Practicing information architecture leads one to see problems in a particular way. IA involves understanding how people use information as well as the specific tools and strategies that support information behavior. Tracing information from its creation, to how it moves through information systems, to the user’s behavior around finding and using that information – and then back again to the source – reveals systems of people, processes, and technologies. The information architect gets a chance to see where information flows break down, and where they move well. An IA develops a deep sense of the domain they’re responsible for. They’re responsible for naming and labeling things, which means not only understanding the thing itself, but all the language and related concepts around that thing. An IA is responsible for how concepts move through systems, and are accountable to how the language for those concepts impact the people that use them. Many people in an organization work on a part of a structure, or within a sub-domain that they can control. An IA works on whole structures and whole domains. They work to weave different understandings of similar concepts together across domains. This naturally gives the IA a unique perspective, and eventually that perspective – that way of seeing the information in a system – becomes a tool in the IA’s practice toolkit. --- **Relates to**: [[information architecture|IA]]