[Sigia-l] RE: Apple and Pears

[Benjamin Speaks]

Interesting thread...and yes I agree that  LIS did make many important
contributions to the discipline (or whatever we define it as now days).

But I tend to think that a lot of people overlook the contributes of AIGA
and the graphic/visual designers as being some of the real pioneers for IA.
Many visionaries (like Clement Mok) made immense contributions to the
discipline and yet are hardly referenced because they did not "pitch"
themselves as having a LIS foundation.  However, the design studios (like
Studio Archetype) were the market trigger that permitted IA to flourish in
the mid to latter 90s (and thus contributing to the survival of the skills
today).  The IA pureplay shops (like Argus) bombed commercially because of
overspecialization and focus on LIS (ever read the titles of some of the
consultants over there?  "Thesauri Expert" means nothing to 99% of the
people who are not in the field.  It is hard enough to educated/pitch
companies on something like IA much less to assume such titles).

To this day I am amazed that AIGA didn't absorb the domain of IA and thus
make it a subset of visual design.  I think they were feeling generous (and
still are) as such a move would not be beyond their capabilities.

So yes I agree with a loose definition of the role.  Actually, what would be
the downside of pitching IA as a subset of [usability, interaction design,
visual design, or whatever] that an individual cross trains in to improve
the overall experience of a product/design?

Benjamin Speaks
Director, Information Design
Proxicom

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Saffer" <interactiondesign at hotmail.com>
To: "'Matthew Rehkopf'" <matt.rehkopf at experiencethread.com>;
<Sigia-l at asis.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2003 2:48 PM
Subject: [Sigia-l] RE: Apple and Pears


> <snip>Perhaps than it is the employers that have muddied the waters of
> IAs, demanding a position they called Information Architect, but which
> was not rooted in LIS. We are defined by the market that demands us -
> perhaps, another reason why we should be attempting to explain ourselves
> better to the business world.</snip>
>
> At the risk of angering the LIS crowd, I'm going to venture to say that,
> even though they often go hand-in-hand, the bulk of "IA" jobs now and in
> the near future are going to be of the "site map+interactivity" type,
> and not the taxonomy/classification type.
>
> Creating thesuari, controlled vocabularies, etc. are specialized,
> typically short-term work: once you've created them and implemented
> them, the client maintains them. I doubt that many companies outside of
> search engine developers like iPhrase, Google, etc. or large,
> multi-faceted companies like Microsoft and Yahoo would pay to have a
> year-round, full-time creator of, say, synonym rings. Pushing ourselves
> to narrowly define ourselves as such to the business world (whatever
> that is) means pushing ourselves out of jobs.
>
> God bless employers for muddying the waters, I say. We're much better
> off with a loose definition of our role, even if it requires a bit more
> effort to winnow out the specialists in the various sub-disciplines.
>
> Dan
>
> dan saffer
> sr. interaction designer, ameritrade
> http://www.odannyboy.com
>
> "there's a lot of things
>  if I could I'd rearrange." -U2
>
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