class meetings
This class meets in room 1255 North Quad on Friday mornings at 8:30am during Winter 2012.
course background
In 1998, two graduates of the University of Michigan's School of
Information and Library Studies were awarded best "computer" book of the year by a relatively unknown online bookstore called Amazon.com. Their book was
(and still is) called Information Architecture for the World Wide Web,
and its authors are widely regarded as the "founding fathers" of IA. Rosenfeld and Morville became world-reknown as authors of "the polar bear book," and the venerable "bible of IA" is now in its 3rd edition. We will read their book in this class.
But there's more to the story of information architecture than polar bears.
With the dawn of the Web 2.0 era and a rising
tide of web design practitioners embracing a more broadly-shared identity under the banner of "UX" , perspectives on the value, role and definition of IA continue to evolve. Work is being done academically and in the field to both understand more deeply what IA is and where it came from, and to use the lens of IA to see into a future of ubiquitous networked information systems and use of information products and services across channels, devices and modalities.
My intention in this course is for students to become conversant with the core principles and ideas of information
architecture, and develop -- as much
as we can in a single term -- a broad understanding of the theory and practice of information architecture.
questions we'll ask
- Where did the idea of information architecture come from?
- Who were the first information architects? What did they do, and why?
- How is IA differentiated from adjacent and related disciplines and communities of practice?
- Does IA matter today? Did it matter differently in the past from how it matters today?
- How do you think like an IA?
- How to you get a job doing IA work?
skills we'll develop
- process flow diagramming
- representing organization schemes and structures
- user experience assessment
- heuristic assessment of information architectures
- credibility assessment of websites/services
- techniques for getting at the "why" of an effort
- techniques for understanding users of an information architecture
- techniques for representing design ideas for making and improving information architecture