As information architecture (IA) becomes a bigger part of the overall business plan in commercial organizations, the role of information architects is also moving to strategic levels. This movement was one of the trends presented at the Euro IA Summit held Sept. 30-Oct. 1, 2006, in Berlin.

The summit, sponsored by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (http://www.asis.org), the Information Architecture Institute (http:// www.iainstitute.org), User Intelligence (http://www.userintelligence.com), and FatDUX (http://www.fatdux.com), was Europe's second IA conference. According to the organizers, the first summit (which was held last year) was so successful that "it was obvious we had to organise another one this year."

While conference organizers acknowledged there is no definitive definition of IA, most definitions have common qualities: a structural design of shared information environments; methods of organizing and labeling Web sites, intranets, and online communities; and ways of bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

The 162 conference attendees arrived in Berlin from 18 countries (the U.K., Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands amounted to about 70 percent of the total), representing an increase of 50 percent from the previous meeting. Attendees said the conference's popularity for Europeans was fourfold: easier travel arrangements for European participants, multilanguage capabilities (more than 20 national languages in the EU alone), new technology for alternative interfaces (phones, PDAs), and European perspectives (seeing the world a bit differently than in North America).

Conference chairman Eric Reiss of FatDUX in Denmark said he expected IA's role to expand as Web sites are more involved in multimedia, noting that customization will be replaced by personalization (e.g., saving logins, suggesting additional books at Amazon, etc.). He also said that although IA is not always part of a job title, it is quickly becoming a strategic component within businesses. In Reiss' estimation, information architects have moved from "geeks to gurus" in this decade.

Keynote Speaker

Keynote speaker Peter Morville of Semantic Studios, LLC in the U.S. kicked off the meeting by saying that although 70 percent of information architects have degrees in library and information science, much of the work in this field is being accomplished by those who do not know much about what IA actually is. Morville, who is the author of the bestselling Internet books Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and Ambient Findability, provided case studies showing the impact IA has on Web sites. In a study of the National Cancer Institute Web site, he found 70 percent of the queries did not involve the single term "cancer" since the majority of the searches are more complex. Morville encouraged users to create "bigger needles" for the growing haystacks using IA processes. He said the next challenge will be searching audio and video files.

Strategic Implications

Opening day sessions covered a range of topics, from strategic steps to social tagging. In the Strategic IA session, Olly Wright of Media Catalyst in the Netherlands outlined steps that information architects must take to understand and reach a strategic level in the operation. The biggest mistake, he said, was "going in with an agenda, then making your agenda the agenda. Find out what they want."

Ariel Guersenzvaig of Claro Studio in Spain talked about the "capability of an online presence to bring a user into action and convert [him or her] into a customer" in the Persuadability session. Getting the user to click on the right link is the very essence of persuadability. This conversion, which is the sum of several micro-actions, is supported by IA's use of consumer psychology, user experience, value proposition, and marketing strategy.

In Virreal Architecture, Almar van der Krogt of VIRVIE in the Netherlands contrasted the tasks of the conventional architect and the information architect: The former is faced with overcoming the forces of gravity and the latter with overcoming the forces of irrelevance.

Tools and Techniques

In A Place for IA Deliverables, the panel (Peter Boersma of info .nl in the Netherlands, Casper Honijk of Macaw in the Netherlands, Larisa Warnke of Carlson Marketing in the U.S., and Andreas Lechner of Spirit Link in Germany) discussed their individual companies' procedures for describing typical deliverables, the design process, offthe- shelf supporting software, and ways of measuring improvements in the design process.

Only 15 percent of companies involved in IA have a documented process for IA deliverables, according to Warnke.

A tagging tool to support bookmarking information architecture resources was discussed in Integrating Bottom-up and Top-down Classification in a Social Tagging System: The Facetag, which finds similar previously indexed articles and allows the easy transfer of terms to new items.

In a panel on the pros and cons of different wireframing techniques, members discussed tools used by IAs to design the frames and templates of Web pages (not content), with a brief tutorial on this software and a discussion on techniques, usability, and functionality.

With the increased mobility of users all around the world, Content Adaptation to Mobile Devices tackled the challenges of using cell phones to access conventional Web sites as IAs adapt content to these devices. The panel presented research results on eight content adaptations on six different devices with four test cases: buying a CD, checking sports results on CNN, replying to e-mail on Yahoo! Deutschland, and finding a travel connection on the Rheinbahn trains. Systems using a combination of server, client, and content performed best, but even the best case was not comparable to using a PC (e.g., it took 65-442 clicks to buy a CD). Perhaps the solution could be found in improved client visualization capabilities.

In The Closing Plenary, Steven Pemberton of CWI in the Netherlands addressed the development of HTML, XHTML2, and Xforms. Pemberton, a co-author of books on each topic, traced their history, explaining how they will simplify IA tasks in Web design (reducing the 250K of JavaScript in Google Earth to one-tenth that size, for instance). Referring to the presentation on the mobile devices, he noted that there are more browsers on cell phones than PCs (and on other devices, including refrigerators), but they are not being used (except in Japan). The replacement software for HTML will simplify this usage, but chances are, it won't totally solve the problem.

Education in IA

Teaching users about IA was the topic addressed in an hourlong discussion on IA Education in Europe. Panelists described courses taught at a variety of European universities. Heiko Haubitz of University College in Dublin described a new undergraduate course on information architecture in the School of Library and Information Studies in Teaching Information Architecture: The Irish Example. In IA at the Copenhagen Business School (the largest in Europe), Dorte Madsen said the IA courses are embedded in the Information Management Program at the undergraduate level, but there are no separate IA courses.

Boris Mueller of the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, Germany, described the role of IA in visualization projects within the school, while Luca Rosati of the University for Foreigners in Perugia, Italy, said a degree in library and information science would be almost inconceivable in Italy, and that there is no common dialog between the roots of IA in humanistic and scientific training. IA is offered by a combination of courses in each field. Bernhard Thull at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt, Germany, described the school's master's program in which IA is inherently taught within courses in library science, media information, and business information engineering. The panel, responding to a question, stated that no standards, approved curricula, or corroboration currently exist among universities for IA education

The 2007 summit will be held Sept. 29-30 in Barcelona. Details of the 2006 summit are available at http://www.euroia .org/program.html.