WIAD 2020 - Becoming Information Architecture

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BECOMING INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Andrew Hinton | World IA Day 2020 Atlanta andrewhinton.com | @inkblurt

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1 Becoming an Information Architect

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Multi-User Domains (MUDs, MUSHs, MOOs.) Bulletin Board for my Quake Clan’s website, circa 1997 Quake Map: The “wireframe” and the rendered room. 1989 - 1998: Increasingly fascinated with making digital places

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One of my first clients: their site’s structure was breaking their organization

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“Living in a house is parallel to working in software … a floor plan supports the structure of life in the house… Contextual Design represents the system work model in a new modeling technique, the User Environment Design (UED).” – Contextual Design, 1998

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Discovering a community with obsessions similar to mine

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“... No terms adequately describe the relationships among the intangible elements that constitute a web site's architecture. The elements of information architecture - navigation systems, labeling systems, organization systems, indexing, searching methods, metaphors - are the glue that holds together a web site and allows it to evolve smoothly.” – Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 1998

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“I mean architect as used in the words architect of foreign policy, I mean architect as in the creating of systemic, structural, and orderly principles to make something work—the thoughtful making of either artifact, or idea, or policy that informs because it is clear.” – Information Architects, 1997

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From “floor plan” to screen-by-screen “wireframes”

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20 years of modeling to “make the complex clear”

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2 Becoming a Discipline

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The definition of information architecture, as presented (or proposed) on AIFIA.org in 2002

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Argus & SIGIA-L ~2000 IA Summit / IA Conference 2000 - Present AIfIA / IA Institute 2002 - 2019 World IA Day 2012 - Present IDEA Conference 2006-2010 Boxes & Arrows 2002 1998 1976 1989 1997 1996 1996

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3 Becoming the Future

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Digital enables maps that behave like territories

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Our entire human environment is “the web” now…

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What things are in the environment? What do we name them? What are the relationships between the things? How do those relationships shape the environment? How will the environment structurally behave? What are the causes and effects? PLACEMAKING