Adaptive Path Blog

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, you may have found yourself in an airport. Any troubles using a check-in kiosk? Locating your gate? Making a connection? Did you find yourself staring at the “arrivals” displays when you actually wanted “departures”?

Or perhaps you’ve been holiday shopping. Some stores probably delighted you — clear selection, items juxtaposed in interesting fashions, and knowledgeable staff helping you make sense of an array of choices. Other stores may have frustrated you — searching in vain for what you want; clueless salespeople giving misguided suggestions; items on shelves that are tagged for a different item.

Whatever you’ve been up to, you’ve doubtless come into contact with information architecture. When done well, information architecture can help you make sense of the world, accomplish your goals, delight in unexpected serendipity. When done poorly (or, more typically, not intentionally addressed at all), information architecture will simply get in your way, and probably piss you off.

I’m thinking of this because of some recent brouhaha in user experience blogs and mailing lists on Joshua Porter’s post “Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture.” What Josh’s post fails to understand is that, well, information architecture cannot die.

Information architecture has been around as long as there was information that needed to be related to one another. My favorite definition of information architecture comes from David Fiorito in a mailing list post: “organization, categorization, and navigation
(maybe that should be wayfinding).”

Organizing, categorizing, and helping people navigate an information space will never “die.” And it’s not solely a web phenomenon — the IDEA conference that I organized showcased examples of information architecture from a breadth of fields (museum design, park curation, media arts, information visualization, etc.) and demonstrated that wherever there is complex information that needs to be presented for people to engage with, there is information architecture.

So, I would argue that information architecture’s impending death is greatly exaggerated. However, I believe that this current swell of discussion comes from a valid place of concern — that information architecture is stuck. There have been some attempts at moving the discourse forward, but that continues to be drowned out by quotidian discussions around “How do I make my web go better?”

Still, I have hope. The response I got from the IDEA conference suggests there is an audience for farther-reaching, channel-and-media-crossing, information architecture discussion. Early reports from the reviewers of submissions to next year’s IA Summit suggest there will be much conceptual groundbreaking happening in Vegas. Chiara’s post from earlier this month suggested many tasty unsolved problems.

So put away your mourning clothes and break open that pad of post-it notes. Let’s continue to unstick information architecture and apply it’s principles and approaches to all the complex information problems we face!

Share This

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Information Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.