I’ve written a lot of stuff over the last few years about information architecture. And I’m working on writing more. But recently I’ve realized there are some things I’ve not actually posted publicly in a straightforward, condensed manner. (And yes, the post below is, for me, condensed.)
WTF is IA?
1. Information architecture is not just about organizing content.
- In practice, it has never been limited to merely putting content into categories, even though some very old definitions are still floating around the web that define it as such. (And some long-time practitioners are still explaining it this way, even though their actual work goes beyond those bounds.)
- Every competent information architecture practitioner I’ve ever known has designed for helping people make decisions, or persuade customers, or encourage sharing and conversation where relevant. There’s no need to coin new things like “decision architecture” and “persuasion architecture.”
- This is not to diminish the importance and complexities involved with designing storage and access of content, which is actually pretty damn hard to do well.
2. IA determines the frameworks, pathways and contexts that people (and information) are able to traverse and inhabit in digitally-enabled spaces.
- Saying information architecture is limited to how people interact with information is like saying traditional architecture is limited to how people interact with wood, stone, concrete and plastic.
- That is: Information architecture uses information as its raw material the same way building architecture uses physical materials.
- All of this stuff is essentially made of language, which makes semantic structure centrally important to its design.
- In cyberspace, where people can go and where information can go are essentially the same thing; where and how people can access information and where and how people can access one another is, again, essentially the same thing. To ignore this is to be doing IA all wrong.
3. The increase of things like ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, emergent/collective organization and “beyond-the-browser” experiences make information architecture even more relevant, not less.
- The physical world is increasingly on the grid, networked, and online. The distinction between digital and “real” is officially meaningless. This only makes IA more necessary. The digital layer is made of language, and that language shapes our experience of the physical.
- The more information contexts and pathways are distributed, fragmented, user-generated and decentralized, the more essential it is to design helpful, evolving frameworks, and conditional/responsive semantic structures that enable people to communicate, share, store, retrieve and find “information” (aka not just “content” but services, places, conversations, people and more).
- Interaction design is essential to all of this, as is graphical design, content strategy and the rest. But those things require useful, relevant contexts and connections, semantic scaffolding and … architecture! … to ensure their success. (And vice versa.)
Why does this need to be explained? Why isn’t this more clear? Several reasons:
1. IA as described above is still pretty new, highly interstitial, and very complex; its materials are invisible, and its effects are, almost by definition, back-stage where nobody notices them (until they suck). We’re still learning how to talk about it. (We need more patience with this — if artists, judges, philosophers and even traditional architects can still disagree among one another about the nature of their fields, there’s no shame in IA following suit.)
2. Information architecture is a phrase claimed by several different camps of people, from Wurmanites (who see it as a sort of hybrid information-design-meets-philosophy-of-life) to the polar-bear-book-is-all-I-need folks, to the information-technology systems architects and others … all of whom would do better to start understanding themselves as points on a spectrum rather than mutually exclusive identities.
3. There are too many legacy definitions of IA hanging around that need to be updated past the “web 1.0” mentality of circa 2000. The official explanations need to catch up with the frontiers the practice has been working in for years now. (I had an opportunity to fix this with IA Institute and dropped the ball; glad to help the new board & others in any way I can, though.)
4. Leaders in the community have the responsibility to push the practice’s understanding of itself forward: in any field, the majority of members will follow such a lead, but will otherwise remain in stasis. We need to be better boosters of IA, and calling it what it is rather than skirting the charge of “defining the damn thing.”
5. Some leaders (and/or loud voices) in the broader design community have, for whatever reason, decided to reject information architecture or, worse, continue stoking some kind of grudge against IA and people who identify as information architects. They need to get over their drama, occasionally give people the benefit of the freakin’ doubt, and move on.
Update:
This has generated a lot of excellent conversation, thanks!
A couple of things to add:
After some prodding on Twitter, I managed to boil down a single-statement explanation of what information architecture is, and a few folks said they liked it, so I’m tacking it on here at the bottom: “IA determines what the information should be, where you and it can go, and why.” Of course, the real juice is in the wide-ranging implications of that statement.
Also Jorge Arango was awesome enough to translate it into Spanish. Thanks, Jorge!
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Yeah, baby! The stuff that makes me follow you on twitter.
However, what you say often sounds like “designers with a linguistic twist”, but surely there’s more coming to pin it down and make it distinct from the evils of the designer moniker, right? In fact, your point 3.3 should be your 1.1 and the basis for everything; I like it the best.
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Great article Andrew. I’ve said in the past if we put an IA, IxD, Graphic Designer, CEO, etc in a room and drew a picture of a product or a service all of these professions could build it. The only real difference, without diving into semantics, would the process they work through to get to that specific / desired end state.
The effect of the drama that has been created has a fundamental issue that has hurt us all.. the opportunity to learn from other processes / approaches to problems. I’m an Information Architect… but the processes and tools that have shaped the discipline to this point are only but a few I use in my work as an IA.
I’ve learned from so many different professionals within and outside the IA industry over the years and that has allowed me to be far more creative than I could have ever dreamed if I had not had such privileges; but you have to seek those out and want to learn; not just sit back and criticize others.
As you say… move on. Move on to bigger and better things!
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brilliant post – spesh this quote: “…start understanding [our-]selves as points on a spectrum rather than mutually exclusive identities.”
I often see myself with just my toes in the water of IA/UX (y’see what I did there – I lumped ’em together), as if there was this big lake of The One True Identity That Is IA. Whereas if we could all just identify that our experience, expertise and skills are moulded by the work that we each do and is therefore just a small part of what IA could be then we might all just get on a little more ;). Points on a spectrum (or stepping stones across the lake) allows us to broaden the scope of what we do for our clients but still make connections with each other to feel part of a community.
The IA I do for law firms is nothing like (on a day-to-day practical/operational front) the work I used to do for an agency. But the IA concepts and practices I employ, and the pretty IA deliverables I create, are the same. I want to believe that still allows me to be in your gang.
Thx.
Oh! I also just wanted to support your evolution point above – legal services are also going through a bit of an evolution with the work they produce, the approaches they use, and the engagements they take on. Are they going to stop calling themselves lawyers? Not on your nelly.
Perhaps the issue for us is just the umbrella term – the great thing for other professions is that they created the term ‘doctor’, ‘lawyer’, ‘architect’, that meant people really really (really) wanted to join the profession. We haven’t been so adept at creating The Profession Everyone Wants To Belong To (yet – as you reason above)…
k8
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Brilliant post. Thanks for sharing, Andrew.
I wanted to add one small note to #2 (under Why does it need to be explained), the one about the various views on IA, as that’s one of the things we try to formalize in the Pervasive Information Architecture book.
We traced down and documented three different sources: information design (the Wurmanites as you say); information science (the Polar Bear), and information systems (coming from the 1980s, and currently mostly concerned with EIA).
We see those as intertwining threads in a long-running (at least longer than we usually think, as we explain the book) development of what we could call classic IA.
What you articulate above is the new, emerging idea of IA as a design layer across environments which has been shaping up in the past 4-5 years, and posts such as this one are definitely going to help clarify our vision. -
I really appreciate your caution with language, Andrew. You are a semantic wizard.
Unlike your peers above though, I feel you wasted your time.
There is nothing new here. All you’ve done is express the argument for BigIA instead of LittleIA. It’s the same thing you could have written back when Morville originally did all those years ago.The difference is that the ship has sailed. DESIGN has come in and taken over as the single paradigm for everything leaving IA in the dust to just be little IA once and for all, b/c any slippery slope is in fact that, slippery and just leads you down to the well of everything is creation and HOW you do that creation is what defines you: engineering, business, design, etc.
What I constantly read from the IAI folks who maintain a very close position like yourself, above, is the syndrome of “I have hammer. I have a GREAT hammer. What can I do with it?” There are a ton of things that one can do w/ the skills of an traditional (little IA) that can apply to many facets of life. That does not mean that what they do with those skills is always the output of information architecture. Which is the way of expressing that you can define the discipline by its activities or you define it by its output, or more importantly you can define it by the overlap of activities and activities. Once you separarte the activities from the output you enter the realm of the slippery slope you’ve entered in your own admitted semantic debate.
Now before you go all hog wild about this IxD person treading here and doing exactly what I’m claiming you do. Notice above I did not place any juxtaposition with IxD. I can care less at this point. Design is transdisciplinary end of story. There is no single design practice, discipline, or even community that does everything, and doesn’t do everything. The same slippery slope argument can be easily applied to IxD, ID, GD, Arch, etc.
Instead of defining activities, I have been concentrating on output. What makes a GREAT interaction? What is interaction? What are the aesthetics of interaction.
THAT is where I would challenge IAs to go. Define information? great information? meaningful? understood? transformative? influential? etc.? What is a “right” IA? Is saying “that works” enough? The how you get there is so influenced by so many different sources that there is no way to say that THIS practice owns anything any more.
I teach IxD b/c I believe that all forms of designers need to understand the intrinsic properties of behavior. I teach IA because information, narrative, semiotics, etc. are some of the containers that behavior transcends.
there is no way to create any experience without either of these (and other) attributes.
So in the immortal words of Mr. Anderson (aka Neo): “There is no IA.”
In other words, like the Matrix itself it is just a metaphor, that we can only apply so long as its extension doesn’t break. It is the end of semantics. We’ve reached the point as designers that NONE Of our paths are meaningful except as communication tools. They are limited, and we have to let the limitations go instead of holding onto them.— dave
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I think we are speaking at extremes & that isn’t helpful.
Information Architect is a real job.
Information Rchitecture is a real discipline
IAs (this is the important part) do MORE than Information Architecture.This last point is the important 1.
But I will extend further…
1. In the grand scheme of things there will never be a comparative critical mass of as titled IAs or even UXers compared to Graphic/Visual/Communication Designers. Or IxDs compared to Interactive, Web, Industrial, etc.I have always been of the opinion that it would be more powerful to build the disciplines (IA & IxD alike) over the professions. The disciplines by their nature have to be transitive to a host of practices beyond either’s core practices & communities.
If you really want to so,ve the bad IA problem, then teach IA to those doing a bad job of it, instead of creating more IAs. It will beinfiniteky mire effective towards our mutual goals of designing kick ass experiences that both meet the needs, wants, desire of human beings while fitting their cultural, social & biological realities (blah blah blah).
Something like that.
This isn’t to say that there is not going to continue to be core practicing IAs or IxDs. Of course there will be.
– Dave
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So, really, we’re talking about clarifying the practice of IA vs. the title that some people give themselves vs. the domain and context such a person might dip their feet in.
Is it meaningful to call yourself IA when you’re doing project-wide design? Is it right to call yourself a UX person if you’re doing the structure and labeling of pages in a website? Is it correct to call yourself content strategist if you, indeed, do copywriting? If I don’t do wireframes nor website structure but focus more on the semantic landscape in linguistic vs. semiotic expressions of an intranet (working with organisational change, for example), am I still an IA?
I think there’s a myriad of “things we can and do do” that belongs in all of the various design camps, but claiming a specific title means something about the focus of our work. Some times I’m a UX guy (usually if I’m whipping existing stuff into usable shape), other times IA (working with more semantics and structuring of information), and then project manager, designer, content strategist, usability researcher, usability designer, information manager, interaction designer, UI designer … the list goes on. I think these titles we choose is not for describing the job we specifically do to the client, but simply is a moniker we use amongst ourselves in describing what part of a bigger problem we’re focusing on a little bit more than all the other things we probably do as well.
Everything is IA. Everything is UX. Everything is, really, content strategy. All we’re doing is trying to pry the “designer” moniker away from the graphic designers, probably unsuccessfully.
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Thanks for a great post; I don’t agree with everything here, but there’s a lot of goodness in it, as well as in your heart–something missing from many of the discussions (or, rather, discussers) in this space over recent years. I hope to dig in further soon.
As far as another edition of the polar bear book? No way! Three was one more than was necessary. ;-) And no, it doesn’t cover everything; 500 pages is already too long for most books. (That’s not counting the 100+ pages we threw away, BTW.) That was the problem with writing the second edition–there was already too much to squeeze into a book.
Finally, I still think we spend too much energy defining the damned thing (DTDT). The most interesting work any of us does–and the most growth in any of the UX-related fields–has little relationship to or dependency upon definitions.
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the web need more people like you.. thanks!
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Andrew – really nice post. Thank you.
Back in 2005 I wrote a post that asserted companies needed to employ interaction designers and information architects and engage them to support the development of cross-channel experiences –> specifically ones that transcend the digital medium. Why? Because most of the rest of the corporation doesn’t understand interaction design…information architecture, path and task analysis… etc. I believe IAs and individuals skilled in interaction design bring a unique understanding of how to organize the content and the experiences so they align and flow together. This is not a skill embodied in traditional IT, marketing, customer service, product development teams.
Perhaps this is a whole other post entirely – but addresses some of what Dave Malouf is talking about above. Pithy stuff.
Leigh
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