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November 05, 2002
MeFi thread about IA
This MetaFilter thread, which discusses the newly launched Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture, draws out some really good crit of IA. Someone called Rory edits the overblown (to me) 25 theses of IA down to about twelve good clear sentences that we actually could use to describe IA to others, Adam responds, and someone called fuzz asks a couple of questions that probably secretly keep IAs up at night (paraphrased):
"Why haven't I (in the IT systems-design field) heard of IA before? Why isn't IA plugged into other tech fields that share the "Architecture" name? I read the site, still don't get it. What is IA and what are its specific goals? What would the world look like if IA succeeded in its aims?"
It's the damn "defining the field" issue again. I'm not sure that IA has clearly articulated its goals as being distinct from, say, usability: if IA suceeded most networked digital things would be easier to use, users' needs and interests would be taken into account from the start of all software projects, businesses would recognize and value the complexity and possibilities offered by attention to information organization and retrieval.
Posted by Andrew at November 5, 2002 06:38 PM