SI 658

Course Description

Information Architecture --- In 1998, two graduates from the University of Michigan's School of Information were awarded best "computer" book of the year by a relatively unknown online bookstore called Amazon.com. Their book was (and still is) called Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and its authors are widely regarded as the "founding fathers" of IA. Or at least, IA as it came to be understood and practiced by the people who designed and built the first few generations of large scale websites and intranets. With the dawn of the Web 2.0 era and a rising tide of web design practitioners embracing a broadly-shared identity under the umbrella concept of User Experience Design, perspectives on the role and definition of IA continue to evolve. This course is designed to teach students the core principles of information architecture, provide opportunities to apply and push back on those principles in a variety of realistic contexts, and develop - as much as we can in a single term - a broad understanding of the world of IA work and the diverse opportunities to do it (or sound smart talking about it) in the "real world".