[Sigia-l] IA Practice Maturation

[Boersma, Peter]

Peter Merholz asked:
> 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.

As an IA coming from a part of Europe that doesn't consider itself
"continental", definitely not "UK" or "Scandinavian", and has a high number
of English-as-a-second-language speakers, I think we're somewhere in the
middle(*).

The Dutch have always had an egineering look at Design, so boxes and arrows
are second nature to at least Industrial Designers. We have a lot of ID's in
our usability and information architecture communities; I see them at
SIGCHI.NL meetings or the Amsterdam IA Cocktail Hours. Judging by what I
hear from them, our Graphic Designers and Project Managers tolerate us
nowadays, but it took some years to convince them of the usefulness of
IA-time.

As Frederic Cavazza said:
> After several years of "intuitive" development, each major
> european Web agency (Framfab, Icon Medialab, Pixel Park, Satama...) have
> mature in their developement methodology (adopting a RUP-like one) and in
> their way of building interfaces (user-centered).

I am currently responsible for the further development of our "RUP-like"
development methodology (of course it's called SUP here:
http://www.satama.com/solutions/34.jsp) and get full support from both
management and senior designers (of all sorts).

If we ever were 2 or 3 years behind (and I guess we were until 1999), we've
caught up fast, I think.

Peter

(*) Traditionally the Dutch are good at being in the middle: lately we
invented the so-called "polder model" or "third way" to solve social
problems where everything ends up in the middle. Heck, we should have
copyrighted the phrase "it depends..." ;-)

-- 
Peter Boersma, Consultant Information Ergonomics
<mailto:peter.boersma at satama.com>

Satama Interactive
Poeldijkstraat 4, 1059 VM Amsterdam, The Netherlands
tel:+31(0)20 6637769  fax:+31(0)20 6681468  mob:+31(0)6 15072747
http://www.peterboersma.com/