On Information Architecture: a brief history and a note on the future
Information architecture (IA) answers the question of how we design shared information environments; how do we organize data so that it is searchable, accessible, and understandable? How do we balance the structure needed for today’s data, with flexibility for tomorrow’s unknowns? How do we find what we want in an environment of too much information?
In 300 BCE we were already overwhelmed
As long as humans have recorded and produced information, we have attempted to optimize the organization of such data, with roots in library science. One of the earliest known libraries is ancient Egypt’s Library of Alexandria in 300 BCE. Ancient Egyptians stored their collection of knowledge in papyrus scrolls, indexed by category and author in what is considered to be the first library catalog: the Pinakes.
Historians estimate that the Library of Alexandria held 40,000–400,000 scrolls. For perspective, we have over 129 million published books in the world and nearly 2 billion websites today. So 40,000–400,000 scrolls is pretty manageable…right? Not so much: around the same era, even the author of Ecclesiastes writes, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is weariness of the flesh” (Eccl 12:12). Weariness, indeed.
The 1800s and 1900s: the Dewey Decimal Classification and the World Wide Web
Fast-forward 2000 years to the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). Published in 1876, the DDC’s innovation was in arranging books relative to each other, by subject, using fractional decimals. Before, libraries in the US assigned a book to permanent shelf positions based on its height and the time it was acquired. The DDC provided the ability for new books to be added within a current system, and the ability to expand upper-level subjects with minimal change to this existing hierarchy.
The early World Wide Web was organized using similar hierarchical methods (Yahoo!, circa 1996) while search engines were lacking. Nowadays, thanks to Google in particular, we search for information much more effectively.
While these examples are of IA applied to all the information in the world, it also applies to information in a specific digital application. For user experience (UX) design, this entails organizing a digital application’s content and functionality in a way that provides the best value to target users. Everyone has a different mental model of how information should be organized. User research seeks to identify these models. The challenge in IA is to determine the best design for as many target users as possible.
What’s next?
Most of us regularly interact with digital information via two-dimensional screens — a tablet, a laptop, a phone. With virtual (and augmented) reality technologies, however, we can interact with this digital information as if it were three dimensional. From surgeons, to house-hunters, to Pokémon Go players, virtual reality may soon become commonplace in our lives. As the tools we create become part of our new normal, the way we design these information environments becomes a huge responsibility in how we shape our world. After all, these tools ultimately become extensions of our minds.
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