http://journalofia.org/volume3/issue2/03-resmini/
The metaphors we use constantly in our everyday language profoundly influence what we do because they shape our understanding. They help us describe and explore new ideas in terms and concepts found in more familiar domains.
Earl Morrogh, Information Architecture: An Emerging 21st Century Profession, 2003
Information architecture (IA) is a professional practice and field of studies focused on solving the basic problems of accessing, and using, the vast amounts of information available today. You commonly hear of information architecture in connection with the design of web sites both large and small, and when wireframes, labels, and taxonomies are discussed. As it is today, it is mainly a production activity, a craft, and it relies on an inductive process and a set, or many sets, of guidelines, best practices, and personal and professional expertise. In other words, information architecture is arguably not a science but, very much like say industrial design, an applied art.
Even though its modern use, strictly related to the design of information, goes back no farther than the mid-1970s and Richard Saul Wurman’s famous address at the American Institute of Architecture conference of 1976, use of the term information together with the term architecture [1] has been around for a little bit longer and in quite a few different settings. In an IBM research paper written in 1964, some 12 years before Wurman, and entitled “Architecture of the IBM System/360” (Amdahl et al 1964), architecture is defined as
the conceptual structure and functional behavior, distinguishing the organization of data flows and controls, logical design, and physical implementation.
It is not disputable that we are talking computer architectures here, disks and boxes and wires and hubs, but the way in which the term architecture is abstracted and conceptualized in connection with structure and behavior and not just physical layouts laid the basis for the subsequent extension of its use to other areas of computing [2].
A few years later, in 1970, at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a group of people specialized in information science was assembled and then given the charter to develop technology which could support the “architecture of information” (Pake 1985). This group was single-handedly responsible for a number of important contributions in what we would call today the field of human-computer interaction, including the first personal computer with a user-friendly interface, laser printing, and the first WYSIWYG text editor. As Marti Hearst, now a professor at the University of California Berkeley, recalls,
(p)erhaps because of the social nature of information creation and use, much of the technical research at PARC has emphasized the human-computer interaction and social aspects of computing.
Weitzman (1995) supports this notion that the modern inception of the term originally came from Xerox Labs [3]. Quoting Smith and Alexander (1988), Weitzman maintains that
Xerox was among the first corporations to address this notion of information structure and use the “elegant and inspiring phraseology, the architecture of information” to define its new corporate mission.
This high-level framing, the necessity for a broader vision, remained one of the core concepts for those who wrote about information architecture up to the mid 1980s, as much as this joining of specialists in information science and in user-focused development (Ronda León 2008), a trait that will be somehow brought to greater visibility and results by the first wave of modern information architects in the 1990s.
From the mid 1980s, information architecture seemingly went through a dormant period, during which the idea of information architecture as both the design of complex or dynamically changing information seemed to be lost to a view much more akin to that of information systems. Articles written in those years mostly refer to information architecture as a tool for the design and creation of computer infrastructures and data layers, with a larger emphasis on the organizational and business aspects of the information networks (Morrogh 2003).
Curiously enough, much of the design deliverables we associate with information architecture today are a product of this period: blueprints, requirements, information categories, guidelines on the underlying business processes, global corporate needs, they all make their way into information architecture-related territory in the 1980s (Brancheau & Wetherbe 1986). They will be incorporated once and for all in the information architect’s toolkit by the wave of the late 1990s lead by Rosenfeld and Morville.
This is what Ronda León describes in his graphical chronology of information architecture: identifying key books, papers, and conferences, Ronda León introduces a three-part development hypothesis (Fig. 1) spanning roughly 30 years, in which the two early phases, that of information design (1960s-1970s) and that of system design (1980s), are integrated into the modern mainstream idea of information architecture as we know it today in the 1990s.
It seems fair to infer that the early take on information architecture that developed from the IBM papers, PARC, and Wurman’s initial vision was still coalescing when the emergence of the World Wide Web provided a one-time chance for pioneer-minded professionals to operate on large amounts of data in a new media, void of or minimally encumbered by preexisting corporate hierarchies. In 1998, Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville’s book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web [4] hit the shelves, and information architecture went mainstream.
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 either artifact, or idea, or policy that informs because it is clear. I use the word information in its truest sense. Most of the word information contains the word inform, so I call things information only if they inform me, not if they are just collections of data, of stuff.