Early in my career, I was a prim copy editor annoying to those who had big ideas and wanted to express them quickly and forcefully. Armed with The Chicago Manual of Style and other references, I painstakingly edited documents to be used as guides in winning and managing client engagements — work done by consultants to improve their clients’ businesses and make them more profitable. It was in this context that I first came across the term, “information architecture.” Naturally (and annoyingly) I balked.
“What’s this?!” I demanded to anyone within earshot. The few who were — a cube mate and fellow workers who came to our cube to use the copy machine — could not or would not answer. They really weren’t interested in the coinage of the term that likens designing a structure of information, composed of words (or nowadays, bytes), to designing a structure built from bricks and concrete, wood, steel, and glass.
The term hadn’t made it into the print dictionary I had at the time (1997), nor is it in the current version of Merriam-Webster Online. I drew my own conclusion about the word’s meaning, but can no longer recall what it was. There are plenty of other online references, however. I just discovered on Wikipedia that Richard Saul Wurman, a bona fide architect, coined the phrase in 1976, “in response to the large amount of information generated in contemporary society, which is often presented with little care or order.” (An aside: I should have already known this.)
Anyway, I am delighted to learn the term’s provenance and am even more delighted to learn that there are other people who not only share my passion for buildings and words, but — more clearly than I — see a relationship between the design of structures for words (information) and of structures for people.
Over the coming weeks, I will delve into information architecture to learn more about it. I will look at my recently adopted city of Dallas to see and appreciate its structures with eyes not yet jaded by familiarity. Time permitting, I will begin again a mothballed correspondence course in home renovation repair and learn at last how to use a hammer and saw, in addition to the technology required by the Master of Science in Interactive Communications program at Quinnipiac University Online.
I will report my findings here. I hope you will find them interesting.
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