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

[Chris Chandler]

From: "Nuno Lopes" <nbplopes at netcabo.pt>


> Christina Wodtke on the topic "Findability is dead, Long live ummm...
> Meaning?" 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. 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.


That sounds good to me!

To me, a lot of the power of "IA" as a discipline comes directly out of it's fundamentally multidisciplinary character.
There were sessions at the recent conference about "how to get along with techies" and "IA vs Visual Design" and there
have been numerous messages (even a new list) about communicating to business, all of which reminded me that a lot of
the value I bring to the design process is as a communicator, facillitator and outsider.

I think we have a tendency to talk about focussing on the needs of the "user" in a way that glosses over how difficult
and central this is to what we do, and how different it makes us from other members of a team. NOTE: I am NOT saying
other members of the team don't, can't or won't have this fundamental orientation, just that it is "baked in" to what I
do as an IA.




> It really puts me of 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.
>
> 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.



"Playground" is a good word for what goes on here.

Let me ask you this -- would you consider the last five years of marketing material for a consumer product company
structured or unstructured? In any event, I added more "structure" to it when I modified the existing structure based on
other sites in the same 'genre' and designed a faceted browsing mechanism for the product line. I also tried to keep
some continuity with the existing labels/navigation to support those who used the old site. My model for how to
structure the data turned out to be a matter of balancing many different forces. Perhaps this is too inexact and
informal to satisfy the challenge to IA you pose above, but I believe IA is at least as much craft as science.


-cc