[Sigia-l] Information-centered Design (was I Want My GUT of I

[alex wright]

I'm glad to see this recent dialogue moving beyond the rubrics of
corporate Web site design.  So much of IA theory and practice to date
seems dominated by corporate imperatives - often in subtle, even
insidious ways.

Of course, most of us work for corporations in some way, so it's only
natural that we should spend time thinking about our immediate problems.
But it also seems like a lot of us are groping around for a more
forward-thinking point of view these days.

I agree with Matt, Joe and other posters who have suggested that recent
developments like RDF, the Semantic Web, and the explosion of personal
mobile information access tools signal important changes in the way
people find, share and consume information.  I suspect we are only
barely starting to understand the implications, but a lot of us seem to
feel that perhaps there may be more to life as an IA than working on
client-service projects for corporations?

No less a capitalist than Adam Smith believed the corporation was a
spectacularly inefficient organism, ultimately doomed to failure.  He
felt that the success of capitalism would ultimately depend not on large
organizations, but on the entrepreneurship of small groups.  A couple of
data points that seem to bear out Smith's hypothesis: over the last 30
years, the size of the average corporation has shrunk drastically (and
continues to do so), while the number of small businesses has exploded.

Frances Fukuyama has predicted that the emergence of networks (social
and technological) will lead to what he calls the "disintegration of
hierarchy": the emergence of smaller, self-directed communities (like,
one could argue, this one) that more closely resemble early kinship
networks and craft guilds than hierarchical entities like modern
corporations or government bureaus.

At the Summit, Stewart Brand and Mark Bernstein both spoke compellingly
about the failure of "architecture" as a model for what we do; and of
how successful buildings often result not from architecture in the
artistic sense, but through the collaboration of builders with users,
and through bottom-up, organic evolution.  That theme resonated with me;
and while I won't presume to make any predictions about what any of us
will be doing in five years, my hope is that over time, the current
model of what I'll call Institutional IA gives way to something more
akin to Entrepreneurial IA.

regards,
alex
---------------
alex wright
alex at agwright.com | www.agwright.com