About the Information Architecture Institute

The Information Architecture Institute is a 501(c)6 professional organization, operated by a dedicated, multi-national group of people. Volunteering our own resources, we aspire to build bridges to related disciplines and organizations. We invite you to join us in advancing the state of information architecture through research, education, advocacy and community service.

We live in exciting times. As the information age rolls forward, our businesses, markets and societies are being transformed into adaptive, connected networks. The Internet of today only hints at the ubiquitous communication infrastructure of tomorrow. The construction of this brave new world requires a new kind of architecture, focused on digital structures of information and software rather than physical structures of bricks and mortar. As we spend more time working and playing in these shared information spaces, people will need and demand better search, navigation and collaboration systems.

We are working hard to build an international membership that connects people with diverse languages, cultures and perspectives. So far, we have over 2000 members from 60 countries. Our Board of Directors and Board of Advisors are comprised of individuals from six continents. Our Translations Initiative and Local Group Program serves to promote and extend our services to all corners of the world.

Read our Annual Report (2010) (PDF) to find out what we accomplished in our eighth year of operation.

Read our latest Meeting Minutes from the Board of Directors for up to date news on the Institute's activity.

Spotlight on our People

Dorian Taylor

Vancouver, Canada

Dorian Taylor photo

Hi there, you probably haven't heard of me and I can all but guarantee you we haven't met.

That's because I've never written a book and never been to the typical conferences (yet, in both cases). And that is because up until very recently my business card has read "developer" at a bunch of companies that are defunct or close to it. Specifically I wrote hosted, enterprise and infrastructure software, the most dismal, plodding and paranoid kind.

What prompted my change in career was noticing a set of common characteristics in the kind of software I wrote. First, it was of critical value to the business. Second, the non-redundant nugget of original functionality was actually surprisingly small. Third, to achieve that nugget, an absurd amount of resources get spent. Fourth and finally, it is equally likely that an absurd amount of resources will be spent anyway, with very little to show for it.

I reasoned that if we made clarity a priority and had better methods of achieving it, we wouldn't fumble as much, or at the very least the fumbling we did wouldn't be so expensive. Any software is a long and precise incantation of a business process, either one that came before it or one made possible because of it. It is language with behaviour.

Software is capable of directly impacting peoples' lives for better or for worse, and its influence will only increase. It has become my professional mission to unmuddy software, both in the process of its acquisition and its results, and enable people to make it work effectively for them.

Spotlight on our Partners

Web Indexing Special Interest Group of the American Society of Indexers

The Web Indexing SIG of the American Society of Indexers promotes the human indexing of Web sites and HTML documents. Its members are professional indexers who have skills to create A-Z site indexes or perform metadata indexing of HTML documents. The SIG web site provides resources on web site indexing for the broader IA community.