Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture (2014)

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^[287^] Photo by author.

Chapter 15. Information as Architecture

Every exit is an entry somewhere.

—TOM STOPPARD

Contemplating “Cyberspace”

INFORMATION HAS BEEN THOUGHT OF AS ARCHITECTURAL IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER FOR A LONG TIME. But, the extreme scale and complexity of it that we now face is a fairly modern preoccupation. Mechanized production certainly enabled a massive rise in information material, but it was digital technology that truly allowed information to come untethered from the surfaces of the world and replicate with seemingly no limits. Information architecture is in many ways a response to this digital unmooring and subsequent explosion, and it started even before the Web.

Ideas and efforts have been around for many years that treat computer-based information environments in physical, spatial ways, even though they haven’t necessarily used a combination of the words “information” and “architecture” to describe them.

For quite a while, a popular term of art was cyberspace. Back in the early 1990s, Bruce Sterling explained how cyberspace isn’t really some futuristic virtual-reality dimension; rather, it is something more mundane and already here:

Cyberspace is the “place” where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person’s phone, in some other city. The place between the phones. The indefinite place out there, where the two of you, two human beings, actually meet and communicate. Although it is not exactly “real,” “cyberspace” is a genuine place. Things happen there that have very genuine consequences. This “place” is not “real,” but it is serious, it is earnest....It makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.”^[288^]

Since its earliest days (Figure 15-1), the telephone has created a real-time conduit made of electricity—a sort of time-space wormhole, as path and place.

Figure 15-1. A couple enjoying the pleasures of cyberspace, in a 1910 postcard^[289^]

But as it turns out, even after the Internet arrived, cyberspace didn’t last long as a place “all its own.” It’s become so interwoven into our environment that there’s hardly a dividing line between one dimension and another. It is many places, all at once, all of them more or less woven into the physical dimension—what cyberpunk characters dismissively called “meatspace.”

The writer William Gibson—who coined the term “cyberspace” in the 1980s—has himself had an evolving perspective on what it means to unleash digital information into the atoms that surround us. He’s long said that cyberspace hasn’t turned out to be the virtual-reality construct he described in his early stories. He now sees cyberspace as everywhere. It has turned inside out and “colonized the world.”^[290^]

When I wrote Neuromancer, cyberspace was there, and we were here. [Now], what we no longer bother to call cyberspace is here, and those increasingly rare moments of nonconnectivity are there. And that’s the difference. There’s no scarlet-tinged dawn on which we rise and look out the window and go, “Oh my God, it’s all cyberspace now.”^[291^]

Cyberspace always sounded a bit exotic, but it isn’t really all that mysterious. It’s just a way of talking about how information has become disconnected from physical objects.

The more practical aspects of such an environment, as well as what it means to make that environment and navigate through it, have been a preoccupation throughout the twentieth century—from Vannevar Bush’s “memex” in 1945, to Doug Engelbart’s work in the 1960s. Both Bush and Engelbart were less technologists than humanists, using technology to augment and enhance human life. That is, the sort of thinking that grapples with cyberspace isn’t ultimately about just the gadgets and networks. It’s about the sort of world that humans create for themselves.

Since the Internet’s arrival, there have been other milestone works about the human experience of information environments and what sort of places we are making with information technology:

§ Information scientist Marcia Bates’ work (see Chapter 14) brought a paradigm-shifting evolutionary perspective to how people experience and take action with information through exaptation of early-hominid strategies for exploration and survival.

§ Howard Rheingold, inspired by the compelling and intimate community he’d experienced in the “WELL” (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), wrote a great deal especially in the 1990s about the future of social software, such as in his 1993 book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (MIT Press).

§ William J. Mitchell, a professor of architecture and media arts at MIT, and former director of the Smart Cities research group at its famed Media Lab, in his 1996 book City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (MIT Press) and other works.

§ Sherry Turkle’s ethnographic research into MUDs, and her resulting 1997 book, Life on the Screen (Simon & Schuster).

§ Brenda Laurel’s influential Computers as Theatre (Addison-Wesley Professional), exploring the existential nature of information environments, in 1991.

§ Janet H. Murray’s 1998 book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (MIT Press), discussing, in part, how digital technology might enable literature to be something we physically inhabit.

These are all landmarks, but they’re only a small sample, part of a large body of work making sense of how information establishes a sort of architecture that we are still coming to understand. These conversations began well before the advent of the Web or the commercial, public Internet. I mention this because, for many who went on to practice information architecture, this was the discourse that made “architectures of information” important and fascinating from the outset.

Architecture + Information

As for the label, “information architecture,” several threads, especially since around 1970, spawned different usages and versions of the phrase for technologists, design and architecture practitioners, and, later, web professionals. They are all complementary in various ways, but have been somewhat separate domains, at least until recent years.^[292^]

In the early 1970s, there were already discussions at places such as IBM and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) about the broader challenges for structuring semantic information within digital systems into environments that would make sense to humans. Xerox PARC, in particular, included as part of its charter in 1970 to support “the architecture of information.”^[293^] And in 1976, Richard Saul Wurman introduced the phrase “information architects” as part of the theme for the annual meeting of The American Institute of Architects in Philadelphia.

Wurman continued to develop his ideas on what he meant by “information architects,” and went on to publish more books on the subject, including Information Anxiety (Doubleday), in 1989, and Information Architects (Graphis, Inc.), in 1997, in which he clarifies that his idea of information architecture isn’t just about information graphics. He writes, “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.”^[294^] Note that Wurman does not say “make it simple.” Complexity is to be made more clear to be understandable, even when it cannot be made more simple.

Prior to Wurman’s 1997 treatise, Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville were noticing that the newly emerging World Wide Web was spawning information environments, and these “websites” were getting out of control. They saw that the anything-goes hyperlinking of the Web was undermining the needs of organizations, even as they were coming to depend on the Web as a crucial part of business. Morville and Rosenfeld saw an opportunity to use the ideas and methods from their expertise in library science in the service of making sense of the Web for those organizations.

They used the phrase “information architecture” because it seemed to them that the practice was less about designing the visual “pages” of the Web than what was “between” those pages—the paths and nodal structures that made up entire Web environments.^[295^] This is why they called their early column in Web Review magazine “Web Architect.” And it’s why they used the term “architecture” for the methods and ideas collected in their groundbreaking book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (O’Reilly). When the concept of architecture for a more understandable and navigable Web was unleashed, more books, methods, and ideas followed from others in the growing community. Those of us trying to figure out the big questions around what it means to create understandable, coherent, useful places on the Web—where people can understand what they’re doing, where they are, and how to discover what they need—started gathering under the information architecture umbrella.^[296^]

Expansive IA

For many who identify as information architects—or at least as practitioners who do their work from an architectural point of view—the pre-Web, big-idea threads about society, complexity, placemaking, and systems have always been part of the discussion. But, some still see information architecture as a limited, specialty practice—really a set of methods—for organizing information inventories and static website hierarchies. Although these practices are still a critically important subset of what information architecture has become, there is a recent resurgence in a more expansive perspective.

Early, Web-centric information architecture practice was mainly about solving the problem of information disorganization and overwhelm, as a result of which users felt they were “drinking from the firehose” (as the saying goes). Even that metaphor is too limited now. Information has changed the hose, the hydrant, the firehouse, and the city itself. As a community of practice, information architecture is at a watershed moment, at which it has to re-embrace some of its early, expansive perspective to address the ambient-technology challenges we now face.

This expansiveness is not a “land-grab” from other practices. Complex problem domains have many dimensions and facets. Information architecture attends to only some of those, regardless of the work at hand. Rather, an expansive view means looking beyond the myopic focus of neatly contained systems of organization and arrangement. It means embracing the more complex challenge that Wurman first articulated in the 1970s: a way of seeing the problems we face with information, embracing their complexity while architecting what is needed to make that complexity “clear.”

Most of this movement has grown in recent years, although less through books than through conversations, presentations, and papers. However, there have been books such as Peter Morville’s ahead-of-its-time Ambient Findability (2005, O’Reilly) and Resmini and Rosati’s Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences (2011, Morgan Kaufmann), which have helped establish a more expansive point of view. Most recently, Morville’s Intertwingled (2014, Semantic Studios) presents information architecture as a way of dealing with big, systemic human challenges that go well beyond websites; Resmini’s edited volume, Reframing Information Architecture (2014, Springer) is an explicit attempt to change the way we think about information architecture as practitioners and scholars.

These are just a few officially identified works about information architecture, but there are many others that frame it in other ways, in other facets of this vast discourse. Most of the innovation and discovery happening in the world of software design—and environmental design, generally—is being done by people who don’t call their work “information architecture” to begin with. That’s how the culture of practice works—all practices take time to coalesce under common language. We’re in the midst of just such a long transition for information architecture.

About Definitions

While information architecture has many voices and many faces, for our current focus I want to establish a baseline for how I frame it going forward. For over a decade the generally accepted definition of information architecture has started with the phrase the structural design of shared information environments. The full definition includes specifics about websites, findability, and the community of practice (see Figure 15-2). But, as intended at its introduction, that first phrase acknowledges that the landscape is changing in its details, yet there will always be a need for making sense of environments. I have found it a valuable way to frame the work, and it has been a touchstone for everything we’ve covered in the book so far, so let’s unpack it a bit.

Figure 15-2. The definition of information architecture, as presented (and, really, proposed) on AIFIA.org in 2002^[297^]

First, the key words structure and design. Here are their primary definitions, according to the Oxford English Dictionary:^[298^]

Structure

The arrangement of and relations between the parts or elements of something complex.

Design

A plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, or other object before it is built or made.

Structure is implicitly about something complex, and how its parts are arranged in relation to one another to create and/or accommodate that complexity. All complex things have structure, but that structure isn’t necessarily clear or understandable. This is why structures we rely on to handle complex, human-made systems require design.

Design, when brought to the problems of structure, is much less about “look” than “function.” It’s the explicit attention to the function of structural arrangement rather than the happenstance, tacit aggregation of parts that occurs when structure is not deliberately considered. Form and function are inseparable; everything with form functions at least at the level of perception, and everything with function requires form to exist.

Next, the remaining parts of the phrase:

Shared

Adding the word “shared” was an effort to highlight how information architecture is mainly concerned with multiuser environments,^[299^] but I think we can safely set that qualification aside, now that being connected to an electronic communications network—all the time, everywhere—is more common than not.^[300^]

Information environments

This last phrase is what this book has been mainly about—establishing what we mean by these words. The prior chapters have explained that, in a sense, all environments are information environments; however, they involve several modes of information in various combinations, with different effects.

To my mind, information architecture as a practice is centered on the semantic information mode, but not bound by it. The practice also has to do with how the functions of the semantic mode inform the affordances of the physical mode, and how both are influenced by the digital mode. In my airport scenario from Chapter 1, information architecture would be a relevant practice for improving not only the digital software but the brand loyalty-program categories, the airport wayfinding, the way WiFi access is presented to users, and the structural design of how all these services conjoin to function as an environment.

Information architecture uses language as the primary material for stitching together the environmental invariants that language informs, and that inform language in turn.

In a branch of anthropology that concerns itself with how we form professional identities and learn from our peers, there is the idea that a “community of practice” has a “domain” around which it orbits and coalesces—a sort of central concern.^[301^] For our purposes here, then, the central concern of information architecture is how information creates environmental structure and supports environmental understanding. One reason I’ve waited until this chapter to discuss information architecture explicitly is that, hopefully by now, those words have a lot more meaning for you than they would have had otherwise.

I suppose it doesn’t have to say “environmental”—isn’t all structure and understanding related to some environment? But I want to be sure we’re always remembering we’re working with situated, embodied structure and understanding, not just abstractions.

Also notice that I didn’t limit the central concern to “semantic” information alone. That’s because, at least for the purposes of this book, information architecture’s semantic toolset needs to account for physical and digital information, as well—using semantic function in the service of helpingphysical bodies comprehend all manner of environments disrupted and changed by digital technology.

As for our focus on context, information architecture isn’t only about context, and context isn’t only about information architecture. However, context is certainly an important concern for information architecture practice, and context can certainly be made better by designing coherent, humane architectures of information.