[Sigia-l] The value of an IA

[Listera]

Christopher Fahey:

> I don't think we're going to get a lot of good business-saavy and design-saavy
> IA/UX leaders in the future unless we always have a large and thriving pool of
> specialized information architects cranking out wireframes and sitemaps and
> learning what it takes to get things done -- and what causes things to fail --
> in the trenches.

Why is this either|or?

One of the things I hated about running a design company was that I had less
time to do design. Even today, while I lead a large project, I do many
things utterly hands-on: I'll design a notation architecture for a tagging
system interfacing an inference engine, create flows for business rules for
some fairly complex financial processes, design interfaces for a variety of
widgets, even do graphic design work at the pixel level (Hi, Chris :-) and
so on. I could easily get someone else to do them, and there are obviously
many people on the team. But these are not in opposition to the product
strategy or application architecture work I also lead. They *are*
intertwined, and I wouldn't want to have it any other way. This is not some
"trench" work for me; I love this stuff. And I personally don't know anyone
who works as hard as I do. But I'm not doing all that for $30/hr. ;-)

Like I said before, this is not about substitution but elevation of skills
and expectations.

----
Ziya

Design is doing for a dime what anyone can do for a dollar.