When I became an information architect in 2000, the novelty of the profession meant that everyone had come to it from different directions. There were librarians and information scientists, project managers, copywriters, visual designers and a few former architects -- of which I was one.

Although I began as an architect, I came to IA following a decade as a design writer and teacher, a masters in Cognitive Science -- and a love for the Apple Macintosh. These preferences have underpinned my approach to user experience, which is mostly interested in structure and its aesthetic representation, the psychology of human-computer interaction and the disarming power of simplicity.

Architecture is essentially about organizing elements and functions in space, and I remain fascinated by the parallels between physical space and semantic space: the idea that meaning and the relationship between ideas can be represented spatially (again, Aristotle got there first).