The History of Information Architecture in 3 Books

The first book is written by Richard Saul Wurman who is known as the father of information architecture. He was an architect who had the revolutionary idea that not only buildings but also information should be architected. In 1997, he published Information Architects which presented the IA-focused works of several world-class designers. Here is a quote from the father himself:

That’s why I’ve chosen to call myself an Information Architect. I don’t mean a bricks and mortar architect. I mean architect as used in the words architect of foreign policy. I mean architect as in the creating of systemic, structural, and orderly principles to make something work — the thoughtful making of artifact, idea, or policy that informs because it is clear. I use the word information in its truest sense. Because most of the word information contains the word inform, I call things information only if they inform me, not if they are just collections of data, of stuff.

—Richard Saul Wurman, 1996

In 1998, Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld wrote Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. It’s a classic text for information architects, designers, and developers that teaches the organization of the massive amounts of information on the web to be both aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate.

Then in the 2000s, as technology became more and more a part of our everyday experiences, information architecture started being described as pervasive or ubiquitous. In 2006, Adam Greenfield, another leading information architect, wrote Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, a book that pushed information architecture from not just the web but to include everything around us.

And there you have it, the history of IA described in a nutshell!