Peter Morville: Profiles in Knowledge

Originally published April 18, 2022

6 min readApr 19, 2022

This is the 78th article in the Profiles in Knowledge series featuring thought leaders in knowledge management. Peter is a pioneer in the fields of information architecture and user experience, and he also specializes in organizational strategy and planning. He has been helping people to plan since 1994. Peter wrote or co-wrote the books Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond (also known as the “Bible of IA” and the “Polar Bear book”), Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become, Search Patterns: Design for Discovery, Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything, and Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals.

I first became aware of Peter’s work when I read the report that he and Fred Leise of Louis Rosenfeld, LLC prepared for the Hewlett-Packard intranet (@hp) in 2001. I thought the recommendations were brilliant. I met Peter several times when he lived in Ann Arbor, and he presented on the February 2022 SIKM Leaders Community call. He now lives on a farm in Virginia.

Background

Peter was born in Manchester, England. In the 1990s, together with Louis Rosenfeld, he headed Argus Associates, the consulting firm which supported one of the precursors of the Information Architecture Institute, the Argus Center for Information Architecture. The company began in January 1994 as a full-solution web design business, but Morville and Rosenfeld decided to specialize by applying principles of library science to solve issues of grouping and labeling on the early Web. The two dubbed their work “information architecture,” although they did not mean it in the sense of Richard Saul Wurman’s use of the term, who according to Morville, “focused on the presentation and layout of information on a two-dimensional page. We focused on the structure and organization of sites.”

In 1998, Morville co-authored Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, which was published by O’Reilly Media in 1998. This book, known as the “Polar Bear book” because of the Polar Bear on its cover, became a bestseller and was awarded Amazon’s best computer book of 1998. It has been described as the seminal book on information architecture. The book sparked enough of a growth in interest in information architecture that two years later, the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) helped organize the first annual Information Architecture Summit.

Education

University of Michigan — School of Information: Masters, Library and Information Science, 1992–1993
Tufts University, BA, English Literature, 1987–1991

Profiles

Content

Strange Connections — Information Architecture

Software for Information Architects (February 19, 2001)
An Information Architect’s Manifesto (January 30, 2001)
Lessons Learned from the Dot.Com Crash (January 12, 2001)
Ethics of Information Architecture (November 29, 2000)
Information Architecture 2000 (November 6, 2000)
IA and Business Strategy (August 30, 2000)
Educating the Information Architect (August 15, 2000)
Big Architect, Little Architect (July 27, 2000)
Little Blue Folders (July 10, 2000)
Information Architecture and Ulcers (June 21, 2000)
Defining Information Architecture (June 1, 2000)

Articles

Farming Information Architecture

In an employee intranet project for HP in the early noughties, the IT group we worked with was insular. This was a problem endemic to the culture, famously captured in the aphorism “if only HP knew what HP knows.” So, in concert with IA, we helped with KM. We pitched cross-pollination via interdepartmental brown bag lunches and championed unsanctioned initiatives such as an annotated site index created by the administrative assistants of HP Labs, because often the path to a good information architecture is better knowledge management.

@hp Information Architecture Strategy & Recommendations Report with Fred Leise

Portal Strategy Recommendations

Define portal scope
Balance top-down & bottom-up approaches to content access
Recognize IA as infrastructure
Manage conflicting influences
Manage transitions

Information Architecture Design Recommendations

Use several classification schemes
Provide multiple finding tools
Leverage CMS (distributed metadata)
Improve search (interface, results, thesaurus)
Provide robust navigation

Articles by Others

Tagsonomy interview by Gene Smith
Ambient Findability — Boxes and Arrows by Liz Danzico
Bobulate — Findability is Ambient by Liz Danzico
Building the Beast by Marla Olsen
Digital Web (with Lou Rosenfeld) by Meryl Evans
Interview with Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville by Scott Hill
Planning for Everything in Times of COVID-19 by Matt Finch
On Planning and Design by Hans Kao
UX Strategy and Planning by Paul Bryan
UX STRAT by Paul Bryan
UX Pioneers by Tamara Adlin
Futureheads Five Stories
Connecting by Nicky Bleiel
Tomorrow’s Architects: Designing the Future of Libraries by ProQuest
Connecting Knowledge Management and Discovery by Synaptica
Authority by Euan Semple (commentary on Authority)
Creating bigger needles by Dave Snowden
International information architecture by Jack Vinson
Authority and bias by Jack Vinson (commentary on Tagsonomy interview)
Are leaves mulch? by David Weinberger
User Experience Honeycomb by Dane Wesolko
User Experience Basics — Usability.gov

Quotes

“Findability precedes usability. In the alphabet and on the Web. You can’t use what you can’t find.”
“The design of good houses requires an understanding of both the construction materials and the behavior of real humans.”
“When technology precedes requirements and user needs, the UX suffers — it leads to solutions in search of problems.”
“The future is faceted.”
“Information architecture is a means to create learning and relationship-building opportunities. When we create unusual relationships between people or products or ideas, we create a tension that invites learning.”