Nathaniel Davis: Information architecture has been characterized as both an art and a science. Because there’s more evidence of the former than the latter, the academic and research community is justified in hesitating to give the practice of information architecture more attention.
If you probe the history of information architecture for the web, its foundation appears to be rooted in library science. But you’ll also find a pattern of borrowing methods and models from many other disciplines like architecture and urban planning, linguistics and ethnography, cognition and psychology, to name a few. This history leads many to wonder if the practice of information architecture is anything other than an art of induction for solving problems of architecture and design for the web…
Certainly, there is one concept that has persisted under the radar for many years with limited exploration. It is littered throughout countless articles, books and papers and is present in the most cited IA practice definitions. It may be the single concept that truly bridges practitioner and academic interests around a central and worthwhile topic. That concept is structure.”
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