You can’t spend ten years managing websites without developing some interest and experience in information architecture*.  However, I hesitated a bit to plunk down the conference fees to attend EuroIA conference, held September 24 and 25 here in Paris.  I worried it might be a bit too geeky and jargon-filled for someone like me, who works with IAs, is interested in IA, but is not a practicing IA.  But IA and content strategy are two sides of the same coin, so off I went.

I discovered I could spend hours listening to presentations, geeky or not, on faceted navigation, structured data, clustering tag clouds, implementing identity, and lean IA principles. I also thoroughly enjoyed the more existential questioning that went on in others: can information be architected? Has the industry reached the limits of its architectural metaphor?  I had so much fun at these sessions I left thinking I might be a closet IA.  Hmmm…

Rather than give you a blow-by-blow account of the conference  (you can get all that here) I’d like to share just a few impressions I am left with now that the excitement has died down and everyone’s gone home.

Borrowing from other disciplines. I’ve rarely gone to a conference where there were so many references made to other disciplines.  Philosophy, literature, architecture, urban planning, cognitive psychology, even gastronomy were held up as potential sources for new metaphors, vocabularies, analogies and whatnot.  Maybe it’s a bit of posturing.  But then again, while practical case studies are essential components of any successful conference, a little bit of theory and philosophy can remove you from daily concerns and maybe elevate your reflection a bit.

The limits of architecture as a metaphor.  As we start having to deal with web experience frameworks rather than simple (ha!) websites, perhaps the use of the term architecture as a metaphor for describing what goes into the building of a website, has run out of steam.  One speaker, Dr. Grant Campbell who teaches at University of Western Ontario in Canada, spoke about the city, and its potential to provide a new conceptual framework for the discipline.  And while I found his talk fascinating, I would have been perfectly happy if he’d explored the application of urban planning principles to the web sphere than trying to construct a vocabulary by examining how cities are described in great works of literature.  That said….

My conference keyword:  emergence. What was very interesting in his talk was the idea that out of chaos, there emerges some semblance of order.  I like this interpretation of IA: someone who looks at a company’s chaos and elicits from it a structure that helps people make sense of it—without fundamentally changing the chaos itself.  Patterns emerge, choices emerge, pathways emerge….the fog lifts, like in Dickens’ Bleak House.  Hmmm…maybe he really is on to something.

Questions about lean IA. On a more practical note, New-York based UX designer Jeff Gothelf talked about the need for lean IA in agile development environments.  More sketches, many quick iterations following user feedback, nothing formal until everyone – client, designer, developers, content strategists — agrees on simple, sketched wireframes, that then become the basis for development.  The process sounds simple and obvious, but I think that approach is probably easier on smaller sites, and especially, in environments where people are not so dispersed.  When teams are spread across continents, cultures, and time zones, it can get complicated.

So voila… my key takeaways.  That, and a couple of books…..

*There are several definitions of IA. I’ve adapted two of them taken from the polar bear book, widely considered THE bible on the subject, to offer you one that speaks to me the most: the art and science of combining organization, labeling, search, and navigation systems within websites and intranets.