Advances in Information Architecture

This chapter frames the ongoing epistemological evolution of information architecture as a shift, under the pressure of social and technological change, from the “classical” information architecture of the 1990s and early 2000s to a “contemporary” information architecture. It then establishes a differentiation between the two, modeled in accordance with the conceptualization of innovation in fields of knowledge offered by Van Gigch and Pipino’s Meta-Modeling Methodology.

First came the primordial soup. Thousands of relatively simple single-celled web sites appeared on the scene, and each one was quickly claimed by a multi-functional organism called a “webmaster.” A symbiotic relationship quickly became apparent. Webmaster fed web site. Web site got bigger and more important. So did the role of the webmaster. Life was good.

Interview about enterprise information architecture practices, the changing role of the information architect, the importance of the Academics and Practitioners Roundtable to support research and academia in the field of IA.

Originally published on Adam Greenfield’s v-2.org website on October 4 2006.

Andrew Dillon, who served as dean of the School of Information, University of Texas at Austin from 2002 to 2017, is interviewed about his contribution to the academic information architecture community, the relationship between academia and practice, the critique of information architecture works, and how he considers the field part design and part science. He also provides his point of view on information architecture as an independent field of study and its potential future.

This is the transcript of Jesse James Garrett’s closing plenary address, delivered March 22, 2009 at the 10th ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit in Memphis, Tennessee. The talk addresses infighting and division in the professional community over the labels “information architecture” and “interaction design” for the work practitioners do. Garrett’s solution is to forgo both labels for a third: “There are only, and only ever have been, user experience designers.” Other topics include creating a body of knowledge and a language of critique for information architecture; ethical implications of user experience design work; the dimensions of human experience as media for design; embracing the community’s role as a cultural force.

When the internet was first becoming a thing, it was very different than it is now. It wasn’t very interactive. To be honest, it barely had any interface design either. The great bulk of websites were just walls of text arranged into a semblance of order by tables with the borders turned off. Interactivity was clicking “bookmark,” “set as homepage” or submitting a “contact us” form. But what the Internet did have was information. Everybody put everything they had up on the web, from help pages to marketing brochures.

An interview with Lou Rosenfeld, co-author of Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond, originally Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, where he lays out his part in the history of information architecture as a community of practice, the emergence of interaction design and user experience from that budding community, dynamics of professional organizations, and the importance of and need for information architecture within businesses and organizations.

A summation of Roundtables held yearly in conjunction with major information architecture events between 2014 and 2019; details out the purpose, structure and experience of the Roundtable and describes the nature of resulting artifacts. Also presented is information about each Roundtable: 2014 Teaching Information Architecture; 2015 A Language of Critique for Information Architecture; 2016 A Discussion of Masterworks: What Makes Good Information Architecture Good; 2017 Mapping the Domain: Navigating to a Discipline; 2018 Ethics and Information Architecture; 2019 Diversity and Inclusion.

Industry events should reflect the diversity of their body of practitioners, but diverse, inclusive, and safe events don’t happen by accident; like the information-based structures that Information Architects create in the digital space, the information-sharing structure of a conference, workshop, or other events must be designed with intent and purpose. This case study outlines efforts undertaken by several Washington, DC-area events as well as the Information Architecture Conference during 2018 and 2019 to better architect Diversity and Inclusion within industry events. The purpose of these activities was to help event organizers to plan and execute better, more diverse, and more inclusive industry events. It describes the 2019 Diversity & Inclusion Workshop series that was undertaken at three of these events to inform diversity and inclusion efforts by the IA Conference, for which one of the authors served as 2019 diversity and inclusion co-chair, and shares the diversity, inclusion, safety, and accessibility topics identified by workshop participants. The chapter concludes with actionable steps that can be taken to improve industry events and their organizational bodies. The goal of this case study is to encourage and support conscious efforts to engineer better events, by leveraging information architecture (IA) and user experience (UX) techniques applied in larger contexts and information spaces.

An interview with Terence Fenn, a senior lecturer at the University of Johannesburg and frequent author of information architecture and design papers, talks and presentations, where he discusses how his interest in information architecture developed over time, how he teaches information architecture to his students in the Art, Design and Architecture school, the social and cultural importance of design, and how he has been using information architecture to redefine how to teach design in a post-colonial, post-Apartheid South Africa.

The chapter discusses the impact of increasing amounts of information; the limitations of micro- and macro-models; the benefits of the levels of analysis framework introducing additional levels to manage information complexity; inversion as a mechanism to leverage complexity.

In this chapter, I discuss the state of information architecture as a professional occupation in Japan from the perspective of Edward Hall’s distinction between high- and low-context cultures. I describe the Japanese cultural practices and the attitude toward the division of labor based on Hall’s and use these to situate the professional development of information architecture as a practice in Japan. I then present the traditional Japanese educational method of learning skills called “do (道),” discuss Seigow Matsuoka’s editorial engineering as a “do” form of information architecture, and introduce a possible “IA-do” approach to information architecture and information architecture education.

In order to identify and enumerate some of the normative criteria for critique (or appreciation) of a given info-architectural structure, system, or solution, two candidate “masterworks” of information architecture are provided for evaluation and discussion: the 1st edition of James Joyce’s first novel, Ulysses, and the only edition of Richard Saul Wurman’s second book, The City: Form and Intent.

Interview discusses information architecture in Brazil; The evolution of information architecture; The importance of systemic thinking and a phenomenological perspective; the Meta-model methodology (M3); architecture and information science; and the relationship between information architecture and user experience.

The chapter analyzes the organization of space and narrative in video games as an instance of the information architecture of digital environments and of the structural role it plays in shaping experience. It does so by adopting two different ways to analyze the space/narrative relationship: Lynch’s spatial primitives for cognitive mapping, and McGregor’s taxonomy of spatial patterns. These are then applied to read three different action/adventure video games: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Shadow of the Colossus, and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. The reason is threefold: to illuminate the individual information architectures of games that might, on the surface, be regarded as providing very similar experiences; to contribute to the ongoing conversation on embodiment and spatiality in information architecture; and to provide an example of how contemporary information architecture can be employed to critique different types of information environments.

Interview covers understanding environmental contexts of information; complex information problems; models as a way to express structure; focusing on language to communicate the value of information architecture; maintaining a conversation channel open between academics and practitioners.

An interview with Carol Smith, Senior Research Scientist in Human-Machine Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, in which she talks about how she practices information architecture in her artificial intelligence and emerging technologies work. She reviews the importance of information structure and organization, the use of language and how that impacts structure, understanding users, and ethics in artificial intelligence.

The need to focus on feminism in information architecture; the importance of defining “the user”; defining feminism in social and academic contexts; feminist studies and practices within information architecture and related disciplines such as HCI, information science, and interaction design; a feminist agenda for information architecture.

Today’s information architecture (IA) practitioners work in a morally and politically challenging climate where pervasive, systemic problems demand that we consider the consequences of our work for social justice and sustainability. Using “Information Architecture in the Anthropocene” as a framing device, and drawing from critical perspectives in design scholarship, this chapter explores what these systemic problems mean for everyday information architecture practice, and it asks what methodological, theoretical, and paradigmatic qualities would enable information architecture to respond adequately to social and environmental challenges. Both design and information architecture practitioners are deeply involved in ongoing sociopolitical problems, which highlights the need for awareness of their limitations and their situatedness within the systems that are traditionally treated as objects for detached research and design. Reflexivity, informed by a systemic epistemology, is identified as a critical attribute for information architecture in the Anthropocene. Three proposals are offered as ways to achieve this: information architecture as a developmental process, information architecture as ethical practice, and information architecture as a network. These approaches apply processual and relational interpretations, along with biological theory, to the practice of information architecture, challenging our field to include ourselves in the systems we study and to rethink information architecture as a responsible practice.

Our purpose here is to present a structure and a vocabulary for discussing time in relation to information architecture. Designers need a way to look across time to see the shapes of performances in order to design satisfactorily for human activities in relation to systems. We elaborate on what we mean by performance rhythms, and show through examples how these rhythms both arise out of and influence human behavior. We provide a vocabulary of timings, rhythms, and cadences to model the time aspect, and show how these behaviors develop in behavior settings within a domain. This analysis comes from an embodied perspective and a practice perspective, where human behavior is viewed as always being physically embodied in actual practices in the real world. Even online behaviors generate a social sense of embodied presence that captures participants in a collective sense of being in a common setting. While important for current design scenarios, addressing performance rhythms will become critical as information systems expand in intelligence and autonomy. The more automated systems become integrated into human life, the more human rhythms need to find resonance in human-system interactions and uses.