The Moonlighting Student

Information Architecture and Building Stuff

February 23rd, 2008 1:02 pm —  195 views

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What is an “Information Architect”?

Information systems are things1 we use that give us information. They are called systems because they have complex inner workings that typically don’t matter to you, the user. You just want the information the system can provide. Consider your car. It is a complex information system and you need it to tell you certain things about what information it knows. For example, suppose you are about to embark on a five hour drive through a desert. Knowing how much gasoline is in your tank is pretty important.

The Internet itself is an information system composed of many equally complex information systems. All are based upon the ability to access, share, and store information. The internet is a network of physical computing devices. The Internet, with the capitalized “I”, suggests higher level processing and interaction with other systems. Namely, humans in distinct social systems.

Information feeds the system similar to how blood carries oxygen and vitamins throughout the body. It flows through routers, switches, firewalls, network cards, motherboards, CPUs, memory, display adapters, and monitors. Circuitry and software exist as the scaffolding upon which more meaningful systems exist. It is the interaction between people and information that makes for a more meaningful system.

An Information Architect in today’s Internet industry is tasked with envisioning and building systems that are personal, proprietary, secure, scalable, and user friendly. The information that flows through their systems must be useful2 and easy to get. Task completion is of significant importance. Consider what you need if you are trapped in a 30 foot hole. You need a rope so you can climb out. Getting out is the task. Where the rope comes from, what it is tied to, and what the rope is made out of…you don’t really care.

Being an Information Architect means caring about what the rope is made of, how it is made, where it is stored, the conditions of its storage, its accessibility. It means caring about how it is tied and to what it is tied before it is tossed down to the person who will be putting their life on the line when they’re fifteen feet off the ground and only halfway out.

Using software for things like chatting, shopping online, doing your taxes, collaborating remotely, is not a life or death situation as in the rope example, but the use of information, the task driven processes, the need to be useful, are still there. It is clear that people can figure out how to do something given enough time. Once you learn how to do something, you can incorporate that learning into the greater picture of what you’re doing. Over time and use, experience grows and you develop a greater awareness and an appreciation for useful innovations in usability. Locating the nearest gas station and displaying directions to get there would be an innovative way for a car to inform you that you need to get more. Behind the scenes a programmer had to tell your car to study it’s location in relation to nearby gas stations and to calculate whether there is a enough gas in your car to get you to the next gas station based on the general direction you’ve been traveling over the last N minutes.

The driver just needs to know when to get gas. A fuel gauge is useful. An information architect considers what it means to make a fuel gauge that can leverage the assets of other systems such as the Internet, data storage, and flexible displays.

An Information Architect seeks to understand what it means when it is said “in a way that makes sense to them.” In order to understand that, a different type of information is needed; the type of information that you can only get by studying how a person works, how they use information, what type of information they need and when they need it. Ideally this is done in real time while reading their thoughts. Ha.

Image: Took this in the middle of lecture on Friday in a course on evaluating information systems. This lecture focused on principles and strategies behind doing usability testing of information systems like word processing programs, online portals, or big commercial programs like Microsoft Money and Quicken.

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  1. I’m loosely defining “things” as any item, machine, application, or interface. Basically, anything that was designed for use. [↩]
  2. By useful I mean, what the person needs to know when they need to know it. [↩]

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