[Sigia-l] NextD takes a slash at "Findability, InformationArchitecture"

[Stew Dean]

On 06/04/07, Lee Hsieh <lhsieh at simple-clarity.com> wrote:
>
> ..other than the turgid prose, the overall meaning is spot on.  There is still a narrow, 'ivory-tower' mindset among a number of practicing IAs which can be largely attributed to a few, vocal individuals in the past who cared more about self-promotion than cross-disciplinary collaboration.
>
> As for the pdf format, it makes sense. if i spent a whole afternoon writing 6-page rebuttal, i certainly wouldn't want to make easy for others to copy/paste my thoughts out of context.
>

Hi Lee,

I'm coming to this a bit late but having found and read the article I
do have empathy with what it's saying. From my perspective books such
as the polar bear book do strengthen a bit of a myth that IA is
somehow different from experience design.  There is also a myth that
Information Architecture is about the organisation of information.

As an information architect it is context, not content that is king.
What I do is dependent on the project I work on and, as a contractor,
I get to work on a lot of different projects with different context.
To be honest I've not worked on designing any huge content heavy sites
for a while, although have worked on a couple of large intranets and
have worked on parts of huge sites but I have noticed a tendency to
over complicate things. I see processes used, like card sorting, that
add noice not signal to the user research process (I would say this is
down to lack of context for the sort not the idea of card sorting as
such).

I think what I'm trying to say is that as jobbing IA I find some what
is 'official' said about IA by those who are in the spot light simply
not to be true. I'm too busy drawing boxes to worry to much if books
about Information Architecture describe my job incorrectly, although
it doesnt help much as there is a danger any official course taught on
the subject will be one step (or even two) removed from reality -
coming out as a history lesson on library science than a good guide on
how to architect web and other interactive projects  in terms of
content, funcationality and experience. There no point implimenting a
site wide dublin core style catagorisation system if that structure
doesnt allow for what the user really wants to do and is not driven by
key user journeys.

-- 
Stewart Dean