The first World Information Architecture Day happened twelve years ago. The most recent was yesterday. (March 4.)

If you haven’t heard of World IA Day, it “celebrates information architecture and shares knowledge and ideas from analog to digital, from design to development, from students to practitioners, globally and locally.” I.e., it’s a day set aside for building IA awareness. The “world” part comes from being distributed in small local events around the world.

I was “thematic chair” for the first WIAD and organizer of the local event in Panama City, Panama — my hometown, where I lived at the time. I didn’t participate in yesterday’s WIAD, not for lack of interest, but because my family and I are back in Panama, visiting for the first time since the pandemic. So, this year, I celebrated World IA Day by myself.

We moved to Northern California almost a decade ago. A big draw was being where the world’s leading digital experiences are forged. However, I quickly realized there wasn’t much awareness of IA among folks designing these systems.

Unfortunately, the situation hasn’t changed much in the intervening years, despite the best efforts of a dedicated community. People still conflate IA with sitemaps — and that’s when they consider IA at all. I suspect many see the discipline as a throwback to a prior era.

And yet, IA is more important today than ever — and will be so as long as software continues eating the world.

IA is about establishing clear conceptual distinctions. Ultimately, it’s a design discipline focused on improving how we think. And improving thinking by clarifying conceptual distinctions doesn’t just improve how we think; it also matters to the new intelligences coming online and how we interact with them.

A recent post by Melanie Mitchell claims that conceptualizing is artificial intelligence’s most important open problem. Mitchell notes that “forming and abstracting concepts is at the heart of human intelligence.” Which is to say, clear conceptual distinctions are core to good thinking, whether in humans or machines.

Clarifying conceptual distinctions and relations is what information architecture is all about. Whether people understand IA in this way — or even call it by the label “information architecture” — is somewhat irrelevant. The fact remains that a design discipline focused on clarifying concepts is crucial to designing systems that help us think and act more intelligently.

Information architecture is such a discipline. As such, its ultimate focus is human flourishing — a noble and urgent calling. I’m proud to call myself an information architect and will continue to celebrate World IA Day wherever and whenever I am — even if I’m alone.

From my work

The Informed Life with Carrie Hane
A podcast interview with the co-author of Designing Connected Content about content modeling.

Also worth your attention

Abstraction and reasoning in AIs
“AI’s most important (and enduring) open problem is being able to form concepts and abstractions.” And current LLMs don’t do it. I’m gonna send this article to everyone who wants to argue with me that systems like ChatGPT “understand” anything in the human sense.

A more humane future
Stephen Anderson reflects on his reasons for moving from Twitter to Mastodon. "I want that post-cloud future where my stuff stays with me."

Availability cascades
Marc Andreessen on how ideas spread. The second post in his new (daily!) Substack blog.

IA for Everybody
My friend Abby Covert launched a new 30-minute intro course to information architecture.

Related concepts in taxonomies
Heather Hedden on how to consider relationships between taxonomy items.

Meetings are the work
In defense of meetings. But more than that: how to foster culture change around shared meaning-making. “… what if the only work that matters in a knowledge economy happens when we are together?”

The Alto at 50
The Xerox Alto — one of the most influential computers in history — just turned fifty. This is a good overview of how it came about. “Innovation is the work of groups, of communities. These provide the context and the medium for the actions of the individual… The remarkable story of the Alto is the story of such communities.”

Costa Rican addresses
A glimpse into Ticos’ (Costa Ricans’) idiosyncratic place addresses that rely on cultural memory. Much of what this also applies to Panama.

Tools and techniques

Open Assistant
This sounds like it’s to ChatGPT as Stable Diffusion is to DALL-E. (I.e., an open source alternative.)

Imdone
Intriguing: a Kanban board app for macOS, Windows, and Linux that uses Markdown files as the data format. As such, it integrates with other plaintext tools such as Obsidian. (H/t Karl Fast)

Newsletter lessons
I love this list of lessons for publishing newsletters. Includes some I discovered in the course of writing this newsletter, and some that I plan to apply.

Upcoming events, workshops, etc.

IA Essentials workshop
Mar 29 — I’m teaching a live one-day version of my Information Architecture Essentials workshop at the IA Conference in New Orleans.

Parting thought

Always run by the shortest route; and the shortest is that which follows nature, and leads us to say and do everything in the soundest fashion.

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations