Information Architecture

Information Architecture is a discipline and a set of methods that aim to identify and organize information in a purposeful and service-oriented way. It is also a term used to describe the resulting document or documents that define the facets of a given information domain. The goal of Information Architecture is to improve information access, relevancy, and usefulness to a given audience, as well as improve the publishing entity's ability to maintain and develop the information over time. It is primarily associated with website design and it is directly related to the following professional disciplines: User interface design, content development, content management, usability engineering, interaction design, and user experience design. It is also indirectly related to database design, document design, and knowledge management.

Historical Background

Richard Saul Wurman is credited with coining the term "Information Architecture" in 1975 (Wurman 1989). Wurman recognized decades before the "information age" that people were becoming "inundated with data but starved for the tools and patterns that give them meaning." As a result, Wurman defined the Information Architect as "someone who enables data to be transformed into understandable information."

Information Architecture is a term most frequently used in relation to website design. It rose to popular professional consciousness as a specialized field of concern, study, and then a job title (Information Architect) in the late 1990s. It arose to address some of the specific problems posed by the rapid expansion in volume of information published by individual web sites to the world wide web. Leading up to the "internet boom" advent, many websites rapidly expanded in scale on an ad-hoc and apparently arbitrary basis. Their information content, context, and the relationships between units of information were often lost in the process. As the volume and complexity of the information published increased along with people's dependence on it, there was often an inversely proportional relationship between the increase in volume and decrease in its usefulness experienced by those for whom it was ostensibly published.

The emergence of Information Architecture as a distinct role and area of responsibility can also be viewed as a natural result of the evolution of websites, from small scale sites to large-scale, highly complex "information spaces." As website design and production are inherently multi-disciplinary fields, and as the scope of web-based information storage and retrieval projects increased, specialization and depth of knowledge in a particular area of it increased too. That is, a normal knowledge domain evolution occurred, resulting in specialization and division of labor. The practice of Information Architecture grew from the recognition that, in order to make increasingly complex information delivery systems useful, special attention to information structure and design itself, separate from visual design or information technology, was necessary.

By about the year 2000, Information Architecture-specific professional organizations (volunteer, non-profit) began to form. Foremost among them are the Argus Center for Information Architecture (2000-2001), Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture (2002-present), and The Information Architecture Institute (2002-present). Among their activities is supporting educational institutions in Information Architecture curricula development and at about the time professional organizations for Information Architecture emerged, top universities and colleges in the United States and other countries offered Information Architecture graduate programs and degrees.

Disambiguation

Though loosely associated with information technology (IT), information science (IS), as well as other internet development fields (Systems Architecture, etc.), the primary focus of an Information Architect is information classification and organization schemes that aid findability, context, and human apprehension. Information architects apply processes, methods, techniques, and schema that improve information access, usability, and comprehension, regardless of delivery technology. Thus the role of an Information Architect is generally more nearly allied to human-computer interaction (HCI) and other "human factors" concerns (ergonomics, cognitive science, psychology), as well as library science and linguistics, than with computer science (CS), information technology (IT), and the like.

Technological Influences

Over time the web has transitioned from being relational database is the most common prime mover. The interface used to control website database content, and, in many cases, the conditions of information retrieval for a given website/user combination, is commonly referred to as a content management system (CMS).

There are a wide range of types of CMSes now available, ranging from expensive enterprise CMSes, to free open source ones, to "blogs", "wikis", and so on. As CMSes have become commonplace, the relationship between data modeling, for the purpose of database design and development, and Information Architecture, for serving human purposes and uses of the information, have become closely interrelated. In fact, the Information Architect's role and focus is perhaps broader in scope than any role or area of responsibility on a web project team, because the Information Architect's concerns span nearly all of the specialized, individual concerns. It can be said that the Information Architect role serves as the main bridge builder between the specific concerns of website design, technology (production), and use (usability).

Furthermore, as websites and the web continue to grow increasingly rich, yet crowed, with information, and our dependence on information continues to increase, search technologies have become nearly indispensable in helping us find information quickly. As "findability" is one of the primary concerns of the Information Architect, site search technologies and search engine optimization (SEO) are a keen concern of the information architect. There are, however, significant differences between how people consume information and how search engine "bots" (programs that index a site's content) consume it. In all, those fulfilling the role of Information Architect must carefully consider all of the information consumer's capabilities, needs, and limitations, for both human and machine (program) information consumers.

Conferences

There are several multi-national forums and conferences, which significantly involve professional-academic interactions and which are relevant for Information Architects as a primary or secondary audience:

• UPA International Conference, http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/conference/
• Information Architect Summit, http://iasummit.org
• IDEA Conference, http://ideaconference.org
• UIE's Web App Summit, ttp://www.webappsummit.com
• Euro Information Architect Summit, http://www.euroInformation Architect.org
• ACM/SIGCHI, http://sigchi.org/conferences/
• FOWD, http://events.carsonified.com/fowd
  

Second-tier conference-holding organizations include ASIS&T (American Society for Information Science and Technology), ACHI (Advances in Computer-Human Interactions), FOWD (Future of Web Design), and Web Directions.

Canonical Writings

Information Anxiety", and "Information Anxiety 2", by Richard Saul Wurman, established Information Architecture as the practice of organizing and presenting information in human-friendly ways, in order to "transform information into structured knowledge," and provides an antidote to the anxiety (and reduced performance) people can experience as a result of attempting to access overwhelming volumes of unintelligible data.

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites", by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville brought Information Architecture to broad consciousness and wider practice among web design and development professionals.

Additional Writings include

• Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, by Christina Wodtke
• Information Architecture: Designing Information Environments for Purpose, by Alan Gilchrist
• Information Architecture for Designers: Structuring Websites for Business Success, by Peter Van Dijck
• Practical Information Architecture: A Hands-On Approach to Structuring Successful Websites, by Eric L. Reiss
• Mapping Websites: Digital Media Design, by Paul Kahn, Krzysztof Lenk

Artifacts of Information Architecture

Information architects are concerned with a wide range of interrelated fields of interest, spanning from organizational strategy, objectives, domain culture, resource availability, and technological capacity (business concerns), to information volume, types, nomenclature, structure, organization, and document design (content concerns), to the tasks, needs, desires, capabilities, limitations, and behavioral predictability of the intended user of the information domain (human concerns).

In essence, Information Architects apply a systems design approach to information.

To serve the Information Architect's aim of increasing information access, utility, and comprehension, he/she employs a number to tools, techniques, methods, schema, and standards, which result in the creation of specific artifacts. These artifacts help people working on the project visualize the information, and evolve it from a highly abstract and conceptual framework, to a concrete, controllable, and usable one. Among such artifacts and deliverables are:

Qualifications For Practicing Information Architecture

The educational, training and experiential backgrounds of information architects vary widely (e.g Rosenfeld and Morville 2002). Generally accepted foundational disciplines include:

• Graphics and information design
• Human-computer interaction (HCI) design
• Library science
• Technical writing
• Usability engineering
• Computer science

Information architects work primarily at the intersections of all of these and other HCI-related disciplines. Information Architects with a great breadth of knowledge across these disciplines will be better positioned to bridge across them, and will consequently be better at fullfilling their role as a result.

Future Directions

Information Architecture rose out of the rapid growth of the web, yet the web is only one of many services that use the internet. Peer-to-peer network services have emerged to circumvent server-client ones. The internet network infrastructure is being coupled with those of other networks, so that DSL, digital cable, wireless/wi-fi, cellular and other networks become appendages to a body of networks. Mobile phones and a myriad of other devices, also known as "information appliances," hold out promise of a "ubiquitous internet" that will serve us in yet undiscovered forms. In all, the "internet cloud" is an ever gathering storm of information content. As businesses, governments and societies produce, consume, and depend on ever greater volumes of information, the need for people who can organize and design information in ways that increase our ability to apply it to our lives quickly and usefully will certainly grow too.

Those in or just preparing to enter the thriving field of Information Architecture should expect to work with a growing variety of media and devices as household and office machines and appliances are increasingly being connected to internet-based information systems. Globalization challenges us to "localize" information and make it consumable across cultures. In sum there is no shortage of challenges or opportunities as the information age continues to accelerate.

Summary

Though the term Information Architecture was coined in 1975, it was not until the mid-1990s, with the rapid expansion of computer-based information via the web, did information access and apprehension become a widespread problem, meriting specialized knowledge and skills to solve it. By the time the "polar bear book" (Information Architecture for the World Wide Web) emerged, methods of Information Architecture had begun to help people in various professions bridge the various specialized aspects of database design, document design, web design, navigation design, interface design, and so on. Soon thereafter, "Information Architect" became a frequent professional title across a range of organizations and projects. There are a about a half-dozen international conferences across the globe that focus primarily or secondarily on Information Architecture. Many prominent universities offer Information Architecture programs, and a few offer graduate degrees.

An Information Architect incorporates and applies a wide range of skills, methods, processes and practices to his/her discipline in order to make information more easily understood and used.

1. Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurman. 1990. 2nd ed. 2002.
2. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Rosenfeld, Louis, Morville, Peter. 2002. 2nd ed. 2006.

Conference Resources

1. Boxes and Arrows, http://events.boxesandarrows.com/events
2. ACM, http://www.acm.org/conferences
3. UPA, http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/conference/
2. Digital Web Magazine, http://www.digital-web.com/events/

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