Information architecture is a systemic design discipline. The bulk of the work consists of establishing distinctions. These distinctions are in service to creating particular contexts that allow individuals to “find their own paths to knowledge.” As a result, the nature of the IA challenge is holistic; we’re fixing a whole so the brain gets in.

A system, you’ll recall, is a set of elements that interact with each other in particular ways that allow the whole to achieve a purpose. This calls for a “big picture” perspective: understanding the system’s purpose and how the interactions between its parts lead towards desired outcomes.

Consider an e-commerce website. A high conversion rate could be one desired outcome for such a system. Perhaps its current semantic structures aren’t doing a good enough job of supporting customers as they go through the purchasing process. The information architect will carefully consider labels and groupings that improve the customer experience. These labels and groupings establish distinctions in the customer’s mind. But the point is not the labels or groupings (or even the distinctions they create) per se; it’s how they work together as a whole to create a good experience.

Systems are important to information architecture on two levels. On one level, the thing we’re working on — what we’re enabling with our sets of distinctions — is a system. Like any other enterprise, an e-commerce website is a system. The business has inputs, outputs, and processes that transform the former into the latter. Information architecture defines the context in which these transformations happen, in much the same way that (building) architecture creates the context in which a “brick and mortar” store operates. Architects are frame-makers; they define the environments systems operate within.

On another level, the design of this frame is also a systemic undertaking; the information architecture itself is also the result of a system. The design of the context doesn’t stop when the website is put in production. Instead, the context is continuously re-created as conditions change. Perhaps customers are buying more of one type of product than another or the relationship with a supplier has ended or a new competitive threat has emerged. Whatever the case, the business is not a static entity. If the business is to serve its purposes — achieve desired outcomes — its architecture must evolve along with it.

This is an ongoing, dynamic, emergent process that requires design at a higher level of abstraction. Information architects are called to define the structure of the place, but they’re also called to define the (ongoing) processes that generate the structure of the place. Increasingly, we design not just the frame around the work, but also the systems that allow that frame to continue serving its purposes as conditions change.

Different design disciplines are characterized by particular gestures that distinguish them from other design disciplines. For example, the core of graphic design is a visual gesture. This could be something rudimentary such as marks made on a wall with a piece of charcoal, or a more complex expression such as a computer-rendered artifact mechanically reproduced at scale. Whatever the case, absent a (relatively) permanent visual expression you don’t get graphic design at all; you’re dealing with a different discipline.

Different design disciplines also aspire to particular outcomes. A graphic designer wants her posters to be engaging and memorable; an architect wants his buildings to be useful and to fit with their contexts; information architects want information to be findable and understandable. In all these cases, this is achieved by establishing particular configurations of things — visual marks, forms and spaces, labels in a navigation system — that make this work different from any other.

This calls for making choices. The possibilities open to a graphic designer or an information architect are almost limitless. Designing is in some ways about narrowing down the options: selecting (from among the myriad possibilities) a set of relevant items and establishing (from among the myriad possibilities) particular relationships between these items. In other words, design is a process for establishing order in a small part of the universe, towards desired outcomes.

Consciously or not, designers bring to the process rules and techniques that help them make decisions about what to leave out and what to include. Some of these rules are dictated by physiological constraints (e.g., door openings must have a particular width if they are to allow most humans to pass), some are part of the canon for the discipline (e.g., some configurations of spaces have emerged over time as being more practical than others), others represent cultural assumptions that inform the designer’s worldview (e.g., what constitutes a traditional house varies around the world), and still others may reflect popular tastes that change over time.

These rules and techniques represent possible responses to design problems. You can think of them as the toolset that designers bring to the shepherding of chaos towards useful order. If all you have in your toolset is a hammer, all problems look like nails — and you’ll have a hell of a time (and possibly do lots of damage) trying to hammer a screw into place. It behooves you to avail yourself of — and learn to use — a screwdriver. A designer with a wide variety of possible responses will be more effective than one with a smaller set.

In this sense, design is the opposite of ideology. Ideology is an attempt to reduce chaos — to narrow choices — through a predefined, abstract, rigid view of how to best achieve particular outcomes. Design, on the other hand, is about reducing chaos through an emergent, responsive, tangible view of how to achieve particular outcomes; a feedback loop that takes real-world conditions as its baseline. To effectively lead this process, designers are called to be open-minded; to learn from everything and everyone without ideological entanglements; to expand their variety of responses as much as possible.