The growth of IA in the past 25 years

When starting to look at articles and books about information architecture I kept looping back to a book that was published in 1998, “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web”. It was co-written by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. Both graduated from the University of Michigan School of Information in the early 90s. This book famously is known as “The Polar Bear Book”.

The book was well laid out in showing information architects, designers, and developers how to build a large-scale and maintainable website that was easy to navigate and also appealing to the user. The success of the book opened their eyes to see that there was a need for information architecture. This lead the co-authors, along with others, to open up the Information Architecture Institute. This was a non-profit volunteer organization that was dedicated to advancing and promoting information architecture. This was dissolved in 2019, but they still plan on conferences to keep growing the knowledge of information architecture.

These two created a book that helped grow the information architecture industry to what it is today. Which has overall helped the world of design and developing good UI/UX concepts. The growth of the IA over the last 25 years maybe would have developed on its own, but without this book and the institute created by these two men. I am not sure it would be where it is today.