Information Architecture History

What is Information Architecture? - Part 1

The History of Information Atchitecture

Information Architecture is derived from the need to index and relate complex informational structures and is derived from military logistics where the specific definition and location of stores, munitions, personal and other material were required for successful campaigns.

For hundreds of years Information Architecture has been the domain of the military, scientific, civil government and librarians to support complex indexing systems.

So Information Architecture is several hundred years old, but has not really been recognised by this terminology until recent times. Information architecture is one of the cornerstones of the invention of the internet (carrier technology - network of networks) and latterly the World Wide Web. Vannevar Bush saw the need for a ways to make machinery help people in dealing with information “selection by association, rather than by indexing” alone. His vision of the “Memex” which would augment human intellect by operating as vast data storage fulfilled the vast logistics problems he was facing.

Information Architecture has only in the last 30 years become involved in enterprise systems, intranets and internet systems as their complexity and size has made them less and less understandable and useable. This is also the reason for commercial websites usage of information architects so that customers are able to quickly understand, use and purchase.

Information architecture now covers a multitude of activities and as such is a hybrid. The real problem is that so many people call themselves IA's but mean different things.