An Even Briefer(?) History of Information Architecture
In Fall 2011, the Journal of Information Architecture published “A Brief History of Information Architecture.” While an impressive and informative piece, it’s not the most digestible. I’m going to try to condense it further and pull from other sources to make it even easier to understand.
What is information architecture (IA)?
If you’ve ever tried to use something and thought, “where am I supposed to go next?” or “this doesn’t make any sense,” you are encountering an issue with an information architecture.
The above quote is from the Information Architecture Institute, which defines IA as “the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be understandable.”
The Journal of Information Architecture gets more specific, defining it as the “professional practice and field of studies focused on solving the basic problems of accessing, and using, the vast amounts of information available today.”
Can you give me an example?
A pretty common visualization of IA for the web comes in the form of a sitemap. It looks something like this:
This shows the flow of pages on a website. So let’s say you went to this website and you wanted to check out the product page for a TV box. You’d go from “HOME” to “Product” to “TV Box,” and boom, you’re there. If the page for “TV Box” were located somewhere nonsensical, like under “About us,” you’d have a hard time finding it. It would be poor IA design.
Is IA relevant in things that aren’t websites?
Sure! Here’s a different example:
I made curry the other night from a recipe that called for dried lentils. I don’t know what lentils are exactly, but I know they’re small and come in a bag that contains lots of them, so I figured I could find them somewhere between beans and rice at the grocery store. Lo and behold, that’s where they were, in an aisle for “Grains, Rice & Dried Goods.” I also picked up some spices from the “Spices & Seasonings” section, because, you know, they’re spices; it makes sense they’d be there. Straightforward, no help needed, found what I was looking for, easy peasy. That’s good IA.
Where did IA come from?
Ah, yes, the reason for this article. Timeline time!
1964: IBM’s research paper, “Architecture of the IBM System/360” (Amdahl, et al. 1964), defined architecture as “the conceptual structure and functional behavior, as distinct from the organization of the data flow and controls, the logical design, and the physical implementation.” Whoa. They just said conceptual structure and behavior are part of architecture. So it’s not just the physical bits.
1970: Remember Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and its contributions to UX? Xerox PARC tasked an information science team with developing technology to support the “architecture of information.” That’s how we got the first computer with a GUI. This team also gave us laser printing and the first WYSIWYG text editor (“what you see is what you get” — yes, that’s really what it stands for).
1976: Richard Saul Wurman, an American architect and graphic designer who also chaired the American Institute of Architecture’s annual conference, chose “The Architecture of Information” as the conference’s theme (source). Wurman is widely credited for popularizing the term “information architecture” as his address at the conference marked the first modern use of the term as it relates to information design. Fun fact: He also created TED.
Mid-1980s: Blueprints, categories, and other IA design deliverables emerged.
1998: Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld, among the first of modern information architects, published a book called Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. IA went mainstream. In the book, IA is at the intersection of users, context, and content, as seen below (taken from the book):
What’s next?
I can’t tell the future, guys, but here are my final thoughts:
Evolving technology keeps things changing at an incredible pace. The way we do things today may be radically different from how we do them a few years from now. But remember that IA is about organizing information so that we can find, access, understand, and use it. Technology may make it easy, maybe even effortless, but humanity will always have that need. As long as IA design fulfills that need, it’s not going anywhere.
