Towards a new Information Architecture

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. – Richard Saul Wurman in Information Architects

When the internet was first becoming a thing, it was very different than it is now. It wasn’t very interactive. To be honest, it barely had any interface design either. The great bulk of websites were just walls of text arranged into a semblance of order by tables with the borders turned off. Interactivity was clicking “bookmark,” “set as homepage” or submitting a contact-us form. But what the Internet did have was information. Everybody put everything they had up on the web, from help pages to marketing brochures.

It was a mess, and someone had to make it all make sense. So while most software interaction designers declined to play with the very limited set of tinker toys the internet offered, others stepped up to fight the “tidal wave of data.” And they become the first Information Architects.

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