Transformative translation through tangibles

I am teaching information ecology this week. I suggest to the students to take a 'discovery-route' running from 1. discovering knowledge organization to 2. discovering information foraging to 3. discovering information ecologies to 4. discovering design to 5. discovering visions, to ... wherever they as Information Architects want to go. Each 'to' represents a journey and a transformative translation - which is what I call 'discovery'. You can not arrive at the concept of 'information ecology' unless you have discovered the concept of 'knowledge organization', and so on and so forth. I find vision-design-information ecology-information foraging-knowledge organization mutually inclusive: without the one you can not understand the others. All these concepts are elusive, hence, we must make them tangible, to use them as 'hangers' for stories, metaphors and images - the works of transformative translations. Taking the discovery route implies communicating images, words on cards, drawings, and theater.
Thanks to my eLL www.ell.aau.dk/ colleague Thomas Ryberg http://twitter.com/tryberg who alerted me to the concept of permaculture, we will also explore this design method.