IA Summit 2005—About the Summit

About IA

About Information Architecture or Defining the damn thing...

Information architecture is:

• The combination of organization, labeling and navigation schemes within an information system
• The structural design of an information space to facilitate task completion and intuitive access to content.
• The art and science of structuring and classifying web sites and intranets to help people find and manage information
• An emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape. From Rosenfeld and Morville ¹

As practitioners this means that we do anything from organizing content to mapping workflows; from understand business objectives to creating XML schema. Information architecture for this conference is NOT data architecture or visual design, though many practitioners in the field touch upon elements of these related fields.

We call ourselves interaction designers, content strategists, content modellers, business analysts or information architects; whatever gets us the role and the job done.

Information architects are the type of people who like to discuss this in great detail. See the SIG-IA list archives for threads or IA wiki .

This conference in particular focuses on information architecture as it pertains to the digital landscape. We are trying to broaden it to include all sorts of devices and deepening it to defining repeatable methods.

1. Rosenfeld, Louis and Peter Morville, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Edition, O'Reilly, 2002

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updated: 12/04/04