IA Growing Roots‐Concerning the Journal of IA

L ast September a new definition discussion broke out on the Information Architecture Institute (IAI) Members List (ia-members). It was fueled by an initial mail concerning a supposedly deceitful narrowing down of the IAI's vision, carried out in secret. As with many other similar threads, popular success among list members was huge and led to a number of spin-off threads, calls to arms, calls to reason and a fair share of thought-provoking posts. Then it quietly died down. The international IA community is now roughly 10 years old, and defining information architecture has been an elusive and maddening task since the beginning. And an enormously intriguing one for information architects worldwide as well, it seems, to the extent that the issue has been awarded its own well-known, fairly successful acronym, DTDT (Defining The Damn Thing). The debate seems unending, and the most differing positions, opinions and views imaginable have been shared through the years, spanning the gamut from blog post to scientific paper, from slide deck to full-blown nothing-spared mailing list confrontation. Since Peter Morville's own seminal Defining Information Architecture in 2000, the IA community has never ceased to try and define itself, often with a certain morbid indulgence in self-deprecation. Why is that? Well, for one thing a definition is inescapable if anything has to be communicated. Words represent our view of the world, but even without taking a full leap into cognitive psychology and linguistics, there are simpler, common sense considerations to be taken into account. First, this " define craze " that regularly seems to seize IAs is somewhat a sign of the times and actually fairly common, and it's a consequence of two different conditions, one internal and the other external: The community is young and somewhat necessarily shallow, and we live in very fast times. Being young means that different layers are constantly confused in conversation: the self, the role of information architect, information architecture as a practice, information architecture as a discipline. These layers are not the same, but they end very often being considered as interchangeable. IA acts like the lively teenager who does not like to listen to his grandpa saying that there are so many hues of gray in the world and that not everything is black or white: I am an IA, therefore IA is what I do. Or vice-versa. Being shallow translates to a certain uneasiness, self-consciousness and scarce …