Information Architecture: A Brief History

Rachel Pleet
Nov 1 · 3 min read

Information Architecture (IA), the structural design of information or content, has come a long way. Today the term is used mainly in digital product design, but creating systems to help organize content has been around for ages. Remember learning about the taxonomy of living organisms by Carolus Linnaeus in your high school biology class? Or how about the Dewey Decimal System when you hit the library to write your first research paper? These classification systems go back to the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, and there are plenty more examples that go as far back as to ancient civilizations. When we talk about IA, we recognize the importance of a product’s elements, the arrangement of its parts, and the interaction among those parts with the content, context, and users’ needs in mind.

So, what are some of the key points in modern history that have shaped our understanding and practice of information architecture today? In 1964, the field of architecture was beginning to expand beyond a physical sense, as an IBM study shed light on its functional behavior among other things. In 1970 at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a group of people–who’ve largely contributed to our understanding of human computer interaction and information science–were given permission to develop the kinds of technologies that could support and affirm the relevance of information architecture. Then, in 1975, we heard Richard Saul Wurman officially coin the expression “information architect” at an American Institute of Architects conference.

Into the 1990s, software developers were experiencing frustrations, but couldn’t put their finger on exactly that those frustrations were called. People had issues finding specific information, while certain sites could not take on new content. It was soon understood that this was not a technology or graphic design problem, but rather, an information architecture problem. Such realizations, along with the progress made from the aforementioned milestones, helped to craft the “polar bear book.” This book was Information Architecture for the World Wide Web written by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. It was named the “Best Internet Book of 1998” by Amazon, and “the most useful book on web design on the market” by Jakob Nielsen. Hugely influential, it sparked further conversation, such as at the first annual IA summit in April 2000. This event brought together web consultancies, fortune 500 firms, and scholars from universities and libraries to share their valuable perspectives.

With the uprise in digital products, and the colossal amount of data now at our exposure, information architecture has become increasingly important as humans synthesize content in meaningful ways. The architects of the future will need to consider shifts in social, environmental, technological, and economic factors, but one thing’s certain: information architecture isn’t going anywhere. The need to organize content in any number of contexts, for any number of user needs, will forever remain relevant in one capacity or another.

Sources: https://dynomapper.com/blog/19-ux/187-history-of-information-architecture, https://computer.howstuffworks.com/information-architecture1.htm, https://bit.ly/2JbkZhf

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