I think the challenge is that metadata, information architecture and usability actually aren't important by themselves. We spend a lot of time in a misguided attempt to convince people that they should be doing more of these things because they are "important".

What's really important? Doing business. So we need to ask ourselves: how can we help businesses to do business? We need to align ourselves to business goals, rather than expect businesses to align themselves to our discipline.

Then the pitch becomes a lot easier... :-)

Cheers, James

Information Design as a practice is exemplified by Edward Tufte's work. Amazon.com called his Visual Display of Quantitative Information one of the top 100 books of the 20th century. I am perhaps not the best person to try to define information design, but let me take a stab at it.

Information design is the practice of creating visual explanations, of information-rich story-telling. The products of information design are human-readable, so practices like data modeling are not part of information design. The techy synonym for it is data visualization, although I look at this field as a small subset dealing with human-computer interaction with huge multivariate data sets.

Some examples might help.

Tufte loves Minard's map of Napoleon's match through Russia, which depicts the size and position of the army geographically, along with time and temperature data. Showing six or seven data points simultaneously is no small feat, so this one deserves all the attention Tufte gives it.

Another great example is the display of standardized test results. David Hoffer presented on this a couple years ago at the IA Summit. Part of the problem is that the parents who receive their child's test scores often don't understand them. David talked through all the testing and design that went into the reports, and how they were tested with people from different educational backgrounds to make sure everyone understood what the reports meant.

Information-Rich Story-Telling! Perfect. Thanks to all that have commented on my question.