The new wave of information architecture
Some thoughts on the emerging need for more information architecture
Updated June 17. Originally published June 13, 2021.
Jorge Arango posted a fascinating article about the world’s longest, continuously running company, Kongō Gumi:
“Founded in Japan a mere century after the fall of the Roman Empire, it survived extreme changes in Japan’s culture, government and economy, preserving traditional construction techniques… for over 1,400 years.”
And now, Kongō Gumi has been liquidated.
Kongō Gumi builds Buddhist temples constructed with “interlocking, precision-cut wooden components that can be individually repaired or replaced” that “facilitates renovation and reconstruction over the centuries” by its teams of expert carpenters.
As an information architecture veteran of the last three decades, Kongō Gumi’s story about the slow sidelining of an indispensable discipline really resonated with me. People agree Kongō Gumi’s practice must have able practitioners. They also agree they no longer need enough able practitioners to sustain the Kongō Gumi company.
Higashi Hongwanji Temple, Kyoto, largest Buddhist temple in Japan
The article explains how Kongō Gumi emerged:
“Kongō Gumi founded When Prince Shōtoku Taishi (572–622) commissioned the construction of Japan’s first Buddhist temple, Shitennō-ji. Japan was predominantly Shinto and had no miyadaiku (carpenters trained in the art of building Buddhist temples), so the prince hired three skilled men… Among them was Shigetsu Kongō, whose work would become the foundation of the construction firm Kongō Gumi.”
Change the names of people and organizations, and you have the stories of firms like Argus and Adaptive Path. If you look at Kongō Gumi’s rise, you can see how the wave of Buddhism that washed onto Japan’s shores invoke’s Wurman’s famous quote from Information Architects.
“There is a tsunami of data that is crashing onto the beaches of the civilized world. This is a tidal wave of unrelated, growing data formed in bits and bytes, coming in an unorganized, uncontrolled, incoherent cacophony of foam. None of it is easily related, none of it comes with any organization methodology…”
IA’s first wave
IA emerged as a breakwater against these first few waves of information as they crashed up against organizational shores.
Emerging from a document-centric software paradigm in the 80s, organizations migrated onto document-centric systems, each organization an island with its own system for managing documents. And as the information tide continued to rise, those single islands turned to archipelagos, organizational silos each with their own system’s for managing their documents. And each of these unorganized, uncontrolled, incoherent cacophonies of documents needed their own miyadaiku, their own craftspeople trained in the architecture of information spaces.
They needed information architects.
Information architecture is most effective when you can implement your information architectures as you build or migrate onto a new information system. It’s just easier to customize foundations and run new pipes when you don’t need to re-plumb, reconfigure, or totally dismantle a building that’s already there. It’s easier to build to ideal or better blueprints when you don’t have an existing building already sitting on your foundation.
Just as organizations moved to new document systems during the first information tsunami, they moved again and again as the scale of information exploded—both in documents and in the databases used to create documents. Websites, catalogs, financials all make their way to human eyes as “pages” on screens or paper. And every time, information architecture had the opportunity to be most effective at the beginning to help lay lasting foundations and plumb useful pipes.
“It’s just easier to customize foundations and run new pipes when you don’t need to re-plumb, reconfigure, or totally dismantle a building that’s already there.”
As a plus, organization’s needed information architecture work within and across several scales:
Culture
Organization
Platforms
Sites
Interfaces
Interactions
With work within and across these scales, information architects kept busy building document-centric, digital analogs to Kongō Gumi’s Buddhist temples.
Unfortunately, as those systems and their existing information architectures gathered more and more data and accreted more and more metadata, labels, and classification woven into more and more systems, information architecture became more and more difficult, more and more costly, and less and less useful. Unlike Buddhist temples, document-centric systems weren’t built from precision-cut components that could be individually repaired or replaced.
Kongō Gumi’s demise as an independent company followed this same trajectory. One of Kongō Gumi’s last CEO’s, Toshitaka Kongō, described macro trends around the company’s decline:
“…difficulties with meeting modern-day deadlines (nobody today is willing to wait 15 years for a temple to be built), the challenges of working with other design and planning firms, and the difficulty of navigating the balance between respect for tradition and the demands of the volatile world economy.”
Information architecture arose as organizations grappled with document-centric systems, but that’s not what I.A. does. Information architects codified their methods as organizations grappled with unprecedented numbers of documents, but that’s not what I.A. is. Information architecture designs information environments by affecting the inter-relation of four properties of information:
Relational depth - How explicit is a given semantic relationship?
Coherence - How consistent are concepts, both within and across scales?
Variance - How variable or invariable are content, functionality, and structure?
Seams - How do seams between concepts and environments function?
(To make them more distinct, I’ll refer to these four properties as the Fantastic 4. I describe the Fantastic 4 in a 2020 IA Conference presentation. Watch the video: “Talking About IA: A practical way to talk about, compare, and evaluate any kind of information architecture”.)
Information architecture’s document-centric tools helped us understand and work with the Fantastic 4 across our several scales of culture, organization, platforms, sites, interfaces, and interactions. This was a lot of work. Until it wasn’t.
Why should you care? Why does it matter how we define or perceive the document-centric work at information architecture’s inception?
Because:
Information environments are not required to be document-centric.
Organizations face new oncoming tsunamis of information.
These new tsunamis are built out of interactions, not documents.
We need information architects again. We need them to design and affect new information environments, to leverage the Fantastic 4 at different scales as organizations evolve into new, interaction-centric information environments. We need new information architectures. We need them everywhere. We need them now.
The new wave of information architecture
Organizations have evolved, are evolving, and will evolve to live in a new kind of information environment organized around interactions instead of documents. You can see the emergence of interaction-centric information environments everywhere:
WeChat’s injection of social media and mobile payments into messaging,
Apple Messages’ emergence as an interchange between people and any other interaction or app on an iPhone,
Slack’s and Microsoft Teams’ extensive integrations with external platforms from both internal and external vendors, and
the AI-driven interface augmentation in tools like Microsoft’s Topics and Syntex as well as extended reality platforms like Hololens, Oculus, and Google Glass.
“Organizations that do not have the information architectures to support these new information environments risk drowning amidst the unorganized, uncontrolled, incoherent cacophony of an interaction-centric world.”
Organizations do not have the information architectures to support these new information environments, and every organization desperately needs them. Without them, they risk drowning amidst the unorganized, uncontrolled, incoherent cacophony of an interaction-centric world.
Imagine your daily grind over the last few years and all the documents you currently search through to probably not find the right document you’re looking for. Now imagine that same world, only every possible search result is a different notification in a different place in a different app.
The interaction-centric world flips the document-centric world on its head. Instead of you reaching out to trigger different interactions, those interaction triggers are thrust at you everywhere all the time. And like the document tsunamis of the turn of the century, the interaction-centric tide will continue to rise. And rise. And rise.
We already have the methods. Though the number of IA practitioners has dwindled as their document-centric skills grew less in demand, the information architect practices the unique craft to form and guide information environments across the different scales using the Fantastic 4.
Like the 90s, when the information tsunamis required information architects to fill green fields with new foundations and structures and plumbing, organizations once again move to new vistas with new green fields where information architecture’s value far exceeds its promise.
You don’t need to change your practice from document-centric to interaction-centric. There’s no IA shame in your IA game. But you do get to choose what game you play.
