Ask me about my laser. 
#blacklivesmatter 
wear a mask (he/him)
You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more
Over the last few days I’ve seen assertions and evidence that information architecture literacy is diminished. Not the least of which: Sitting in a design review where the designers couldn’t explain the structure of their design.https://twitter.com/livlab/status/1179751258237865990 …
Interest in IA was stronger 20 years ago, says @karenmcgrane, and I tend to agree. What’s pulled the rug out from under the field? I posed this question to the @eightshapes team this morning.https://twitter.com/karenmcgrane/status/1179890743789391873 …
What’s caused the decline of IA? @eightshapes theories:
1. Difficult to sell/teach IA in the emergent UX crash courses
2. Agile methods are incompatible with “big thinking” required in IA
3. Small screens (i.e. smartphones) obscure the need for deep thinking about structure
Information architecture, the design of virtual structures, is the last area of web design that hasn’t been commodified. That is, the most proprietary and influential work you can do is on the underlying structure of a web site or digital product.
As we strip away UI — because voice interfaces, because artificial intelligence, because whatever — the structure is all that remains. Information architecture remains relevant, crucial, and at the heart of many of the ethical considerations now facing product design.
One reason you might not see a lot of philosophical work on information architecture is that we *did* that work in the 90s and 00s and it set us far apart — even alienated us — from software development.
You don’t see people like me tweeting about IA theories challenges because they’re alienating, but also complex and proprietary. Twitter is hardly a venue for elaborating on the nuances of designing digital structures. That isn’t to say I haven’t tried…https://twitter.com/brownorama/status/1108792310677016581 …
(I dunno. Maybe Twitter took the wind out of IA. When industry discourse moves from blogs to micro-blogs, there’s only so much we can really dig into. I wrote a shit ton about cognitive linguistics in the 00s.) https://web.archive.org/web/20060512023839/http://www.greenonions.com/archives/2005/07/12/big-blog-of-concepts/ …
Anyway, I love information architecture. I will call myself an IA until my dying day. My best days at work are when I get to puzzle through a difficult categorization problem, or a way to conceptualize a messy domain.
If you've made it this far, maybe it's because you love the challenges of designing digital structures, too. Maybe you haven't had a chance to think deeply about these things, maybe because you haven't found someone who wants to think about them as much as you do.
Well, you found someone who loves information architecture as much as you do (but who's maybe loved it longer). My DMs are open.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.
