[Sigia-l] Re: IA Standards

[Listera]

"david_fiorito at vanguard.com" wrote:

> Personally I see the need for standards at the company level not at the
> level of the profession.

That's a smidgen of progress.

> Architects design the structures and spaces where we live work and play.  They
> do not make movies that are shown in the theaters they design, or make the art
> that goes on the walls of the galleries they design.

Are you simply unaware of the great tradition of architects
designing/manufacturing furniture, utensils, sculpture, fabrics, typography,
etc for millennia? 

> But we "information" architects cannot be said to have such clear
> boundaries to the work we do.

It's only you who erroneously thinks that all other professions are
simplistically defined by single words.

> Are we HCI experts, library scientists, UI designers, etc?

Are "programmers" kernel programmers, device driver programmers, web app
programmers, three-tier programmers, GUI programmers, procedural
programmers, OO programmers, interpreted-language programmers, etc? What a
compiler or kernel programmers does is worlds apart from, say, what a
scripting programmer does.

Are "designers" print designers, motion graphics designers, icon designers,
web designers, 3D designers, editorial designers, UI designers, etc? What a
3D special FX designer does is vastly different than, say, what a
pixel-level icon designer does.

I'm having a hard time deciding if you're naïve about these things or you
are having a difficult time with the complexity of the world around you.

> What is the harm in narrowing our field so that when a business has the need
> for our expertise they automatically know to call an information architect?

Because the world has ceased to be such a neatly defined, simplistic place,
oh, right about 1950s.:-)

Ziya
Nullius in Verba