Adventures of an Information Architect

What's an Information Architect Doing Telling Stories?
by Thom Haller - February 1, 2000

I structure information.

It's my vocation. It's my avocation.

It's my … well, it's me.

I'm the guy who loses his place when reading. The guy who is asked by friends, "what books are you carrying around now." The guy who had to learn to think and write in bullets. I'm the guy who needs to see structure in documents.

I'm the guy who gets lost trying to find my way across a gasoline pump. Gets lost using a microwave, and doesn't even try to program a VCR. I'm the guy who inevitably pulls doors open the wrong way. I'm the guy who appreciates the nod from author/teacher Donald Norman that perhaps the doors weren't designed with users in mind.

But I'm also the guy who believes we can structure information so people can find it and use it.

I had to learn to structure information. No one taught me. I've discovered models and structures. I even quit my job as a writer so I could learn to write.

And now, I'm … well … writing.

Primarily, I write stories. I take to heart the Sartre quote that man sees everything that happens to him through stories, that man tries to live his life as if he were telling a story. I do. I can't help it. As I learned to structure reality, I grabbed hold of narrative structures (a West Virginia background didn't hurt either--storytelling is in our blood). I studied rhetoric in school (structuring information for a specific purpose) and traveled a professional route through instructional design, technical writing, and storytelling.

Along the way, I gathered a sense of myself. I was a user advocate.

"Goodness" I said to myself (we say "goodness" when we're from West Virginia). "Why is it that we don't write or present information that is clear?" "Why is there little value placed on structure?"

Then infoglut arrived. I learned about Richard Saul Wurman's book "Information Anxiety" and became an information architect. (Now, of course, we're the buzz.)

Which is why I'm writing. People now are getting a sense of information architecture. And although I've "enjoyed" the past few years telling people I was an information architect and then receiving blank, "huh?" expressions, I'm now meeting people who have a sense of what I do.

What I do is help people find their way through information. What I do is tell Thom stories. And what I'm hoping -- in sharing them -- is that you take the stories and use them to explain to others what it feels like to be lost in information. Because if you want to understand how someone could possibly get lost…. Stay tuned.

© 2002, Info dot Design, Inc.