[Sigia-l] clash of the viewpoints

[Christopher Fahey [askrom]]

> > Worth checking out!
> 
> http://www.eleganthack.com/archives/003145.html


I just read the Shedroff/Greenfield debate referred to in Christina's
blog:
  http://www.v-2.org/displayArticle.php?article_num=175

I'm going to get a bit crotchety here, but to me this interview
alternated between tiresome and annoying. It reads like a hair-splitting
dorm-room debate about the existence of God. The kind of debate where
both parties present strongly-felt arguments for their point of view yet
where there is no prospect, ever, of reaching consensus. To compound my
frustration, neither Shedroff nor Greenfield seemed to be listening to
each other very much, preferring to debate against an imaginary strawman
representing 'the-opposite-of-whatever-each-party-wanted-to-say'. 

I've been pretty absent from the IA lists lately, in part due to a heavy
workload, but in part due to the fact that we can't seem to stop having
religious debates about terminology and semantics. That said, I will
hypocritically join the fray:) :

Instead of a religious debate it seems like we now have an arms race.
Each party is expanding the definition of their champion terminology
("Experience Design" or "Information Architecture") to include
everything else, like two nations redrawing maps so their nation
encompasses the other. 

As he defines it, Shedroff's "Experience Design" is bigger than and
certainly includes "information architecture", "interaction design", as
well as branding, visual design, and a whole host of other fields. The
term describes a field about as broad as the term "design" itself, so
bloated and generalized as to become impractical as a . Unless I am a
corporate officer or a professional author and pundit (like Shedroff), I
am most likely going to specialize in some subset of Experience Design. 

On the other hand, Greenfield's arguments for the term "information
architecture" are even more vague to me. Using some incredibly abstract
(and to me, novel) definition of the term "information", Greenfield
argues that *everything* comes down to "information flow" and that
everything occurs in a "field of information". In my day-to-day work as
an information architect (and yes, that's what I still call myself),
understanding user interaction in terms of a "field of information" is
simply absurd. When I am trying to design an interface/process to allow
a user to (for example) change the color of some selected text or to
select multiple items from a long list, it is unnecessarily abstract to
consider the process in terms of "information flow". To make an analogy,
the human body is nothing but molecules and atoms, but your dentist
doesn't *ever* think of your teeth that way. 

Ultimately I dislike both terms in this argument. "Experience Design" is
so general as to be useful only to theorists and strategists, so I don't
begrudge it much. But "Information Architecture", my official job title,
is still highly problematic to me. Greenfield's contortions to defend
the term's inherent appropriateness notwithstanding, I think the only
legitimate argument for its continued use is the fact that it is
currently the de facto standard. Other than that, I think the term is
quite weak.

Some other notes:

1) "Information Theory" - unless you are talking about the mathematics-
and electrical-engineering-based field exemplified by the work of Claude
Shannon, you should wash your mouth out with soap every time you use
this term. Read the out-of-print "Silicon Dreams" by Robert Lucky for a
great introduction to what information theory is all about, and you too
will avoid using the term wantonly.
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0312029608/
Or just read this site:
   http://www.lucent.com/minds/infotheory/what.html

2) "Information Architecture", despite the efforts of Argus, Asilomar,
et al, is still not a term exclusive to 'our world'. The Boston-area
software firm recently raided by the FBI for suspected terrorist
activity was referred to on NPR as an "information architecture" firm,
although the firm does not do what we do. And yet NPR's reporting was
correct!
   http://www.ptechinc.com/01/sub/miaa/index.asp
Even within our little IA community, we still have IAs whose work is
more taxonomy- or database-oriented and others whose work is more
process-oriented and still others whose work is more visually-oriented. 

3) Whatever happened to the elegant and succint term "interaction
design"? More than anything this describes what I do and what most
professional information architects I know do. It doesn't describe *all*
of what I do, but it describes *most* of what I do. And it describes a
key aspect of what all current IAs do. I think we're wrong to try to
come up with a name to describe all the hats we wear when we don't even
have a name for each of the hats. 

-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
sci: http://www.askrom.com
biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com