“Frequently… messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.”
“Information Architecture is the only field I’m aware of that is concerned with the structural integrity of meaning across contexts.”
One of the most important breakthroughs in Claude Shannon's work is his insistence that “meaning is irrelevant" to the problems he sought to solve around information storage, transmission and retrieval.
The necessity for humans to understand information, and to account for the dynamics within information ecosystems as data is transformed through various representations, abstractions, and arrangements, is seemingly intractable thanks to Shannon.
The meaninglessness of stored data is quite often reified in the structural design of information and knowledge management systems. In these ways, we can see Shannon's theory as creating the need, which in turn becomes the mother—of the invention of the field—of information architecture.
Information architects turn data (back) into information!
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