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Richard Saul Wurman, who coined the phrase “information architect” in 1976, said that IAs are people who have a passion to make the complex clear. It’s a very concise, simple description. But many information architects working in interactive media now constantly struggle with how to describe what they do, and where to set the boundaries of their expertise.

In Web 1.0, IAs were making the complex clear by creating sitemaps, user flows and wireframes of pages and pages of information. The IA’s competence helps the organization to label, prioritize and organize their information, the design and developer team to create the website, and the user to find the information by clicking through pages in a relevant order.

In Web 2.0, customization and personalization models got IAs to change their sitemapping and flow drawing techniques. The increased amount of interaction calls for prototypes instead of static wireframes. When designers are dealing with linear data, the IA’s role is not just about drilling down to information and organizing the content like the branches of a data tree. There are no easily separable pages, but pathways to information, actions that the user takes to get to the information he chooses.

Of course it can be said that designing interaction doesn’t belong to the IA’s field of work, but the interaction designer’s. However, few IA people can or want to specialize just in strict, structural information organizing, and few interaction designers can design the interaction without organizing and labeling the information at the same time.

As for Web 3.0 – “the more relevant, semantic web” – how does the IA make the complex clear? What new tools and methods do IAs need to learn and develop to communicate the information structure and the interactive script while taking into account the social data and dynamics? How should the growing mobile web be organized differently, and what sort of new opportunities can IAs map for themselves, their field of work, their clients and users?

I’ve put together a presentation that takes a stab at  the above
questions. The architects of the future will need to gather, understand
and interpret more social data, and create structures where the user is
seen as a co-creator. Information systems will be more scalable and
re-usable than before, and IAs should encourage that. Information will
be made searchable, taggable and findable in many more ways than now.
Creating conceptual models that combine all the aspects that affect the
information architecture will become one of the most important parts of
the IA’s role. Some have already chosen to specialize in a smaller area
of work, and many more will do so as the profession grows older, but a
few will always choose to be generalists.

The constant need to
change and learn new skills can scare anyone. But the new work methods
don’t completely displace the old. Architects just need to find the
best ways of making the changing complexity clear again.