[Sigia-l] RE: first principals

[Jesse James Garrett]

Christina asked me off-list for some clarification of my response
regarding IA vs. information retrieval.

In ia/recon I compare the concerns of information architecture with the
concerns of writing and editing for print publications:

"Like the editor, the information architect is concerned most
fundamentally with creating information structures. But the discipline
of information architecture views this responsibility in a very
different light. In the world of information architecture, all
structural challenges are currently viewed as variants of the same
problem -- the problem of information retrieval.

The editorial discipline has to contend with information retrieval
problems as well. Many publications are structured to facilitate
information retrieval: phone books, dictionaries, atlases. These,
however, make up only a fraction of the incalculable volume of material
published every year.

All those other publications (the ones that aren't dictionaries or
atlases) have structures, too. But those structures may not reflect the
orderly classification schemes one would expect in a reference work.
Writers and editors use structure to achieve a variety of goals. Some
structures are intended to teach; others to inform; still others to
persuade.

I believe information architecture can also address this broader set of
problems, and that this potential is already latent in the discipline as
it is now practiced."

<http://www.jjg.net/ia/recon/#part2>

At last year's IA Summit, I gave a presentation entitled "The IA of
Everyday Things", in which I suggested that information architecture is
"the juxtaposition of individual pieces of information in order to
convey meaning".

921 KB PowerPoint: <http://www.jjg.net/ia/jjg_everyday_031702.ppt>

For the purposes of that talk, I deliberately chose the most fundamental
definition imaginable in order to illuminate our discipline's roots in
structuring information for other media. But over the course of the
intervening year, I have come to think that this definition may be the
only one that can comfortably encompass the entire range of
information-structuring problems IAs are called upon to solve. The
common thread through all of our work is juxtaposition for communication
-- finding ways to implicitly or explicitly indicate relationships
between pieces of information.

Whenever people are structuring information to impart meaning -- to
communicate -- they're doing information architecture.

________________________________________________________________________
Jesse James Garrett                                   Now in bookstores:
jjg at jjg.net                            "The Elements of User Experience"
http://www.jjg.net/                         http://www.jjg.net/elements/