[Sigia-l] unemployed?

[christina wodtke]

On Zeldman: I have had the immense pleasure of hanging with Zeldman at a few
conferences and I think he sticks his foot in his mouth like a few other of
my favorite people, but is a smart huge-hearted guy. He cares a whole hell
of a lot. I once saw him crushed  when another speaker said on stage that
she was unable to use her site when she got a disabling disease that
affected her eyesight  (I think it was MS) and couldn't resize his fonts. I
thought he had forgotten about that statement, when one day voila, a bigger
font button on ALA. If one can make a clear case for change, Zeldman's open
minded enough to hear it.

On graphic design and A List Apart: As far as I can tell, all the articles
on ALA have been promoting the tension, rather than mending fences or
teaching IA skills. I recommended we send him article ideas on IA. In
return, B&A will solicit him and other designers for articles in turn. Maybe
we can build some bridges.

On unemployment wisecracks: I really suspect he was making a joke. But when
you are steeped in an environment of hostility, it becomes ingrained. One
day I maybe a snide comment about Jared Spool on another list because of our
endless weird relationship with usability, and then immediately regretted
it. I'd turned a reasonable human into an icon of guruness. Luckily Jared
and I could chat offlist about it and our friendship is intact. It's so easy
to automatically joke about those people, be they marketing, usability,
design or engineering, removing their humanity and making them into a
homogenous mass we can mock. I suspect the "unemployed IA" is part of
Zeldman's homogenous mass... pretentious, intellectual, bullshit selling
skill-free part of the consulting golden fleecing that happened in the 90's,
finally brought low by the dot-com bust. His librarian angel may not be
enough to remind him of the real people of IA, just as I could confuse Jared
the guru with Jared the cool dude I joke with.

Our biases are our Achilles' heel, we must protect ourselves from them.

So I would say that IA's have a great deal of talent in bridgemaking and
translating, and we should look at rifts like this one and try to understand
them and see if we can heal them.

The comment resonated with me because lately I've been wondering if our
profession could go "poof." And wondering if that was a bad thing.