[Sigia-l] RE: IA Practice Maturation

[Eric Reiss]

As an American, who’s lived and worked his entire adult life in
Europe (Copenhagen, Denmark), I’d like to add my two cents on several
issues that have come up in this thread.

LAGGING BEHIND
There’s good IA and bad IA on both sides of the Atlantic. Good shops
do good work. Bad ones don’t. Good shops understand IA. Bad shops
don’t. American shops are more likely to have people running around
with Information Architect (or one of 57 other variations) on their
business cards. European shops have relatively few people who call
themselves IAs. BUT...the practice of IA has little to do with what
one’s business card states.

Until a colleague plunked down Lou and Peter’s book on my desk a
couple of years ago, I didn’t even know the discipline had a name.
The book confirmed many of my own practices and observations, which
was reassuring. That said, I’ve never felt the need to call myself an
information architect, even though I’m now the author of my own book,
Practical Information Architecture.

I think, perhaps, the plethora of contending terms that define our
work stems from the fact that in the dot-com heyday, the big shops
sold a lot of digital alchemy at grossly inflated prices. In other
words, they could afford to have an army of specialists on staff –
interaction designers, information architects, user-experience
specialists, ad infinitum (ad nauseum?). This point was driven home
to me at last year’s Summit in San Francisco when Adam Polansky
presented a glorious Visiogram for some site he’d worked on. Price
500,000 US dollars. At that time, similar sites were being developed
here in Denmark for 500,000 Danish kroner (1 USD = 8 DKK) – including
full-blown IA and usability testing.

Does Europe lag behind the US in the practice of IA? Possibly – I
generally agree with Eric Mahleb’s comments. But let’s not confuse
this with the business card gap.

LANGUAGE ABILITY
Vince Lombardi raised an interesting point about the lack of
non-English web literature. In general, the Latin portion of
continental Western Europe (general population) is less likely to
speak English than the Germanic portion. (In general, Latin refers to
Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, parts of Belgium, and by extension,
Greece and Turkey. Germanic refers to the Netherlands, Luxembourg,
Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. This general
demographic distribution is provided for those who can’t agree on
whether Michigan is in the Midwest). Residents of Eastern Europe
(including the former DDR), due to post-war segregation, have less
knowledge of English than Westerners. I’ve left out the UK for
obvious reasons.

However...
If you look at people who work in the web industry, you’ll find that
this is a self-segmenting group. As such, people with a working
knowledge of English have generally embraced the web. Those who speak
little or no English are less likely to have done so. As such, my
conclusion is that lack of local-language literature may contribute
to a perceived lag, but probably to a far lesser degree than one
might think.
 
On a related note, publishers seem to be aware of this problem. I
seem to recall that Lou and Peter’s book is now available in Spanish;
my own will soon be available in Japanese and Korean.

Clients are a different matter in terms of language ability, but
since few seem to read much about the web anyway, the lack of
literature may be a moot point. Although client education is
paramount, I’m not sure books are the best way to achieve this.

EUROPEANS ARE UNWILLING TO LEARN FROM AMERICANS
Cinnamon Melchor thought the Western European design group she worked
with last summer exhibited anti-American tendencies. This doesn’t
surprise me. Many Americans (myself included) came to Europe with the
idea we were going to teach these backwards people how the real world
worked. It’s a bad tactic. Sadly, the vision of the Ugly American is
still alive and well. Many Americans still fail to acknowledge that
they are guests, not conquerers when they visit. I’m not suggesting
this was Cinnamon’s attitude in her specific situation, but Europeans
have become somewhat sensitized over the years, which means visiting
Americans would be wise to hone their diplomatic skills.

At this year’s ASIS-T Summit, I heard people refer to both the Argus
Mafia and San Francisco Mafia, which suggests something similar
occurred in Baltimore. Let’s nip this one in the bud.

Regards,
Eric

-----------------------
eric reiss
principal
e-reiss aps
copenhagen, denmark
http://www.e-reiss.com
office: (+45) 39 29 67 77
mobile: (+45) 20 12 88 44
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