I’ve been designing products since before the library/info science folks planted the IA flag. I struggled to understand why IA wasn’t just a subset of what people like me were doing all along. (To Capolan’s point.)

Now I understand better the legitimacy of IA. IA to product design as plumbing is to a general contractor. Plumbing is a legitimate specialty, and some jobs need the specialist. To call it a specialty is not to denigrate it! But a plumber wanting to expand his business should expand his skills and his title, not the definition of plumbing.

That a crisp definition of IA eludes the profession year… after year… after year… should be construed as a hint that Rosenfeld’s flexible definitions have too much play in them. We all seem to agree that “small IA” is a definition that holds its own. Can we make it official?

When the definition of IA crisply matches the grain of the real world, the perennial controversy will finally die down.

I’ve come accross numerous sites all vague and filled with generalities, buzz terms and jargon. It reminded me a bit of the Project Managers who have read all the books but can’t actually manage a project. They have all the answers and use all sorts of terms that are central to the PM world, but in the end they find that they can’t actually manage the project. Just because someone knows how to use tools does not a carpenter make.

I guess I may be foolish to believe this, but I always felt that being a GOOD web designer involved designing for human experience, being a good web designer really enhanced the, as Microsoft has called it, “story” for the user.

The concept of the IA seems to be made up to compensate for designers who only create pretty pictures. This I don’t think warrents creating a new role, it warrents getting better designers.

There are many freelance developers/designers out there that do a fine job without having to bring in an overpriced “user philosopher” to tell them how to build the website experience.

This same thing holds true I might add for the role of Project Manager in these situations.
Am I the only one that thinks that we are adding uneccessary bloat to projects by putting too many cooks in the kitchen?

Do we really need all these people touching this – I mean, its a website. Its not nuclear physics, its not the worlds largest particle collider..its a website. we’ve all been on ones we like, and ones we didn’t. I think “IA” is becoming more and more ingrained in people. Charting and graphing it, doesn’t change much.

I then read some of the above posts and I couldn’t help but think that what I was hearing was “Derrida-esque” in that, it all was just jargon strung together, designed to collapse on itself under scrutiny, the linguistic equivalent of a house of cards.

The role of “IA” seems to be one more corporate created position that adds overhead to the project, and really provides very little to the end result. These things are, I believe nothing that a good team and a quality designer couldn’t have brought to the table on their own.

The role of the “IA” resembles to me the role of the “consultant” when they come into the company. They say the same thing that everyone else has been saying or doing, and get paid for this reiteration and creating a nice pie chart.

Perhaps I’ve had the luxury of working with great designers that already understand “IA”, I don’t know. What I think however is a different story. What I think is that the role of the “IA” is arrogent and is one of those high level filler positions that is not only unecessary but somewhat detrimental to the development of a strong team.

I’m eagerly awaiting feedback – someone, anyone show me in a clear manner that I’m wrong, and then provide me with concrete evidence about how a “IA” truely improved something over what the original team’s plan was.

I see too many “User Experience Design” hijacked by “designers” who had no knowledge in “Human-Computer Interaction” and “User Centered Design”, but merely their ego-centric “design innovations” in the sake of “design”.

IAs by definition are not “information-centric” people as mentioned in the article, in stead, any IA will tell you “User” is always the first and foremost priority in any Information Architecture. UCD (User Centered Design) is the foundation of Information Architecture.

Back to the Physical metaphor of “Architecture”, any organized structural system requires architecture, whether it is a conventional building, or a really innovative cutting edge organic living structure such as the space station in 2050…In the same sense, any information system requires architecture in order to form a non-chaotic system, the work and process of creating this order is called “Information Architecture”. Designers should stop complaining and fear about the “IA-land grabbing”, and focus on the really design issue, which is how to make the interiors and exteriors beautiful.

To me, someone who calls himself an Information Architect is, sorry to be so blunt, a pretentious dick who tries to make their contributions to design look and sound more important than they actually are (in that, they actually match the common attitude of real architects who generally consider themselves at the top of the design pyramid). This term once might have raised one’s market value, but since nowadays everyone and their brother has much fancier job descriptions on their business cards than the job they actually perform in happens to be, it just sounds utterly ridiculous, only to be surpassed by the even more obnoxious term of the ‘Experience Designer’. As a matter of fact, this is the first Website/Blog on these matters which I come across that doesn’t drip with self-complacency and egos who are a bit too bloated for their own good. Given the vile reactions Joshua’s piece has triggered here it seems indeed that in the end it’s all a vanity issue and nothing more.

And “design,” don’t get me started. We’ll all be human-touch-thing-planners within six weeks.

There has been an ongoing misconception for a while now that information is something that can exist on its own without interpretation. But one man’s information is just another man’s data. Without the context portion involved in the above equation, the human perception and understanding, there is no information, only noise.

Consider a very simple example: a list of phone numbers. Some people would call that information. I would say that without the associated names, it it not information. And I would add that it is design’s job to make that name-number association useful by putting in alphabetical order (or whatever order the user would like).

There are is tons and tons of datum in the world. Most of it is going to waste because it isn’t being transformed into information. if you don’t believe me, look at what Hans Rosling accomplished with the right data and intelligent design.

(BTW, it’s a bit disappointing when a proponent of design engages a “neat” feature like a live preview for comments that literally makes it impossible to type quickly. I had to switch to a text editor to type my message and paste it in because the live preview was so unresponsive. Put your money where your mouth is and turn off that wizbang, useless feature.)