# First note Date: 2026-06-24 Mood: Opening the window Reading time: 5 min Canonical: https://alejandromarco.com/notes/first-note A first note on why this space exists, and on Information Architecture as the invisible structure behind digital places. I wanted a place that feels lighter than a case study and more open than a CV. Notes can hold the parts that do not need a launch, a metric, or a perfect conclusion: a thought from building, a small product instinct, a sentence I want to keep, or the shape of something I am still figuring out. For now, this is intentionally simple. A little room on the site for things that are still becoming. The first thing I want to put here is not new. It is a translated and expanded version of a short reflection I wrote for an Information Architecture class. The Spanish acronym in the original text was AI, but I was not talking about Artificial Intelligence. I was talking about **Information Architecture**: the practice of deciding how information is structured, named, related, found, and understood. That distinction matters more now than I expected. ![A classic iTunes library view with songs organized by album, artist, genre, time, and plays.](/notes/itunes-library.png) _iTunes made the music library feel inspectable: columns, metadata, categories, and a visible structure under the interface._ The traditional view of Information Architecture was born in a web that behaved a lot like a library. There were collections. There were categories. There were labels. The job was to help people know where they were and where to go next. Early iTunes is a clean example of that world. Music could be sorted by artist, album, genre, time, rating, plays. The interface assumed that music was something you owned, arranged, and browsed. The structure was visible. The user could almost see the database underneath the product. There is something comforting about that. A table is honest. A sidebar is honest. A hierarchy says: this is how the place is organized. But digital places stopped being that still. ## From shelves to situations Today information is not only stored. It moves. It appears across devices, contexts, moods, permissions, histories, and recommendations. A music library is no longer just a collection of songs; it is a morning commute, a shared playlist, a half-remembered track, a recommendation, a device handoff, a social signal, a search query, a generated mix. This is where Information Architecture begins to blend with Interaction Design and User Experience Design. The structure still matters, but it is no longer only the sitemap or the taxonomy. It is also the sequence, the memory, the recovery path, the affordance, the way a system lets you return to something without asking you to remember its exact name. Spotify did not eliminate the need for classification. It still depends on artists, albums, genres, tracks, playlists, metadata, and search. It also has unresolved classification problems, especially around music that does not fit the dominant pop-song model very well, like classical music. But Spotify made music feel more fluid by placing structure inside behavior: recently played, collaborative playlists, personalized recommendations, device continuity. The architecture became less like a map you study and more like a place that remembers how you move. That is probably the most interesting shift for me. Good Information Architecture is not only about making content retrievable. It is about helping a person build a mental model of a system that keeps changing. ## The invisible part Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango describe Information Architecture as a way of creating semantic structures that help people engage with a message, and they place special emphasis on finding, navigating, and understanding across channels. That feels right. The work is not only organizational. It is cognitive. Jon Kolko approaches Interaction Design from the side of behavior and meaning. His framing is useful here because the interface is not just a surface where information appears. It is the place where a person forms expectations, makes decisions, and feels whether the system is working with them or against them. Those two ideas meet in the same uncomfortable place: many product problems that look like interface problems are actually information problems. The button is not confusing because the button is badly styled. It is confusing because the object behind it has no stable name. The onboarding is not long because the screens are badly arranged. It is long because the model asks the user to learn too many invisible distinctions too early. The search is not failing only because the algorithm is weak. It is failing because the system does not know what its own things are. ## Generative systems make this harder Generative Artificial Intelligence makes the old Information Architecture questions feel urgent again. These products introduce objects that are still unstable: prompts, threads, memories, tools, runs, sources, generated files, agent actions, context windows. Some are user-facing. Some are hidden. Some are temporary until they suddenly matter. If those objects are not named and related carefully, the experience becomes fragile very quickly. A chat can feel simple for one task and impossible for the next, because the underlying information model has not been designed. Where did that answer come from? What did the system remember? What can I edit? What is reusable? What is private? What belongs to this thread, this project, this person, this device? This is where I think a lot of current product design is behind the technology. We have become very good at polishing interaction patterns, but not always as good at rethinking the information models underneath them. Information Architecture is not a nostalgic discipline for websites with sidebars. It is closer to cognitive infrastructure: the structure that lets people trust, recover, compare, return, and understand. The more products become dynamic, personalized, conversational, and distributed, the more the old questions return in sharper form. What is this thing? Where am I? What changed? What can I trust? What can I find again? Maybe that is why Information Architecture still feels alive to me. It is not only about arranging information. It is about giving changing systems enough shape that people can think inside them. Sources I am building from - Jimenez, L. and Gonzalez, P. (2012). *Cuaderno de Arquitectura de la Informacion*, chapter 1. - Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango. [*Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond*](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/information-architecture-4th/9781491913529/), fourth edition, O'Reilly Media, 2015. - Jon Kolko. [*Thoughts on Interaction Design*](https://shop.elsevier.com/books/thoughts-on-interaction-design/kolko/978-0-12-380930-8), second edition, Morgan Kaufmann, 2011.