[Sigia-l] IA Practice Maturation

[Andrew Otwell]

On 4/17/02 9:31 PM, peterme wrote:

> 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.

I'm living in Berlin this year and am trying to do IA here. I've found very
few people that are familiar with what we might think of "standard" IA
processes or approaches. Despite this, several big firms here include
"information architecture" both in job descriptions and in project
proposals. I've met senior Konzeptors (great title) from a couple of
agencies here, and although they both professed to be IAs, neither had any
idea what I was talking about when I described the problems I was working on
organizing large sets of search results. One of them said, well I really
only worry about the first few levels of a web site,  not the pages down
below that. For most, I think that "Information architecture" means
literally nothing beyond a few boxes and lines, starting with one called
"home page."

Usability and user research are also pretty much new ideas here as well, and
it's quite hard to convince clients that testing a design might be a good
idea. In fact, my co-workers at the design firm I'm at also gave me sort of
blank looks when I tried to put usability testing time into the schedule.
Although there may be some isolated specialists, IA, usability, and user
research certainly haven't yet made too much of an impression on most
designers or programmers here.

Part of the problem is language: most of what we read in English isn't
available in German. Even though _every_ designer I've met reads English
well, I don't know that they'd be likely to seek out books on specialist
topics like IA, and I don't blame them.

A bigger problem is education: many European designers (like other
professions) go through a pretty rigid educational process that starts at a
young age. Continuing education of any kind is essentially unknown in
Germany, so niche professions like IA don't really have any way to provide
formal instruction.

That said, I am going to speak at Hyper Island, a design school in Sweden,
next week about information architecture. They asked for that specifically,
so students seem to be becoming more aware of it.

andrew