.cross.wired.mind.

There is a great article over at IAwiki about defining IA. For those interested in some of the history and contention this is a great place to start.

You may also want to see the IAI about the definition issue. While your there check out Andrew Hinton’s 25 Theses.

More on my definition later.

I had a good conversation with a friend last night about defining information architecture. His feedback on the beginnings of my definition was very helpful. He said that it seemed too static. He reminded me that any given document (I will post on his definition of a document later) has a life cycle and its place in any scheme of organization and categorization changes over time, and that the nature of changes themselves can be valuable information. I am not just talking about the substance of the changes, but a record of the who, why, and when of each change. He went on to say that the critical element in any information system are semantic relationships.

This led me to think about the concept of an information ecology. A good brief definition that I like is the one from Wikipedia:

It marks a connection between ecological ideas with the dynamics & properties of the increasingly dense, complex and important digital informational environment and has been gaining progressively wider acceptance in a growing number of disciplines. “Information ecology” often is used as metaphor, viewing the informational space as an ecosystem.

In the book Information Ecology, Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak write:

Information architecture, in the broadest sense, is simply a set of aids that match information needs with information resources. A well implemented architectural design structures information in an organization through specific formats, categories, and relationships. (p. 156)

Though I like this definition I feel that “needs” and “aids” are just too vague. I prefer to bring substance to those terms by highlighting the broad categories of “needs” and “aids” that we, as information architects, find to be at the core of our discipline.

Given my discussion last night and my subsequent thoughts on information ecologies I am revising my definition:

Information architecture is the practice of creating organizational systems, navigation systems, and categorization schemes that capture and reflect the relationships that shape information spaces, facilitate understanding, and make information easy to find.

Again, I will need to go back and explore some of the terms in that brief definition in order to make it clear that information spaces are much akin to ecosystems in that change is constant, growth needs to be accommodated, and entropy can set in.

There is a great resistance in the IA community to formalizing a definition of Information Architecture. Some believe it will be too limiting. They say that they do not want to be boxed in. Some say they would rather just do it than take the time to define what it is. Still others see a danger in creating a definition because it may tie Information architecture to closely to a given channel like the Web. And some just see it as a pointless exercise in navel gazing.

I disagree with all of them. I believe that defining our craft can only enhance our ability to propagate our ideas, recruit new IAs, and to bring IA into academia. We have to be able to articulate the core concepts and general approach that IAs bring to bear on the information problems faced by the world as we move into an age where access to the Net becomes truly universal, while at the same time the Net begins to shake off its PC centric nature. As the cross connections in the infoverse become more complex there will be a greater need for the designers of information systems to be able to make those systems usable. Usability in this sense goes beyond the traditional definition of human computer interaction. In this case usability goes hand-in-hand with findability.

Information architecture is the practice of creating organizational systems, navigation systems, and categorization schemes for the express purpose of shaping information spaces in order to make any given piece of information within the infospace easy to find.

This may seem like a simplistic definition on the surface but there are many terms that require deeper exploration. What is information? What is an organizational system? Etc. Definition of those terms will take time. Hopefully it will lead to a great diversity of thought. That is the beauty of such a brief definition - it makes the creation of sub-disciplines easy. For example, one key area of practice in Information Architecture is the Web, another could be electronic libraries, or even physical spaces that are actually infospaces.

From this simple definition a wide variety of sub-disciplines could be spun off. We could develop areas of practice or SIGs. Curriculum development could be enhanced to allow for general courses as well as sub-discipline specific lines of study. Far from limiting IA to a single channel we can take the essence of IA and apply it where ever there is an information space that requires shaping.

Thoughts?