1 Jan 2011 12:54
Re: [Sigia-l] Anyone suggest a better global list?
Peter Morville <morville <at> semanticstudios.com>
2011-01-01 11:54:49 GMT
2011-01-01 11:54:49 GMT
As a practicing information architect, I'd have to agree with Skot. Designers and developers have absorbed the basic skills of IA, but there remain many environments where people who specialize in strategic and/or tactical IA are required. I focus primarily on strategic IA and find myself having to refer some really good work to others, because I can't meet demand. At the same time, I believe the emergence of cross-platform, multi-channel, (ubiquitous, pervasive, ambient) experiences is opening up a whole new set of challenges for information architects and other mapmakers. In the next 5-10 years, we will need to create a new set of "basic skills" for designers and developers to absorb. This will require discussion, so I'm pleased to see that sigia has survived into 2011. Happy New Year! Peter Morville President, Semantic Studios http://semanticstudios.com/ http://findability.org/ On Dec 31, 2010, at 3:16 PM, Skot Nelson wrote: > I disagree with the premise that it's been absorbed, but acknowledge that a basic skill set may have and that for many organizations that "basic" skill set suffices. > > Project management should never have been it's own discipline. It's a skill set, but there are times when a dedicated project manager is appropriate. > > Similarly designers need to be aware of usability and information architecture concepts, but there are still Many times when a dedicated usability position may be important. > > -- > Skot Nelson(Continue reading)
Further, I think that the opposite
opinion has better (and more hopeful) parallels with this discussion of IA.
Various people have talked about the basic skills of IA now being expected in designers. Similarly, the
basic skills of project management should always have been expected of everyone except the very
inexperienced. However when you move beyond the basic, you get into levels of knowledge of a skill base
that require specialists. I think this is what makes a discipline exist; everyone can get a basic
grounding in a range of different skill sets, then get deep grounding in a smaller number. You bring
together a cross-discipline team based on the shape of your problem. If you're building a tiny system that
simply accepts comments but passes them onto another system for processing, you may not need an IA
specialist, and similarly if you're working with a small co-located team, without heavy ext
ernal dependencies, suppliers and so on, you may not need a dedicated project manager. Similarly with any
other discipline (some companies need logistics experts, or pilots).
Of course, this doesn't necessarily answer the question as to why this list went quiet. Perhaps it's that by
driving the complexity of problems that are referred to actual IAs up, combined with an increase in the
number of problems that need /some/ IA but without a suitable increase in the number of professional IAs,
people's minds are being swamped with the work they're doing, and there's less time available for
distilling that work into ideas and stories that can help others? Many counterbalancing forces, and
maybe they aren't quite balanced at the moment.
I'd say there's also something to the argument that at the basic levels, so much stuff has been experimented
with, researched and discussed that people don't feel a need to share yet another story about how they did
what their professional instinct is telling them to do. It may take a while longer for learnings from the
more complex stuff that is being done to emerge. It takes time to reflect on what you've discovered so that
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