[Sigia-l] unemployed?

[Andrew Hinton]

I recently re-read Social Life of Information, and it struck me with a new
energy from what I had remembered... It reminded me why I really love what
I'm doing. 

I've also been reading David Weinberger's "Small Pieces Loosely Joined"
(much of which I read online already but now I'm digging in for real).

If you take what these two books discuss and combine it into a kind of
clustered world-view, that'd be what Information Architecture is to me. An
ineffable combination of city planning, civil engineering, interior design,
organizational design, anthropology, group psychology, linguistics,
information science and palm-reading.

My theory: Library Scientists have found themselves suddenly extremely
relevant on a massive scale because this new dimension uses contextual
relevance as its central nervous system. But that's just one sliver. I keep
wanting IA to be more than that.

But, hey, if the IA's held a referendum and decided tomorrow that what
they're really about is taxonomies and their related library-science
activities, then I would no longer be an IA -- the term just wouldn't apply
to me. We need library scientists more than ever, but I'm not one.

Well, is what I'm trying to do "design"? I just don't know that 'design' as
a macro-discipline is capable of containing the implications of what
cyberspace (for lack of a better term) is and is becoming. We've created a
new dimension that is fundamentally DIFFERENT from the world we have evolved
in. We have no language for it yet. The brains of our children will grow and
understand the world differently because of it.

If Design somehow ends up swallowing the act of shaping cyberspace, design
itself will be completely changed from the inside out. The Internet is not
just another medium to be brough alongside print and buildings. It's an
ontological big-bang. Our terms will still be around 50 years from now, but
I doubt they'll mean quite the same things.




::challis at challishodge.com::wrote on 6/2/02 11:16 PM:

>> What are the trends? If smaller projects/teams are in the future, does that
>> increase or decrease the likelihood of positions being created for IAs? Is
>> it more or less likely that 'adjacent' disciplines (designers, developers,
>> project managers, business analyst, etc) will ultimately incorporate what
>> IAs offer by way of expanding their influence and domain? IA may be
>> important in the future, but does that necessarily mean so will IAs as
>> distinct professionals?
> 
> 
> In the ongoing evolution of design it is my feeling that people and design
> principles remain roughly the same while issues of context and technology
> (medium) change. New roles emerge to meet the changing needs of context and
> technology. They may be treated as professions for a while but eventually
> they find their place in the appropriate adjacent discipline for purposes of
> efficiency. We've seen this with usability engineering, with research and IA
> is another logical place for this consolidation.
> 
> -challis
> 
> 
> Challis Hodge
> chodge at humancontext.com    [www.humancontext.com]
> challis at challishodge.com    [www.challishodge.com]
> 312.382.0033    mob 847.830.8638    fax 312.382.0044
> 
-- 
:: s y m e t r i ::
andrew.hinton ÷ information.architecture ÷ ahinton at symetri.com