Information Architecture: An Academic's View

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, Aug/Sep 2006 by Campbell, D Grant

I am an academic and have been one for over 20 years, apart from some truancy in the 1990s. I started research in literary studies and then moved to information studies; I have therefore attended and spoken at conferences in a number of different areas, including the American and Canadian Societies for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the International Society for Knowledge Organization, the American Society for Information Science and Technology and the Canadian Association for Information Science. Both my research and teaching lie in the areas of classification, metadata and electronic text design. I attended my first IA Summit in 2004 and have been attending every year since. In this article, I will outline some of my thoughts as an academic towards the field of information architecture, particularly as manifested in the annual IA Summits.

Why Did I Go?

I submitted an abstract to the IA Summit in 2004 for several reasons. Information architecture as an area of research had been lurking on the periphery of my attention for some time: I had the vague idea that information architects were deeply involved in the act of bringing Web information to users. IA seemed to pull together many aspects of information design that have all too often been separate: user studies, user cognition, information policy, search engine design, interface design, metadata and classification.

The chance to see classification and metadata issues discussed outside the library environment particularly intrigued me. Discouraging evidence was piling up that LIS research remained isolated from other domains of inquiry, and I was growing restless and discouraged. All the roads labeled "metadata" and "classification" seemed to lead back to library science, and much as I admire and respect library science, I occasionally want to see how other people are solving problems of information organization, information filtering and overload, user needs, labeling, categorizing, ordering, sorting and displaying.

I also knew that two of my friends were going that year; I therefore wouldn't have to have dinner alone. And Texas is warmer than Ontario in February. Many career decisions have been made for poorer reasons.

The People

When I arrived at the opening reception for the 2004 Summit, I was struck immediately by the crowd's air of intensity: an air which I've since discovered is a central feature of the Summit. Groups form and discuss information issues voraciously, sometimes with loud voices and laughter, and sometimes quietly, with intense stares. People have formed friendships with attendees of previous Summits and watch for them anxiously: cries of joy, far more abandoned than one finds at the ASIS&T Annual Meetings, are common, as are rapturous hugs and a tendency to talk in that verbal shorthand that is common with people who are completing each other's thoughts, without troubling to bring outsiders up to speed.

At first, I thought the delegates were displaying insular snobbery; later, I came to realize that this behavior arose from an intense hunger to be among other information architects. Practitioners of IA spend much of their professional lives explaining what they do to others and patiently justifying their roles to skeptical project stakeholders who know nothing about information. At the IA Summit, they are among friends; what looks to the outsider like snobbery is in fact intense gratitude and relief. Delegates are often in tears on the last day and at the closing session of the 2004 Summit, an information architect got up before the assembly and burst into an impromptu rendition of "You Light Up My Life."

The culture of IA Summits reminds me of a dartboard. At the center of this intense group stand the "stars." Information architecture is a young profession, and the dynamic individuals who got it going are still very much alive and very much in evidence at the Summit: Jesse James Garrett, Lou Rosenfeld, Peter Morville (frequently called "PeterMo") and Peter Merholz ("PeterMe"). Moving out from that center, we find a group of information architects with many years of experience: Margaret Hanley, James Melzer, Fred Leise, Samantha Bailey, Karl Fast, Amy Warner, Liva Labate, Javier Velasco, Dave Heller and many others. They live and work all over the world. A significant number of these people are alumni of Rosenfeld and Morville's pioneering IA firm, Argus Associates, and get together to reminisce about Camelot and all its glories. These people attend every year, and present frequently; their presence and contributions provide the base of continuity that gives the IA Summits their unique aura.

At the outer edge of the circle we find a wealth of people who come and go: researchers like myself, looking for ideas and insights; practitioners looking for solutions to specific problems; thoughtful people from government, industry, the non-profit sector and the health professions trying to make difficult information decisions with very little training or experience, in urgent need of ideas and advice.