Information engineering is a term describing the design and development of information for specific uses. An online course is designed to teach subject matter to a distant learner who takes action with that new knowledge. An advertisement is designed to inform, engage and entice the audience into taking action, like buying a product.

The engineering of information, the process of taking a variety of concepts, processes, and contexts and transforming them into a coherent message, using the best medium, to connect with the right audience, is a one of the most important jobs in the modern economy.

Unlike how advertising is often defined, usually as designed to create awareness and knowledge about goods and services, information engineering is the design and development of information for specific uses by identified audiences to achieve a planned goal. That may sound the same using some fancier words, but the systematic nature of designed information is a key difference. Advertising is just one type of information design.

Bringing everything together.

Designing information requires an endpoint for that information to be consumed by someone, to achieve some end. Creating a training guide to teach someone how to operate a widget machine requires an instructional design that ends with the user learning how to operate the machine. Working backwards from that result is a primary function of information design. Too often the goal is lost in the data.