What’s the Purpose of Information Architecture?

It’s been fifty years since information architecture’s coming out party in Philadelphia. Alas, the discipline is still widely misunderstood. The main obstacle? The very thing that brought it to many people’s attention: the World Wide Web. I’d venture most people who’ve heard the phrase ‘information architecture’ have done so in the context of designing website navigation systems. That’s understandable: The web is a huge deal and IA was exactly what it needed early in its development. But IA has more to offer than its contributions to UX design. To understand why, consider its ultimate purpose. This is how I describe it: The purpose of information architecture is increasing agency by making systems more legible. Let’s unpack this statement. The word agency is loaded now. We talk of agentic systems to mean those powered by AI agents. But here, I mean ‘agency’ in its original sense: giving an actor (human or otherwise) scope to decide and act independently. Systems are the scope we’re…