November 21st, 2006
Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture
by Joshua Porter | 
102 Comments | shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/514
Christina Wodtke (who wrote the book on Information Architecture) is angry about its impending death:
“I recalled a recent blogpost by Adam Greenfield and I found a clue. I think he, and Peterme, and Lou and Peter Morville… well, we’re all outgrowing our favorite pair of jeans: IA. And the waistband is cutting in badly, but it’s our favorite pair, so of course we’re crabby. We’re all going to stay crabby unless we finally take them out of our “skinny” drawer and give them to goodwill.”
Yes, indeed. IA as it has lived will soon die. Not because it wasn’t valuable, not because IA’s didn’t do great work, but because the Web is moving on.
The problem is that IA models information, not relationships. Many of the artifacts that IAs create: site maps, navigation systems, taxonomies, are information models built on the assumption that a single way to organize things can suit all users…one IA to rule them all, so to speak.
Clay Shirky, in his talk Ontologies are Overrated, equates this type of categorization with organizing the world in advance. He uses the dichotomy of browse vs. search as a wedge:
“Browse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure, and in the degree of power derived from that link structure. Browse says the people making the ontology, the people doing the categorization, have the responsibility to organize the world in advance. Given this requirement, the views of the catalogers necessarily override the user’s needs and the user’s view of the world. If you want something that hasn’t been categorized in the way you think about it, you’re out of luck.”
Many IA’s won’t stand for this, however. Their response would be something along these lines: “unchanging taxonomies aren’t what IA is about…it’s about organizing information around the user’s needs, and practices such as card sorting help to do that”.
In addition, writers in information architecture have reacted strongly against ideas such as folksonomies, which are navigation structures built out of one’s own tags. Peter Morville, in his book Ambient Findability, states:
“when it comes to findability, their (folksonomies) inability to handle equivalence, hierarchy, and other semantic relationships causes them to fail miserably at any significant scale.”
This is a valid reply, of course, except that it’s completely wrong. Equivalence is handled by similar tags and tag clusters, hierarchy is handled by nested tags, and it’s pretty clear that both Flickr and Del.icio.us (and many other sites using folksonomies) can scale.
Thomas Vander Wal, in a recent reply to Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy, an article critical of folksonomies (a term he coined), gets at the heart of the problem here:
“This assumption…that taxonomies are great and help people find things by providing the authoritative terms is wrong. Taxonomies are always less than perfect and most often far less than perfect for helping people find and refind information they need. But, we do need taxonomies to provide that foundation structure. We need solutions that can help the many people whose terms and vocabulary are left out of the taxonomy.”
This is, on some level, a platonic vs relative argument. Either you believe meaning is inherent in the natural structure of the universe, or you believe that meaning is relative, personal, and different for everyone.
The biggest cleavage along these lines, as Shirky alluded to, is Google Search (meaning is relative and can be modeled by links) vs. Yahoo Directory (meaning is inherent in the structure of information). We all know who won that battle, but did you know that the Yahoo Directory isn’t even on the Yahoo homepage anymore? Yahoo has all but demonstrated that the directory model, and not the folksonomy model, doesn’t scale.
In many ways, the success of Google’s Pagerank algorithm was the harbinger of all this. The simple idea that people’s actions model meaning better than a directory (even a flexible directory) is a critical step forward in thinking about the Web. The innovation we’re seeing with folksonomies, recommendation systems, social networking sites…all have their roots in the idea that modeling what people actually do on the Web is the best way to provide answers for them. And, perhaps more importantly, it is an admission that we simply can’t predict the future…we can’t design a perfect information architecture, and to attempt to implies that the world we’re modeling doesn’t change.
That said, I’m not claiming that information architecture is bad. In all probability an IA would assume that Search is part of IA, that flexible metadata is part of IA, and most of what I’m using as counter-examples are part of IA.
But the fact is that IA is a theory about the inherent structure of information…the architecture of information…and if we are moving away from that we should call it something else.
Relationship Architecture, perhaps?
In the end, Christina suggests that it is all about change, and that explains why she’s angry:
“Anger is almost always based on fear, and change fuels fear.”
Links to this Post
Comments
1. Wade Winningham 9:24am, Tue 21st, 2006
What about Experience Architect?
2. Martin Ringlein 11:17am, Tue 21st, 2006
IA won’t die — not as long as “content is king”. There will always be a need to organize, structure and determine hierarchy for content — something IA does very well (for those with patience).
What might kill IA is the rapid speed of web development in this Web 2.0 environment — not allocating time for what is a crucial step that might be perceived as “wasteful”.
3. Stephen P. Anderson 12:14pm, Tue 21st, 2006
Excellent summary!
My thoughts…
* Is this the death of ‘information architecture’ or information architects?
* What ‘flavor’ of IA is dying? If we listen to Peter Merholz’s closing plenary (from the 2006 IA Summit), he’s proposing a fairly expansive definition of IA (which may beg a different title)
* What exactly is an IA? I’ve been privy to and participated in a few of these fruitless discussions, but I still draw a line between IA’s focusing on content sites (and metadata and taxonomy and…) vs IAs designing applications (isn’t this really something else?)
* I see the biggest danger for IA’s being not adapting to change– continuing to use tools designed for pages, when the page metaphor is going away (at least for web applications). I’m saddened to see really good IA’s hacking Visio to emulate rich interactions–and calling this a “hi-fidelity prototype.” If you’re going to spend time creating prototypes, create something that can be reused- code, design, whatever.
BTW- having used delicious for a couple years now, some upfront IA work might have helped me– not with filing things away, but with being able to find them again!
4. Jennifer B. 12:56pm, Tue 21st, 2006
Continuous evolution is what I like about my practice of IA. Call it whatever, it’s still at the core, making the complex clear and organizing ’stuff’. If you stay at the abstract level with some practical application, what you do will always have relevance. If you don’t evolve to meet your ‘user’s’ needs then of course you become irrelevant.
5. Austin Govella 1:18pm, Tue 21st, 2006
Not to be too snarky, but your entire premise is terribly, terribly wrong. IA is all about relationships. It’s nothing but relationships: relationships between people, between data, between information, between processes, organizations, markets, products, services, cultures, whatever.
Every IA process discovers, documents, and defines relationships.
Your second huge error: “information models [are] built on the assumption that a single way to organize things can suit all users”. No IA I know of ever thinks this is the case. The main value IA offers is to weed through the *multitude* of ways one can label, associate, navigate *relationships* to choose the reasonably best few for a given context.
And any project I have ever worked on has always offered a minimum of four ways for organizing content relationships: hierarchical site structure, direct access via URLs, horizontal discovery (browse), and keyword discovery (search). And the more complex the project, the mroe ways one has to navigate.
Navigate relationships.
I agree the name may not be the best. It obviously leads people very awry. But in the end, most IAs agree, IA isn’t something you *are*, it’s something you *do*.
6. Josh 4:49pm, Tue 21st, 2006
Austin…I submit that if traditional IA techniques were successful at modeling human/information relationships, Christina wouldn’t have written what she did, and neither would I, and neither would you. However, as you mention, IA is changing to model these things…but the term is confusing.
7. Jay Fienberg 7:11pm, Tue 21st, 2006
This is very incorrect. Or, if it’s correct, you could likewise say that “tag” systems are information models built on the assumption that a single way to organize things can suit all users.
A single information model can simultaneously represent multiple ways to organize things–and represent multiple levels of organization. It can represent tag systems. And, it can represent systems that combine ontologies / taxonomies / and tags (e.g., someone could create a map for Flickr that represents Flickr’s ontology, it’s taxonomy, and it’s tag system).
8. Bob Jacobson 7:56pm, Tue 21st, 2006
Perhaps IA or whatever it’s called is simply too self-referential. It’s great to say that IA is all about relationships, but then so is physics and so are the social sciences. That’s a distinction without value.
Let’s be frank: what happens on the Web is a thin slice of human experience. Crafting effective communications via the Web is akin in many ways to publishing a book or producing a media artifact, albeit one that’s interactive.
When you get beyond that, you’re dealing in information design, which is a field with canons and theories and methodologies that has been conveniently worked around by Web professionals.
Maybe this was necessary, in a pragmatic, workplace kind of way, to establish the special properties of Web design and the worth of people who deal with it, separate from more general information design and information designers.
If so, as Christina suggests, the ruse is up. IAs will become IDs, happily or dragged by the feet. Eventually, being liberated from the Web’s confines will be seen as a blessing. There’s more to information design than keywords and tags, with many more degrees of freedom with which to play.
9. xian 10:08pm, Tue 21st, 2006
It’s also probably worth noting that Google, Delicious, Flickr, and the rest all have information architectures. They have global navigation, their interactions flow in designed ways. The interface for adding a new tag in Delicious is itself a designed artifact.
When Flickr reorganized its top-level menus a while back, that was information architecture (no matter what the job title was of the person who led the team of people who did the work).
I could go on but I think I’ve made my point.
10. Boris Anthony 1:49am, Wed 22nd, 2006
I think what you all are witnessing is not the death of IA, but the death of the notion that it is something peculiar to building structured websites.
Everything the human mind does is IA. The moment you try to communicate in a cogent fashion, IA plays a role.
And yes, without relationships, information has no meaning.
Time to find a new title. Perhaps “interaction designer”, the current hot thing to be, will do?
11. Todd Warfel 12:51pm, Wed 22nd, 2006
IA will always be here, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will always be done by an IA. After all, design and information architecture decisions are made every day w/o information architects. So, while the specific field of IA, or IAs as a sole descrete discipline might fade away, IA itself will remain.
12. lisa 12:56pm, Wed 22nd, 2006
Relationship architecture is what anyone who does any sort of architecture does. They build a model based on things and relationships between these things. They have a vocabulary and standards. Sometimes the model is well-formed. Sometimes it’s not. There are different approaches and some will be more effective in some tasks while others will be in others.
People tend to pit theories against each other as if there can be a winner. Often it’s just a matter of which theory has better results for which tasks.
In natural language processing, there has always been a dichotomy between those who model language statistically and those who favor a semantic model-theoretic approach (like Montague).
Similarly, both formally-structured knowledge of taxonomies and ontologies (which is a model of all relationships) as well as social tagging have their purposes.
People make categories. Some are well-defined based on attributes, others may be more on prototypes. Categorization done by “authorities” always has prejudices built in. However, social tagging also has risks – especially as people see the monetary value of being associated with certain tags over others. Don’t underestimate the power of money in people’s determination of what is proper categorization.
13. Christina Wodtke 2:45pm, Wed 22nd, 2006
OMG, I have never been so misquoted in my life! Teach me to blog… I might as well stick to talking to reporters on the phone.
IA is alive, well and growing, swiftly adapting to social technology advances– see facemap.org. Some information architects are doing a good job, some are not. Some ID’s are doign a good job, some are not. Some usability pundits, some enginerers, etc etc. Don’t confabulate any individual with a body of knowledge.
Me, and several other IA’s have just gotten interested in other things, and have a hard time giving up the profession and communities we adore. This woudl be the same as declaring engineering dead because Jeremy Zawodny publicly annouced it was tiem for him to do somethign else, and while he regretted leaving his profession, it was time to be CEO of something.
I AM SO SICK AND TIRED of every new idea having to jump up and down on the idea that came before. It is hard as hell to shand on the shoulders of giants when you are so busy kicking them in the pants.
14. Josh 10:18pm, Wed 22nd, 2006
Note to all: Christina Wodtke did *not* suggest that IA is dying and I didn’t mean to imply that she did. I took her comment that the original giants in the field were moving on and used it as evidence that the field is mutating into something else. That is not what she meant, so please don’t confuse her post with mine.
So, I’m the one who suggested that IA is dying, and I take full responsibility for starting this discussion…
15. Derek Rogerson 7:12pm, Thu 23rd, 2006
I tried to convince IAs that what they knew about categorization was wrong a long time ago () but got largely abused for it.
IAs uniformly reject the idea of organization which doesn’t operate on a principle of rejection (no categories) because, well, it puts their game out-of-business.
16. William Bardel 9:08pm, Fri 24th, 2006
Information architecture existed before web design went big, and it will still exist after web design reliquishes its white-knuckled grip on it (see Richard Saul Wurman’s broader definition in his book “Information Architecture”). I will be thankful if and when the notion of information architecture as a practice is no longer so predominantly associated with web design work. I think it’s a real shame that the term has been some narrowly connected. There are many other contexts where it aptly and beneficially applies. It makes is hard to talk about the value of IA conceptually when there is such an automatic and constrained assumption of its application.
17. A. Piana Bianco 7:15am, Sun 26th, 2006
Then, I really don’t see the point of all this mumbling…
18. Bob Jacobson 12:51pm, Sun 26th, 2006
Another expropriation worth reversing is the taking of holistic “experience design” and rerendering it as “user experience design”: i.e., designing the experience of using the Web, rather than experiencing life generally. The overwhelming commercial value of Web activity has promoted user experience design as THE sole form of experience design, resulting in reduced attention to the larger issues of designed experiences — an imbalance that is addressed by Experientia’s Putting People First and Corante.com’s Total Experience, among others. It’s a tall order for a few blogs, however, to reopen all the doors and windows, a task that deserves a more robust effort.
19. Rob Fay 8:12pm, Sun 26th, 2006
I don’t think IA is dead. However, our definition of IA must change with the times.
Frankly, I’m surprised the moniker and specific practices have been tied so closely to the Internet, because there are many uses for structuring and organizing information, apart from the Web.
My vote would be to redefine the scope of the practice.
20. nathan 5:29am, Mon 27th, 2006
“The problem is that IA models information, not relationships.”
That is complete and utter nonsense and shows a total lack of understanding. What are information models / taxonomies for? TO SHOW RELATIONSHIPS!
21. Scott Weisbrod 2:40pm, Mon 27th, 2006
Joshua,
Thank you for igniting this conversation. I love the passion I’m seeing in some of the comments here. To me it shows that IA is not dead, but maybe just stuck.
I think it’s stuck and that that is has more to do with the practitioners than the practice. A lot of the leading thinkers in IA are moving on or at least growing beyond IA. Like Christina says, a lot of us are growing out of our favorite pair of jeans.
When folks like Christina are getting angry, I think it has to do with getting frustrated about the conversations that IA practitioners are having with each other and that they’re the same types of conversations that were had 5 years ago.
It’s not that people like Lou, Peter, and Christina want to drag the IA community into the new practices or business problems they’re exploring but they do want the community to join the new conversations they’re having.
The field of information architecture is far too self-referential right now. We’re a little too exclusive when we need to be inclusive (tip of the hat to David Armano on that notion).
Not enough of us are getting uncomfortable and knocking down fences to reach out to other people from other fields and engaging in meaningful conversation about design and business problems. The conversation is stuck and we need to evolve.
22. Shimon 10:48am, Tue 28th, 2006
I would say it won’t die. It will just grow and change with people’s experience…
23. andrea 6:17am, Wed 29th, 2006
as many others do, I don’t think IA will die or is dead already, probably its focus will shift from “structure” to “guidelines” and from a deterministic approach (the IA shapes teh user experience) to a generative one (the IA gives the user the tools to shape her/his user experience).
24. Peter Morville 8:16am, Thu 30th, 2006
Joshua,
I’d expect a more thoughtful, better informed perspective from someone who works for Jared Spool.
In any case, here’s my response:
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000149.php
And, I believe this discussion will only help IA as a role, discipline, and community…so, thanks!
25. Montoya 12:21am, Mon 4th, 2006
IA won’t die, it will just adapt. As all these new methods of finding information develop, IAs are the ones on the forefront learning new things and making these methods work.
26. tercüme 1:58pm, Thu 12th, 2007
I would say it won’t die. It will just grow and change with people’s experience
27. kale kapı 4:02am, Mon 6th, 2007
enthusiasm for blogging about the Summit. It didn’t take away the sense of renewed energy that I’m still feeling, nor is my overwhelmingly positive impression of the event itself diminished, but I’m going to need to take a little extra time to marshal my thoughts and write something about the experience
28. kapı 9:43am, Sun 19th, 2007
[…] Uma taxonomia é um sistema para nomear e organizar coisas que possuem caracterÃsticas em comum em grupos hierárquicos. Com o surgimento da folksonomia na web, muitas vezes, taxonomia virou sinônimo de trabalho do arquiteto da informação (o que tem gerado discussões sobre a morte ou a transformação da arquitetura da informação em arquitetura da interação), enquanto a folksonomia é sinônimo de web 2.0. Mas será que não há formas de conciliar esses dois sistemas de classificação? Uma hipótese: agrupamentos hierárquicos organizados pelo próprio usuário. […]
29. amerikan kapı 8:43am, Mon 20th, 2007
enquanto a folksonomia é sinônimo de web 2.0. Mas será que não há formas de conciliar esses dois sistemas de classificação? Uma hipótese: agrupamentos hierárquicos organizados pelo próprio usuário
30. Jim 10:32pm, Fri 28th, 2007
I think it wont die, i mean look at the bloggers, there was a blog boom, now its not anymore interestant the way it was some months ago. The Way Blogs are simply changed , and so it will be with IA too..
31. seduction 4:46am, Tue 23rd, 2007
nice article and comments found on this page, greetings
32. nezh 11:43am, Wed 7th, 2007
There are more similarities in my argument for a move away from links in our marketing programs and the idea that the way we share information in a link-based system is slowly eroding than at first seem evident
33. sandalye 1:40pm, Fri 16th, 2007
thank you
34. James Burt 2:43am, Wed 5th, 2007
I had to defend that information architecture is not dead but the interaction between individual might be stuck and that there was a strong need to look voices of inspiration outside of the information architecture structure and if traditional information architecture techniques were successful at remodeling information relationships IA is changing to model these things.
35. gümrük 11:48am, Thu 13th, 2007
thank you
36. david deangelo 4:56pm, Mon 17th, 2007
“Anger is almost always based on fear, and change fuels fear.â€
Change also helps a person develop. No change means our lives remain stagnant.
37. oda kapısı 7:44am, Sun 27th, 2008
“Anger is almost always based on fear, and change fuels fear.â€
Change also helps a person develop. No change means our lives remain stagnant.
38. youtube 12:45am, Sun 3rd, 2008
Lastly, I also chimed in on the information architecture is dead debate by suggesting that information architecture is not dead but the conversation amongst practioners might be stuck and that there was a strong need to look voices of inspiration outside of the information architecture
39. rüya tabirleri 12:20pm, Wed 6th, 2008
Thank you.
40. iyinet webmaster forumu 2008 seo yarışması 12:47pm, Wed 6th, 2008
Thanks
41. cam balkon 8:51am, Thu 7th, 2008
amongst practioners might be stuck and that there was a strong need to look voices of inspiration outside of the information architecture
42. youtube 8:53am, Thu 7th, 2008
having used delicious for a couple years now, some upfront IA work might have helped me– not with filing things away, but with being able to find them again!
43. diziizle 12:46pm, Thu 7th, 2008
“Anger is almost always based on fear, and change fuels fear.â€
Change also helps a person develop. No change means our lives remain stagnant
44. youtube 6:35pm, Fri 8th, 2008
I think it wont die, i mean look at the bloggers, there was a blog boom, now its not anymore interestant the way it was some months ago. The Way Blogs are simply changed , and so it will be with IA too..
45. herseybendevar 10:13am, Mon 11th, 2008
agreeable a lot of thanx..
46. paruresis 12:50am, Wed 13th, 2008
thanks for that view.
47. linux 1:20pm, Sun 17th, 2008
great article, thanx
48. Nike Dunks 8:42pm, Mon 19th, 2008
“Anger is almost always based on fear, and change fuels fear.â€
Change also helps a person develop. No change means our lives remain stagnant
49. Dwayne West 2:18pm, Fri 30th, 2008
The people making the ontology, and the people doing the categorization, shouldhave the responsibility to organize the world, but do not want to take control. they seem to want the next person to do it for them.
50. Chat 7:46pm, Tue 15th, 2008
Thank you my friend..
51. Picture Frames 7:11am, Wed 16th, 2008
Just wonder what exactly is an IA?
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53. chat 11:45am, Fri 12th, 2008
thank you ..
54. Müzik Dinle 5:02pm, Mon 29th, 2008
Great work bro. Thanks Müzik Dinle ,Bengü.
55. Voyance 2:13am, Tue 30th, 2008
Very good post ! thanks
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thanks
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62. gorge 4:14pm, Tue 10th, 2009
Interesting preview! but i think he is strange material about Death of Information Architecture
63. sex shop 5:19am, Fri 13th, 2009
I think this is very good idea, but I am affraid but not for me
64. Oyun 8:15am, Fri 13th, 2009
But, we do need taxonomies to provide that foundation structure. We need solutions that can help the many people whose terms and vocabulary are left out of the taxonomy
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67. hdtv antenna 6:10pm, Sat 28th, 2009
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68. Brett Lutchman 5:49pm, Fri 2nd, 2009
Having the benefit of coming back to this piece by Christina several years later has allowed the privilege of having 20/20 hindsight.
Hearing Christina speak at IDEA09 on Information Architecture, confirms that she does indeed believe information architecture is a thriving craft in itself, but as the web evolves, our craft as IAs will also need to change based on the way people interact with the web. Even though I am an IA, I have already ventured out into cyberspace and believe that I am at the forefront of the semantic web and am presently pondering titles like “Thought Collaborator” or “Online Community Leader”. Yes I will still be implementing IA methodologies to any project I take on the web, but I am simply doing this to assist my real goal which is to harvest online relationships and coal-mine contextual and collaborative thoughts to be allotted to specific data points to become useful artifacts that hold value.
To me personally, IA used to be helping people obtain information in the most effective way possible.
Now, IA seems to be more invisible as “Experience & Relative Architecture” seems to be more of the focus.
It is an exciting time to be one of the ones to already have IA under my belt. Taking my craft to the next level as a tool and not as my objective seems to be very fitting for me.
Excellent writeup Christina.
(Thank you Josh ; )