What is Information Architecture?
posted by Anna Mar, December 22, 2011Information Architect (IA) is a widely misunderstood profession. Some think of Information Architects as glorified Web Designers. Others think of IAs as database designers. Still others consider them to be library scientists – classifying and organizing knowledge.
Official definitions from industry bodies don't help much. Consider the Asilomar Institute of Information Architecture definition: "IA is the design of shared information environments".
To really understand the IA profession you need to go back to basics. IAs are members of IT projects. Any project with a user interface that displays data potentially requires the services of a professional information architect.
The contribution of the information architect is to plan and design how information will be used by users, how it will be stored and how all this satisfies the business goals and strategy of the organization. In other words, IAs architect data end-to-end:
usability → data model → business results
Information architects come from a wide variety of backgrounds: database designer, library scientist, user interface specialist and solution architect are all common paths to the IA profession.
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