O’Reilly: News — An Interview with Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville:
[...]“Hill: Did the concept of information architecture originate in the field of information studies?
Morville: It’s hard to say where the concept of information architecture originated, since people have been doing information architecture in one form or another for centuries. The structure and organization of books, maps, libraries, museums, and cities are all artifacts, in one sense or another, of an information-architecture design process.
Rosenfeld: People have been developing information architectures ever since a stylus was first applied to a clay tablet. All information systems have an architecture, planned or otherwise. Books, for example, have sequential, numbered pagination, move top-to-bottom and left-to-right, use title pages, tables of contents, and back-of-the-book indices. These are all architectural conventions that we take for granted. But their acceptance took decades after Gutenberg’s revolution.
Web sites, on the other hand, generally have unplanned, accidental information architectures. The conventions aren’t really there yet, which isn’t surprising given how new the medium is. With all of these information systems, someone has been functioning as the information architect, consciously or otherwise. So information architecture is nothing new in practice.”
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