[Sigia-l] [iai-members] Where are the examples of IA work?

[Richard Hill]

Peter, you are right on the pitcher's mound with your query here. Not in the
out-field at all.

I think one of the issues that we have as a practice is that we don't own
our final work. We aren't the visionaries behind them and thus don't feel
qualified to present them as our work. I'm sure great IA thinking went into
it, but the total picture is made up of some many others and well the
leadership is not done by an IA. 

This is not the case in architecture and graphic design or in industrial
design.

So yes, we need to figure out how to own our own work at least for ourselves
so that we can show people what we've accomplished with all this process,
methods, and documentation. 

How to do that? hmmm? great question. I'm trying to figure that out for the
IxD community myself and it is not easy b/c we face a very similar problem. 

-- dave

On 3/31/07, Peter Merholz <peterme at peterme.com> wrote:
> Personally, I am hesitant to show a final result, not for criticism
> but that end result will be wrong for nearly everybody else in the
> room.  The design thinking, process, knowing the right questions to 
> ask, and knowing that convention is not right for many people (as we
> can always do much better) is a far better lesson than showing one end
> result of hundreds that were possible.

I'm sorry, but this thinking is incredibly flawed. Unless you think 
architects shouldn't talk about their the final product of their
buildings, or graphic designers shouldn't talk about their final
product (whether books, collateral, posters, web sites, environmental
graphics, whathaveyou).

This is not to diminish the value of the things that get us to a
final product. But I'm shocked at how resistant this community seems
to be to showing final product. I'm surprised at how many people 
pointed to the various documentation sesions at the Summit as
examples of IAs showing IA work. Documentation is well and fine, but
what did the documentation *lead to*? What are the experiences we're
enabling ours users to have? Users don't experience documentation 
(thankfully).

This discussion, frankly, only concerns me further. A community
caught up in its documentation, or which sees these:
===
  - words like AJAX, folksonomy, and blog
  - influential books (lots of these) 
  - the visual vocabulary
  - jesse's elements of user experience diagram
  - Boxes & Arrows
  - the IA Institute
  - the IDEAS conference
  - Rosenfeld publishing
  - successful and influential consulting firms 
  - courses and degrees that teach IA skills and principles
  - workshops and tutorials and other professional training
===
as the exemplar of demonstration is not a community that will connect
with a broader audience. 

Now, Karl also mentioned a set of products built by former IAs:
===
  - Intuitect
  - MindCanvas
  - SlideShare
  - Measure Map
  - FaceTag
  - Swipr (at the summit this year; no presentation though) 
===

Almost none of which engage in what I would think of as serious IA.
These are by-and-large examples of interaction design (with the
probably exception of FaceTag).

Where is our facility for wrangling complex information spaces being 
brought to bear? How are we making the world a better place in the
face of information glut and overload? What are the experiences
people are having with the things we helped build?

Am I really speaking from so far out of left field here? 
--peter


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