First: yes, I started this blog just to make this post, but I hope to use it at least occasionally to jot down thoughts about my work and our profession in a less long-winded fashion than this post. I blog elsewhere, but this post didn’t really fit with my (sporadically updated) personal blog, and I’d been meaning to start a Tumbleblog for a while anyway, so here it is.
A disclaimer: I had a pretty good time at the 2009 IA Summit. I saw some really terrific presentations, I met some cool people (not a lot, but that’s my fault and no one else’s), and I came away with a good mix of information and tools that I can start using right away (like EightShapes’s awesome Unify) and information and ideas that made me really stop and think (like Karl Fast’s “Is Interaction Necessary?”).
I hope to write more about all the positive stuff I heard and learned and saw at the Summit. And I want to stress that this post is not directed at any individual. I’m just passionate about our field and a little frustrated that time was wasted at this year’s Summit on discussions that criticized without providing solutions. I wasn’t a first-timer, but I wonder if some who were might turn into one-timers. I hope not, and fortunately, I don’t think so; most of the first-timers I talked to seemed to view the in-fighting as a) not relevant to them, and b) inevitable for a field that is still young and figuring itself out. Which, come to think of it, is true, on both counts.
With all that said, though, I’m going to get this off my chest:
Four things I hope not to hear at the next IA Summit:
- “I don’t call myself an information architect anymore.”
Well, good for you. Some people still do; others never have; ultimately, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the work you do, how much you care about it, and how well you do it. As Christina Wodtke said, you are not your title. And let’s be clear: there is nothing inherently bad about calling yourself an IA, and there is nothing about calling yourself something else that makes you inherently superior to someone who calls himself or herself an IA.
(For the record, my title doesn’t have “IA” in it either. It has “experience architect,” which I think is more accurate for my particular role, and if I could create my own title, it would include both “experience” and “design,” and would say something about business strategy. But if my title were Information Architect, that would be fine too.)
- “If you’re still doing wireframes and sitemaps, you’re an idiot.”
That’s not an exact quote, but it’s close to something that I heard more than once, and it was hands down the silliest thing I heard at the Summit. (To be fair, I don’t think it was said maliciously or with the intent of insulting anyone; I think it was said to make people think, and that’s always good. I’m just not sure it came out that way.) Wireframes and sitemaps are a tool, a means of expressing and communicating the design or conception of an experience. And in the trenches, where most Summit attendees work, they’re a recognizable and easily digestible means of communication. Are they the best means? In some situations, they probably are; in others, they definitely aren’t, and an important part of our work is finding the best language for communicating what we’ve designed.
But just as you aren’t your title, you aren’t defined by your tools, either. Should you learn new tools and keep up with the tools that others in the field are using? Absolutely. Should our tools evolve to match the way our concepts and our experiences are evolving? Yes, and it’s exciting to see how this is beginning to happen. But wireframes and sitemaps are not going to disappear tomorrow just because someone at the IA Summit says you have to use something cooler. If wireframes and sitemaps are what you do, your only obligation is to make them the best they can be.
(Again for the record, I still make wireframes, but I’m finding that in my current work, they’re not the best means of communicating my designs, and I’m enjoying learning some new skills so that I can experiment with other approaches. This is not the same as stating that wireframes are dead.)
- “IA isn’t just about taxonomies and controlled vocabularies anymore.”
In other news, did you know you can watch television on your computer? And that people don’t all have dial-up anymore?
This may be the strawman-iest argument in the history of strawman arguments, and yet I heard variations of it several times. It boggles my mind that anyone is still saying this in 2009, because I am absolutely 100 percent positive that no one—seriously, not anyone—in 2009 thinks that IA *is* just about taxonomies and controlled vocabularies anymore. Trust me on this.
(That’s not to say that taxonomies and controlled vocabularies are history, or that they’re irrelevant. They certainly aren’t.)
- “Thanks, Lou and Peter, but it’s time to move on.”
Another strawman that was trotted out more than once, and one that makes the speaker sound both condescending and a little clueless. It would be a valid thing to say in some weird parallel universe in which Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville had done nothing since writing the first edition of the polar bear bookâor if they had nothing interesting, current, or valuable to say about the field of information architecture (and its variants). A more accurate way to express this sentiment might be, “Thanks, first edition of the polar bear book, but it’s time to move on.” Which, um, duh.
So what did you hear at the Summit that you never want to hear again? Buzzwords, strawmen, in-jokes…bring ‘em on!
