Information Architecture: Building to Have Clients or Having Clients to Build?
Kym McCauley · LASIE: Library Automated Systems Information Exchange · 2001
A challenge we face in working with information technologies is how to make the internet familiar to clients and users who are comfortable with static models of information transfer. In their handbook Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville establish connections between those who create and utilise physical space and those who specialise in the arrangement of information in 'cyberspace'. In this paper, the author addresses some of the specifics of what Rosenfeld and Morville call 'information architecture' and raises concerns about the way in which their proposed architectural model for online information exchange appears to compartmentalise 'conceptualisation' (or 'creativity') and 'production' in the design of structures and the delivery of information. The author proposes a change in the context of information architecture and a movement in nomenclature from the notion of terrain and objects to the notion of fluidity and flow in order to utilise a wider breadth and range of communication strategies available to us and our clients in the exchange of online information.