A category is never just a container

Open almost any digital product and you will find categories everywhere: Men, Women, New, Popular, Work, Personal, Urgent, Completed, Recommended, Other. They look harmless, mostly because we are so used to seeing them that we rarely stop to ask what they are actually doing.

A category feels like a container. Something already existed in the world and someone simply found the right label for it. But categories are rarely that neutral. Every time we put two things together, we are making a decision about what makes them similar. Every time we separate them, we are deciding which difference matters enough to deserve a boundary.

Sometimes those decisions reveal more about us than about the things being classified.

Categories are not as objective as they look

I came back to this idea through George Lakoff. In Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, he challenges a very persistent way of thinking about categories: the idea that they work like boxes with clear edges, where every member belongs because it satisfies the same defining conditions.

Human categorisation is much messier than that. Some members feel more representative than others, boundaries can be fuzzy, and context changes what feels like a natural grouping. Our bodies, culture, language and experience all participate in the way we organise the world.

The strange title of Lakoff's book comes from Dyirbal, an Aboriginal Australian language whose noun classification system places women, fire and certain dangerous things within the same grammatical category. At first, the grouping can sound almost absurd to an outsider.

But that reaction is interesting, because it exposes an assumption: that our own categories are somehow obvious. Usually, they are only familiar.

Think about something as ordinary as a supermarket. Tomatoes may live with vegetables even though botanically they are fruits. Plant-based milk may sit beside dairy products despite containing no dairy. A product can be categorised by what it is made from, how it is used, when it is consumed, who typically buys it or simply where someone expects to find it.

None of these systems is inherently ridiculous. They are answering different questions.

Every taxonomy is a point of view

Digital products do the same thing constantly. Imagine designing filters for a fashion catalogue. You could organise clothing by garment type, by occasion, by aesthetic, by weather, by material, by fit or by trend.

Each taxonomy creates a different version of the same catalogue.

And each one quietly tells the user:

this is how we believe these things are related.

That is what makes categorisation so interesting to me. Information architecture is not only about finding a tidy place for everything. It is about deciding which mental model the product will privilege.

We often talk about clarity at the level of language. Is the label understandable? Is the wording simple? Would users recognise this term? All important questions, but a perfectly clear label can still belong to a confusing classification.

Imagine seeing “Professional” and “Personal” as two categories. Both words are obvious until you have something that belongs to both: a personal portfolio used professionally, a phone purchased by a company but used privately, or a trip that combines a conference with a holiday.

Suddenly the problem is not vocabulary.

It is the model underneath it.

The system assumed a boundary that reality does not always respect.

“Other” is where the model starts to crack

This happens constantly in products. The difficult cases are often pushed into “Other”, and I have started to think that “Other” might be one of the most revealing categories in any system.

It tells us where our model stopped working.

The things inside it are the things reality produced that the taxonomy did not anticipate. Enough of them, and “Other” stops being an edge case.

It becomes evidence.

There is another part of this that feels especially relevant to design. When we hear the word bird, most of us do not imagine every possible bird equally. Some examples feel more “bird-like” than others. A robin or a sparrow may arrive in the mind faster than an ostrich or a penguin.

The category has a centre.

Products have these centres too.

When a team imagines “the user”, somebody often becomes the prototype. Not officially and not deliberately, but gradually: the person with a certain level of technical confidence, the customer with a straightforward purchase journey, the user who fits cleanly into one segment, the person who understands the vocabulary we chose.

Then we design outward from that imagined centre.

People closer to it experience the product as obvious. People further away encounter friction. A form asks a question that has no accurate answer. A filter does not describe what they are looking for. A navigation structure forces them to choose between two things that are simultaneously true.

We call these edge cases, and sometimes they are.

Other times they are simply people standing far away from the prototype we unconsciously placed at the centre.

Categories shape what we are able to see

Categories do more than organise information. They influence what becomes visible.

If a project dashboard divides everything into “On track” and “At risk”, the organisation starts looking at work through that distinction. If a CRM forces every lead into one industry, ambiguity disappears from the database even when it still exists in reality. If research participants must choose one reason for abandoning a purchase, the resulting chart may suggest a clarity that the actual experience never had.

A system does not simply record reality. It asks reality to fit its fields.

And once enough information has been structured that way, the categories begin to look like facts.

That is the part I find fascinating. Something that began as a design decision can eventually become the lens through which an organisation understands its customers.

The edges are often more interesting than the centre

I do not think the answer is to stop categorising. We could not. Categories are one of the ways we make complexity manageable, and without them most products would be unusable.

The interesting question is what happens when we stop treating them as inevitable and start asking why these things are together, who feels obvious inside a category, who sits awkwardly at its edge, what ended up in “Other”, or what would change if we grouped the same things around a different property.

Sometimes the answer will be: nothing important.

And sometimes the entire structure changes.

That is probably what I like most about Lakoff's work. It turns something as ordinary as sorting things into groups into a question about perception.

Categories look like descriptions of the world, but they are also traces of the minds that created them.

Once you start seeing them that way, even the simplest dropdown becomes slightly more interesting.