Nature - Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything - page 6

As our practice evolved and the gap between classic and contemporary information architecture
grew, our community struggled to explain itself, so much so we earned a hashtag (#dtdt) for
“defining the damn thing.” And while accusations of navel-gazing were not without merit, this
was a necessary, productive struggle that helped us shed a web-centric worldview in favor of a
medium-independent perspective.
Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati led us to independence with their manifesto for pervasive in-
formation architecture.
Information architectures become ecosystems. When different media and different contexts are tightly in-
tertwined, no artifact can stand as a single isolated entity. Every single artifact becomes an element in a
larger ecosystem. iii
Soon they were joined by new voices. Jorge Arango, a traditional architect by training, put a new
twist on the old metaphor by arguing that where architects use forms and spaces to design en-
vironments for inhabitation, information architects use nodes and links to create environments
for understanding. iv Andrew Hinton invited us to peer through the lens of embodied cognition
to see that digital contexts are every bit as real as their physical counterparts and to see that lan-
guage is environment and information is architecture. v And Dan Klyn inspired us to “make
things be good” by learning from the lifework of Richard Saul Wurman and by focusing on the
architecture part of IA. vi
I'm excited by the depth and diversity of ideas about the direction of our discipline. And yet I
worry we may be unbalanced. In our passion for placemaking we mustn't lose sight of the in-
formation in the architecture. Our strength in structural design must be joined by an aptitude for
managing information flows, feedback loops, and motivational metrics.
What matters most isn't what we build but the change we make. That's why I'm writing this
topic. I want to study, understand, and clarify the nature of information in systems . In part, it's
about going beyond the Web. Mobile and the Internet of Things are tearing down the walls
between physical and digital, creating new information flows and loops.
It's also about seeing old sites with fresh eyes. Our websites aren't just channels for marketing
and communication. They've become rich, dynamic places where work gets done. Websites are
extensions of the organization that change its nature. To manage them, we must address inputs,
outputs, feedback loops, metrics, governance, and culture.