[Sigia-l] IA Practice Maturation

[Peter Merholz]

So, last night we had a meeting of the San Francisco IA/UE cocktail hour.

In attendance was Very Special Guest Victor Lombardi, who works at Razorfish
in NY, but was doing a stint in Razorfish's San Jose office. We took
advantage of his presence to address the question, "Is there a difference
between west coast and east coast IA?"

The answer, according to Victor, and quite a few others in the room: No.

This interested me. Back In The Day (oh, early 1998), there definitely was.
I found myself in New York working on a 3 month project for Studio
Archetype, and I was shocked at how far behind the New York New Media scene
was, compared to the SF web design scene, when it came to information
architecture. The following year, I spoke at Edgewise 99, and such disparity
still seemed to be the case.

But now, in 2002, it seems that, for all intents and purposes, the practice
of IA has matured to the point where, no matter where you are in the
country, it's done pretty much the same way (recent transplants from Atlanta
were able to confirm this). (There was, however, a lot of evidence that IA
is practiced differently in non-English-speaking countries than in English
speaking countries... I'd love to hear more about that on this list.)

At least, there doesn't seem to be a geographic basis for different IA
practices. There is still something of a disciplinary basis for different
practices -- those who come from an LIS background do things differently
than those who come from a design-for-understanding background -- but even
those differences are smoothing out. We're all recognizing that folks from
other backgrounds have something to offer, and we're listening, attentively.
This, for me, was one of the big takeaways of the IA Summit -- it wasn't
about doing IA "my way". It was sharing all of our ways of practice.

Because no one else has said it, I thought I would -- I think this is an
important step in the development of our field. That we're hitting upon a
common toolset, methodology, and practice for approaching our work.

Which leads me to wonder, "what are the next steps?" And for me, the most
obvious is figuring out how to expand/extend this methodological maturation
and sensitivity to a wider area of interactive design. There are still
hurdles when "IA types" work with "graphic design types" on Web projects.
Let's be explicit in figuring out how to work together, from our particular
backgrounds, to achieve common goals.

Another point of extension, which Victor mentioned, is building a bridge to
more of the hardcore technical types--the database administrators, computer
programmers, systems engineers, and other folks whose systems we will
increasingly rely upon, and whose systems need to be increasingly aware of
our requirements.

Anyway, some thoughts for hump day. I look forward to hearing others'
thoughts and comments..

--peter
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