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Public information should be made public. Public information refers to everything that explains our citizenship. Public means everything that we agree should be available to the body politic. Making information public is somewhat less generic. This public means presenting, designing & structuring this information so that it is accessible, available, understandable & free. Public means that the simple basic questions in the minds of the American people are easily, readily & clearly answerable. It is our right to question & get answers. This book is a celebration & a visual demonstration of questions & answers leading to understanding. This book demonstrates the power inherent in understanding & the notion that understanding is power. In 1975 I began preparing for a gathering of five thousand architects in Philadelphia the following year to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the founding of the United States in that same city. As national chairman of the AIA convocation, I entitled it the Architecture of Information & began to call myself an Information Architect. This field is a three-way marriage among the information technology corporations, the talent of great American graphic designers & the abilities of researchers & librarians to focus on making the complex clear. Now in the year 2000, the focus of this book is on the power of understanding. I hope readers will develop their own intricate road maps of follow-up questions to address our leaders, would-be leaders, each other, parents, friends & children. The word public shares the same root as publication. So it is fitting to publish this book for the public. The idea has been part of my recurring vocabulary every four years over the past twelve years. Circumstances happily conspired to put off its birth until now—the millennium year. Why is this moment a good one besides the symbolic three zeros? For the first time, this is a moment in history when messages, content & dynamic images can be sent to hundreds of millions of people with seemingly less effort than scribing a page in a 13th Century book of hours. Information technology has gained muscles & maturity. It has gone from xlook at me, look at me & the show off of boys with their toys to why are we doing all this? The next great American business is the learning business. This business is the child of entertainment & information technology using information architecture as its guidebook. UNDERSTANDING is a concept that addresses a special moment in history. The advent of the millennium has resulted in considerable & excellent media analysis focused on historical milestones & prognostications. We are at an amazing moment of a Gutenberg-level event, with electronic wings able to fly through understandable information of our own choosing. With Velcro claws we collect all the data that warm & answer our inherent curiosity & questions. I dream of asking a question, a simple childlike question & receiving an answer. What a dream! The dream is here. We are at the cusp of the marriage of information technology & information architecture. Our extraordinary ability to store & transmit data will make this dream a waking dream. Louis Kahn said beginnings, beginnings, beginnings, beginnings—I love beginnings. This is such a beginning—the primitive formation of a new era. This is the Romanesque before the Gothic. This is the temples at Paestum before the Parthenon. This is Cimabué & Giotto before Piero della Francesca. As the child of the 20th Century’s information technology industry, the Information Architect shall become a mature, even robust, player in the 21st Century. Conversation is the most natural, effective, yet most complex mode of human connection. The goal of conversation is understanding between the participants. Successful visual communication design can be defined as frozen conversation much as wonderful architecture is referred to as frozen music. Understanding information is power. |
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