Information architecture cannot die

Agreed. Information architecture applies to much more than just the web and is a concept that has been around for a while without being named. Just for the record, when Richard Saul Wurman coined the term, he was talking about maps. It's really only the recent proliferation of media types that has laid bare the concept of information architecture.

Having said all that, I'd be wary of using a phrase like information design. Can information be designed? It seems to me that the presentation of information can be designed--that the visualization of it can be desinged. But information is atomic in some sense. It's data within a given context. The context, the media type, shapes the way the information is perceived, but the information remains the same regardless of how it is perceived. Designing information sounds to me like creating propaganda. Advertising is information design--ensuring that you get only the best parts of the picture of the product.

Can information be designed?

I kind of like Peter Bogaards's definition of ID: "Information design is the intentional process in which information related to a domain is transformed in order to obtain an understandable representation of that domain."

In the case of the quipu, though, I just mean that things like rope colour (which could be seen as design elements) actually carry important information.

(ID as it's practiced today is pretty much the antithesis of advertising. It's much more like Wurman's information architecture than Rosenfeld-Morville information architecture.)