13 Nov 2006 2224H

There’s some shakeups from the movers and shakers

People are giving up on the idea of being an IA. Some don’t want to even call themselves IAs anymore. Christina Wodtke of Elegant Hack, as was brought up elsewhere by Adam Greenfield, writes about our disciplinary myopia, or is it amnesia, or is it, as I’ve reproduced below about e-voting and IAs, a case of me not knowing what I don’t know?

For a discipline that is growing and developing as rapidly as it has, and as it continues to grow, and add practitioners everyday, there will necessarily be some of this re-treading of old ground, even though, to the practiced eye, particularly to the old trailmasters who originally cut this trail years ago, this well-worn path continues to be re-re-re-discovered by newer eyes, setting foot on the information architecture trail for the first time.

But I sympathize deeply with Wodtke and Greenfield. There are whole manners of things that we can apply our skills to but have not stepped outside the web box. There are whole layers of rigor we haven’t even begun to subject ourselves to. I have decided in this last job search which brought me to the company I work for now, that the place I ultimately want to wind up in, is not a place that churns out websites only, but sees as its domain the user-centered design of user-facing information systems and ecologies, of which websites are only one part. This would also include user interfaces for electronics, for customer service, for signage: for all manner of things where information and companies and people have to interact, to achieve goals, to do so in a pleasurable or at least perfunctory manner, without hassle, using all the tools, quantitative, qualitative or otherwise, to bring to bear on these problems.

That’s what this is all about for me.

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