Chapter 2. Practicing Information Architecture

Information architecture is everywhere

Whether the world needs information architects

Qualifications and source disciplines for information architects

Information ecologies and their impact on the practice of information architecture

What is information architecture? Is it an art, a science, or a craft? Who should do this work? What qualifications are required? These are the questions we grapple with as a community of information architects. We write articles and publish books. We debate on discussion lists and argue passionately at conferences. We pull out our hair. We lose sleep. This is serious stuff.

And yet, independent of our intellectual theories and existential agonies, something very powerful is taking place. We are being surrounded, quite literally, by information architecture.

Have you ever walked through Times Square in New York City at night? It's quite a spectacle. You're on the corner of 42nd and Broadway. The glassy facades of buildings are pulsing with real-time information, courtesy of the latest in flat-panel display and projection technologies. Business news, financial data, corporate logos, and URLs are lit up in neon. Taxicabs sport billboards on their roofs as they honk their way through traffic. Pedestrians (or shall we say "users") hustle past one another, chattering into their cell phones or stopping on the corner to check email or get directions on their wireless PDAs. This is William Gibson's cyberspace turned inside out, physical architecture meets information architecture, a world of content, labels, and metadata all competing for your attention.^[*]

^[*] See the Flickr photo pool "Everyday Information Architecture": http://www.flickr.com/groups/everyday-information-architecture/pool.

And that's nothing compared to the real cyberspace, a new reality where we spend increasing amounts of time. How many hours do you spend staring at a computer monitor each day? How often do you check email or pop open your web browser? When your Internet connection is broken, how do you feel?

The World Wide Web has lived up to its name. It has connected and transformed the world. Want to know what's going on? Check out nytimes.com, bbc.co.uk, or your favorite blogs. Planning a trip? orbitz.com and kayak.com will meet your every need. Having trouble with your green iguana? No need to leave the house. You'll find the answer at iguana.com.

Billions of web pages have sprung up since the Web began. And guess what? Information architects played no role in designing most of them. This has been an emergent, bottom-up, grass-roots phenomenon. But every single web site that exists does have an information architecture. They're riddled with labels and taxonomies, vocabularies and metadata, sitemaps and indexes. There are portals linking to portals linking to search engines. Pure navigation. Some is good. Much of it isn't. We can critique it and we can make fun of it, but we can't stop it. Information architecture happens!