InfoD: The term 'Information Architect'

[Richard Saul Wurman]

  * The term 'Information Architect' *  (reply to the discussion)

    message by:  Richard Saul Wurman


I feel that words and actions both have great importance.

My passion has been to make things that interest me
and that I do not understand, understandable.
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My passion is to make the complex clear.
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The best of architectural training results in the systemic
ability to create solutions that not only respond to performance
but enhance performance.

To see & describe the interrelation of these systems as they work
is an art form.  This is a model for the information architect.
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Several years ago in San Francisco, at the San Francisco
annual meeting of the AIGA I conducted a survey of the 1200
participants.

   What kind of commission, what kind of job or what kind of
   task in graphic design would they like to be asked to do?

Their overwhelming selection from a rather exhaustive list was
to design a poster.  Making the complex clear, making information
clear, information design; charts, graphs, maps and environmental
graphics could just as well not have been listed for all the
votes they received collectively.  The poster aesthetic
represents *design* to many designers.
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The various books that have been produced on graphic diagrams
have been devoted almost exclusively to the aesthetics of the
beautiful diagram, the beautiful map and chart - not their
performance, not their system and not the analysis and criticism
of their performance.  The departments of graphic design that
offer valid courses to this end are practically non-existent.
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I do believe there is the need for new words.  I do believe
there is the need for new actions relative to understanding.
I do believe leadership for these words and actions comes
from several communities

      1. thoughtful graphic designers
      2. creative information technologists
      3. writers and journalists

The individuals who cross the boundaries of these three groups
have the potential of being information architects.
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As for my TED Conference, it examines the merging and converging
of the technology business, the entertainment industry and the
design profession in the service of learning and communicating.
So the emerging of the information architect comes from the
merging of the several disciplines serving understanding.

Unfortunately, the title 'designer' in much of the popular 
parlance has come to mean that person who takes a product, 
a space, a book, a piece of clothing and makes it LOOK BETTER 
as opposed to the individual who seminally creates something 
that is better.

I see no cleavage between Americans, Europeans or Asians in 
this regard and the very notion that this term is thought to 
come from America and is thought of as a means of grasping at 
a new business or that it has some notion of exclusivity is 
patently absurd.

We live in the AGE OF ALSO, an age with multiple paths and
choices, an age when one can choose TO DO THIS or ALSO CHOOSE
TO DO THAT.  I have never remotely advocated or proselytized
the adoption of a specific descriptor - I have rather simply
put *Information Architecture* on the buffet table of choices.
After the dinner is over it will be interesting to see if it
was left untouched or needs replenishing, because it fills
and fulfills a viable descriptor appetite.

Richard Saul Wurman

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Some concluding thoughts by Conrad Taylor
of the InfoDesign editorial team:

    It would seem that, now that the adjective "designer"
    is being applied to jeans, hair and even lager beer,
    some information designers are finding that when they
    call themselves designers, they are thought of as
    mere decorators of the surfaces of things -- stylists.

    For Wurman and other recent contributors to this list,
    the term "information architect" is an attractive
    alternative, because people understand that a real
    architect is concerned with structure and purpose.

    For others among us, it is not yet time to abandon
    the term `designer' and surrender its use to mere
    stylists.  Rather, in our individual practice, in
    public through our associations, and by engaging in
    debate with the educational institutions which train
    designers, we should insist on such a breadth of
    definition for the word 'designer' as would have
    been understood, for instance, by the Bauhaus.

    Conrad Taylor


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