[Sigia-l] I Want My GUT of Information Architecture!

[melanie.kendell]

Hi

I have been lurking on this list for a little while, thinking that IA 
might have answers to some of my problems - but I think Nuno has some 
good points as to why it has not been as useful as I hoped.

Some background - I am a long time tech writer and previously worked as 
both a trainer and support analyst. I also have an interest in 
cognitive psychology and way people learn and put that learning into 
practice. So I believe I have a pretty good idea of how information 
dissemination methods work/don't work.

Nuno wrote:
> It seems that
> the specialists can't really settle on which facet of Information the
> discipline tries to grasp and master, and if all quite often I get
> confused on what is being actually referenced as "structure" in their
> comments. This can be a good thing, but nevertheless confusing.

I too have found the lack of agreement on this list confusing, there 
are a lot of people saying what IA is *not* (although there seems to be 
no concensus on even this) but I still haven't formed a good 
understanding of what it *is*.

<snip> For the second group, the work is still little and inconsistent 
> as we
> don't know what is actually the power of the artifacts being produced
> (Topic maps, Taxonomies, Faceted Classification, Second Order 
> Ontologies, etc). Most of the artifacts of the second are even for 
> some Information
> Architects not recognized as structuring entities.

These seem to be specialties of the Information Architect (in that 
although I think I know what they are, I'm not 100% sure - maybe that's 
just a terminology thing - this is where real-life examples would help).

> The third, spans over the previous two, and probably will be the 
> glue of
> joining both but still work is lacking as the people working in 1) and
> 2) don't actually know the power offered by each other products.

Is this in the realms of IA as a discipline? I agree it may be in the 
job spec of an Information Architect but is it Information 
Architecture? If it is, there are lots of people doing Information 
Architecture that are not Information Architects and this seems to me 
to be the difference between what I am understanding of Little IA 
(Information Architect) and Big IA (Information Architecture). I could 
be completely wrong but this is how it is coming across to me. 

> Christina Wodtke wrote:
> 
> >I have long thought the three qualities an IA should work toward was
> >findability, understandability and usability
> 
> I think this is the kind of higher level of pragmatics that the field
> needs. 

These are the aims of anyone involved in the dissemination of 
information - eg a technical writer will build a document/help system 
with structured navigation tools (tables of contents, index, full text 
search, etc), concise explanatory text targetted at the audience, and 
good layout/widgets to allow easy digestion of information and make the 
information gathering/learning task pleasurable enough to be repeated 
the next time. 

> Knowledge is not about Big IA, Little IA, West Cost IA, 
> East Cost
> IA, Information Architects, Data Architect or any other kind of 
> labels,is about sharing experiences and reasoning. Is about 
> unblocking barriers
> that other fields have reached (such as Data Architecture) and at that
> at the moment are having difficulty in breaking.

I think the thing is (as I think someone mentioned before) is to try to 
articulate some general understanding of what Information Architecture 
*is* and leave what an Information Architect *does* well alone.

> It really puts me off IA, when after reading the comments of different
> members about an interesting subject, when it comes to play the pipe
> with an example, the fundamental part falls within the scope of the
> knowledge of Data Architectures were the data modeled is highly
> structured.

I, selfishly, would like to see a lot more sharing of real examples on 
this list as it would help everyone understand the scope and skills 
involved in using IA in their work.

> But the reason why is highly structured, is not because structure in
> this case is good, but because we lack knowledge about creating models
> around unstructured data. It was here were I thought it was the play
> ground of Information Architecture, and probably is but I'm still not
> convinced by the information being exchanged in this list.

I think this is (or should be) part of Information Architecture, but is 
certainly an area which is being handled all the time in tech writing 
and many other information design roles.

> Peter Merholz wrote:
> >I'm Just Around The Corner from Figuring It Out.
> 
> I'm really excited about your solution. Please share if you can.

I would love to see this too :P

Thanks for some interesting reading.

-Melanie Kendell