Information Architecture

The empha­sis on the social design of com­plex infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ments is evi­dent in this def­i­n­i­tion from the Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture Institute:

1. The struc­tural design of shared infor­ma­tion environments.
2. The art and sci­ence of orga­niz­ing and labelling web sites, intranets, online com­mu­ni­ties and soft­ware to sup­port usabil­ity and findability.
3. An emerg­ing com­mu­nity of prac­tice focused on bring­ing prin­ci­ples of design and archi­tec­ture to the dig­i­tal landscape.

An IA Curriculum

In their eval­u­a­tion of var­i­ous IA cur­ric­ula, the Grad­u­ate School of Library and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin, devel­oped these learn­ing objec­tives for their own pro­posed curriculum:

• Under­stand and apply the­o­ries of infor­ma­tion orga­ni­za­tion and retrieval as they relate to man­ag­ing
  elec­tronic resources.
• Have a basic knowl­edge of a Web pro­gram­ming lan­guage and the soft­ware design process.
• Design, imple­ment, and ana­lyze data from social research projects.
• Under­stand and apply the con­cepts of user-centered design and Web site usability.
• Research, plan, and man­age IA projects.
• Be famil­iar with key aspects of the appli­ca­tion of elec­tronic infor­ma­tion resources in edu­ca­tional
  and/or busi­ness environments.
• Develop and prac­tice the soft skills of work­ing in a team envi­ron­ment, crit­i­cal think­ing, and prob­lem
  solving.
• Effec­tively com­mu­ni­cate ideas and con­cepts (both orally and in writ­ing) on many dif­fer­ent lev­els of
  under­stand­ing, from end users to clients to cor­po­rate sponsors.

It’s instantly rec­og­niz­able as a dis­ci­pline within the field of library sci­ence, but cer­tainly a learn­ing designer would feel com­fort­able with these objectives.

Read­ing List

These have been selected from the IA Canon:

• To read
• Rec­om­mended
• You have bet­ter things to do

• Lack­off, G. (1999). Women, fire, and dan­ger­ous things: What cat­e­gories reveal about the mind.
• Rosen­feld, L. & Morville, P. (2002). Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture for the World Wide Web.
• Wodtke, C. (2003). Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture: Blue­prints for the Web.
• Mor­rogh, E. (2002). Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture: An Emerg­ing 21st Cen­tury Pro­fes­sion.
• Gilchrist, A. (2003). Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture: Design­ing Infor­ma­tion Envi­ron­ments for Pur­pose.
• Wur­man, R.S. (1997). Infor­ma­tion Archi­tects.