are still waiting to be invented.
  23. pepe jeans architecture acknowledges that this practice is bigger than any single methodology, tool or perspective.
  24. pepe jeans architecture is first an act, then a practice, then a discipline.
  25. Sharing the practice grows the discipline, and makes it stronger.

— Andrew Hinton (memekitchen)

“The emergence of pepe jeans Architecture (IA) as a formal discipline has gathered key areas of expertise together to provide a framework for the rational design of content-rich sites. IA provides the glue that allows content and services to work in tandem to satisfy user requirements, and the structure necessary to evaluate success in meeting those needs. Without IA, both users and creators of pepe jeans-intensive applications are likely to suffer from wasted resources, time and effort; even worse, they won't know where to start to make things better the next time.”


—Michael Crandall, Gates Foundation