Explaining IA by Dan Klyn.

In this four-minute video Explaining IA, Dan Klyn gives a brief history of the field of information architecture beginning with Richard Saul Wurman. Dan also offers a description of information architecture as the thoughtful contriving of ontology, taxonomy, and choreography in the service of utility and delight—making the complex clear.

The transcript is below.

Transcript of Explain IA

“My name is Dan Klyn, and I'm an information architect.

“I came to this profession through library and information science. But when it comes to explaining information architecture, I found the best place to start the discussion isn't in the library. It's in Pennsylvania or in California.

“Most folks understand that if you want to build something that's remarkable yet inhabitable and usable, the person you call is an architect. As early as 1976, Richard Saul Wurman understood that architects could be equally essential to the design and construction of remarkable work in two dimensions. As chair of that year's AIAA conference, Wurman introduced an idea that he called the Architecture of Information.

“Fast forward 20 years and his architect colleagues had largely lost the thread. In the interim, Wurman shuttered his architecture practice and opened a new firm called The Understanding Business. This was an incredibly prolific period for Wurman and in 1996 he pushed his ideas even further in a book titled Information Architects, a beautifully printed collection of writings and graphics by designers whose work exemplified the definition of information architecture on its cover, making the complex clear.

“As was the case with his conference in 1976 Wurman's 1996 Information Architects book was ahead of its time. Just two years later, a book called Information Architecture for the World Wide Web became an instant bestseller and was named Technology Book of the Year by a then-new company called Amazon,

“Written from a Librarianship Perspective by Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, this book was intended for a technology audience presenting frameworks for designing and organizing the information within complex websites. With each new edition of the Polar Bear book, the definition of information architecture changed and grew. In retrospect, this abundance of definitions contributes to the present difficulty in explaining information architecture.

“Happily, the profession does not appear to be suffering in the absence of a concise or authoritative definition of information architecture, as evidenced by a robust job market for information architects and by tens of millions of web pages referencing information architecture and by a professional organization for information architecture with 1400 members in 80 countries.

“Information architecture has come a long way since 1976. Each fall, I teach a class called Information Architecture, and the best way I've found to explain it to graduate students is to start with architecture and Wurman, dive deeply into Rosenfeld and Morville, and then distill all of it down to the three things that define what it means for me.

“The first is ontology. IA discovers, defines and articulates the rules and patterns that govern the meaning of what we intend to communicate. The second is taxonomy, developing systems and structures for what everything's called, where everything is sorted, and the relationships between labels and categories. Lastly, IA is concerned with choreography, the structures that create foster specific types of movement and interaction, anticipating the way users and information want to flow and making affordances for change over time.

“In my teaching, and even more so in my practice, I've found that information is rarely the thing that inspires and delights. In the context of building and as far back as Vitruvius, achieving an appropriate balance between inspiration, utility and delight is understood to be the special domain of architects and of architecture. And so for me, information architecture is the thoughtful contriving of ontology, taxonomy, and choreography in the service of utility and delight, making the complex clear.

“That's how I explain IA.”