Information Architecture from 1970s to 2010s
The phrase “information architecture” appears to wide attention, by Richard Saul Wurman, who is an architect and a graphic designer and the author, editor, and/or publisher of books that make use of graphics in the presentation of information in a variety of fields.
In the 1960s, when he was as an architect in his early career, he was interested in the urban environments of how the buildings, transport, utilities, and people worked and interacted with each other. Soon his interests was developed further in how the information about urban environments could be gathered, organized, and presented in meaningful ways to architects, to urban planners, to utility and transport engineers, and especially to people living in or visiting cities.
For Wurman, architecture is the science and art of creating an “instruction for organized space.” And the problems of gathering, organizing, and presenting information for him is to serve a purpose as closely analogous to the problems of designing a building that will serve the needs of its occupants.
In 1976 Wurman served as the chair of the national conference of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and chose as “The Architecture of Information” as the conference theme. He developed the following definition:
“information architect. 1) the individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear. 2) a person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge. 3) the emerging 21st century professional occupation addressing the needs of the age focused upon clarity, human understanding, and the science of the organization of information.”
A few years later in 1970, a group of people in the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), specialized in information science was assembled and developed technology which could support the “architecture of information” (Pake 1985). This group was responsible for numerous important contributions in field of human-computer interaction, including the first personal computer with a user-friendly interface, laser printing, and the first WYSIWYG text editor.
Since completing a broader vision, high-level framing became one of the main concept for those who shared information about information architecture up until the mid-1980s. In the mid-1980s, the notion of information architecture as the structure of complex or dynamically changing information was lost to a view that was much more similar to that of information systems. Writers referred to information architecture as a tool to help with the formation and design of computer infrastructures and layers of data, with a broader emphasis on business and organizational aspects of information networks.
The 1990s came with the first wave of modern information architects who were specialist in not only information science, but also user focused development. This may be due in part to the opportunities that have arisen during the 1990s to rethink the presentation of library-catalog information as this information has been moved into online public-access catalogs (OPACs), and in part to the proliferation of information on the Web itself.
An excellent presentation of this aspect of information architecture is a book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, written by two librarians, Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, who have built a business, Argus Associates, that specializes in the design of Websites.
In their book, they emphasize that they “talk about web sites. Not web pages, not home pages. Web sites.” They do so because they are concerned with the presentation of information in the whole of a Website, with how the pages within the site relate to each other, and with how the viewer is permitted and/or directed to navigate his or her way around the site.
Recently, things were changing again. Tagging was everywhere, and personal mobile devices and home appliances were redrawing the boundaries of computing. Information is everywhere as new media keeps coming up to us, as a result, the way we interact, the data we need, how we allow ourselves to be distracted by the information we receive, the urgency or timing of warnings and reminders change all the time.
Information architecture becomes pervasive, and starts to address the design of information spaces as a process, opening up a conversation with computing and service design. The new technology, such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) is reshaping our reality by digital. Information architecture will definitely go beyond textual, audio and video information to include sensory and contextual information. It has to update their methods and their realms of action.
