Information Architecture

Introducing Information Architecture

Definition Information architecture (IA) is a design discipline that is

focused on making information findable and understandable.

• Places made of information
• Organized for optimum findability and understandability.

The problems that information architecture addresses

• In the past, the information is embedded in and tied to its container. A one-to-one relationship between information and container.
• Then comes the “Rip-Mix-Burn” campaign. Information had dematerialized.
• Challenge: Information Overload
• Information is decoupled from both the artifact and from the contexts.
  • Digital media are part of a system that can gather other information as well.
  • Such decoupling has also made reproduction and distribution cheaper and easier.
• Consistent semantic structures across different channels → such must be abstracted from actual implementations
• Balance between structural coherence (high-level invariance) and suppleness (low-level flexibility)

Defining information architecture

We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its

stones.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

• Basic Concepts of IA

  • Information
  • Structuring, organizing, and labeling
  • Finding and managing
  • Art and science

• Information Ecology = Users + Content + Context