Andrea Resmini - Advances in Information Architecture: The Academics / Practitioners Roundtable 2014–2019

Perhaps not as heavy as it should. What you hold in your hands now is a milestone: cut from the raw earth, hewn and chipped at, carved and shaped, set down in place as a marker of distance traveled. Such milestones are infrequent and distinctthats what makes them useful markers.

In this case, the distance traveled is the distance between nothing and something: from scraps of ideas pasted together into makeshift frameworks to formalized language, practices, dialectics, and an emerging cultural identity as a global community of practice across societies, cultures, languages, and formsmuch of it led by the unique voices you will encounter in this book.

Information architecturethe structural design of bodies of information to align them with human psychology and behaviorwouldnt exist in the form we know without these people, their ideas, and their stories. But information architecture has no origin story of its own, because the origin of information architecture is intimately bound to the origin of humanity itself.

Compared to every other species on the planet, the human animals mastery of information is undeniable and unparalleled. Gifted with the remarkable processing power of the human nervous systema mystery so deep in its complexity it challenges our notions of complexitys limitshumans developed the ability to do more than simply sense and respond to their environments, but to reshape their understanding of the world based on the information latent in those experiences.

When the human mind first turned experience into information, combing meaning out of the constant flow of sensory and emotional inputs, taking conscious control of its own understanding of the world, true sentiencethe essential quality of human consciousnesswas born. So was information architecture.

At the deepest psychological level, association and juxtaposition drive the meaning we bring to, and take from, our experiences. These deep processes are the associative engine behind both our extraordinary capacity for intuition and our propensity to fall into the predictable psychological traps of bias and prejudice. This is the messy, high-speed, unconscious realm of Daniel Kahnemans System 1; it is also the dream logic of Freud and the mythic, archetypal landscape of Jung. This is where the enduringly common human experiences are written that gave Joseph Campbells hero his thousand faces.

This fundamental process of association and juxtaposition is the essence of the craft of information architecture. The field in which information architects operate is the ancient, unconscious wiring of the human mindthe part that shapes the conscious minds experience almost invisibly. Every fracture in our culture wars is the result of clashing, incompatible information architectures: one individual drawing a very different meaning from the world than another, based on a very different internal understanding of the world. Every individual human consciousness shapes, and is shaped by, its own information architecture.

It is through this web of conceptual association that we give meaning to and make sense of our world. But it is also through information architecture that we consciously, intentionally sculpt that meaning according to our own designs.

Because the power of information architecture doesnt just apply at the individual level. When we needed to communicate our accumulated understandings to one anotherreplicating a bit of one persons associative matrix in the mind of anotherwe assigned sounds to ideas and markings to the sounds and we called it language. And the structure of the languages themselves was built on association too, as onomatopoeia seeped into our phonemes and crude visual renderings of a person, a tree, the sun became letters, icons, ideograms.