Comments on Why I'm Not Calling Myself an Information Architect Anymore

Mike — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:11 GMT

I have always been intruiged, confounded and slightly amused by the way terms like Information Architect are picked up and used by people. In the 15 years that I’ve been around this field I’ve been a “Communication Designer”, “Document Designer,” and “Information Designer” at various groups. I have rejected the title Informaiton Architect, though. It simply doesn’t feel right for the general kinds of communications projects that I do, although I’ve come across others who have made Information Architect the next stop on the user-centered design train.

All the terms lack percision to me becuase they are picked up and used by so many people—and they certainly seem to confuse clients. I’ve yet to find one that I feel comfortable with. In my last group we all used the title “designer” regardless of our specific pont-of-view or the output we produce.

My all time favorite confusing term? A group that called themselves “Design Integrationists.”

David Heller — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:11 GMT

I think that people are missing the context of my article. I’m not trying to say that Information Architecture isn’t a good title. It is. It is a good title for those people who use information architecture as their sole specialty.

The point of the article is to say that it does no one any good to use the term Information Architecture to mean anything other than what it really means. Other terms are generic, and do a good job of being generic, but using a specific term to mean something generic doesn’t make much sense. User Experience Design is a good generic term because it doesn’t relate back to a specific discipline, or set of specific skills.

IA on the other hand requires quite a bit of specialization to be done correctly and that is what I’m trying to suggest. IA should be protected and loved and respected. IA can only be helped by this. This might mean pissing people off who have used the title but really don’t use IA. People who are general User Experience Designers who don’t really understand categorization, facets, thesauri, etc. Most people who call themsevles Information Architects don’t do this and thus dillute what would ordinarily be a very valuable title.

Most User Experience Designers do employ some level of IA, but aren’t really expert in it. So it is like the visual designer. Not all visual designers are iconagraphers even though most have created an icon or two in their lives. This seems pretty easy for most to accept, no? Why not w/ IA?

Lets not turn IA into “usability”. Lets keep IA as a specific term that carries its value.

Betsy Martens — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:11 GMT

As someone pointed out already, this is perhaps mostly a question of self-identification. After listing all my diverse “hats” on a business card, then (joyfully) feeling empowered to lump them all under “information architect,” I now have settled on a tag line to do the job. My business is information design (encompassing more than Web stuff), I use the title “information architect,” and the tagline reads: “Content and the space it occupies.” So much better than a big stack of hats.

Pat — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:10 GMT

A long post. Sorry….

My team is wrestling with the whole “title” issue right now. For those who wonder “why bother,” I must say that in a large corporate environment, a title can help the many different players (technical and non-technical) in a project understand what you do and why you’re present. And in my experience (again, in a large, corporate environment), that title must be clear and not haughty, off-putting or overly academic-sounding. We already battle the notion of “what makes them the ‘experts’.” Calling ourselves “architects” is – IMHO – fraught with peril.

I like the inclusion of the word “customer” in titles associated with the IA/usability field. I think that resonates much more strongly with business-side folks. For example, see if your “look-n-feel” or “usability” issues get better attention/prioritization from a project’s business owner if those issues are re-identified as “customer experience issues.”

I have a meeting tomorrow AM to lock this down and move on. We’ve already done a few laps on this topic, and here’s how the meeting invite reads. Would love to hear thoughts/opinions.
– - –
OK – I know we’re sick of discussing this, but . . .

It’s a little bit like trying to name navigation—short but all-encompassing!

Perhaps I’m also over thinking it, but with our lack of direct and final authority over designs, do we want to have the word “design” in our titles? In other words, if we call ourselves designers but don’t always get the designs we want, would we be comfortable pointing to the website and saying: “I’m an interface designer, and I work on this site.”? For this vein of thinking, I wonder if we adopt the word “consultant”?

I also wonder about the absence of “usability” in our titles, (though many listings on Monster do not state “usability” in the title—rather, it’s part of the description/duties).

So, that said, here’s where I’m at, and I want to leave this meeting with the title decided so that it can be communicated in the full dept. meeting on Monday.

In no particular order:

1 – User Interface Designer
2 – User Experience Designer
3 – User Interaction Designer
4 – Interaction Design Consultant
5 – Specialist, Usability and Interface Design

Could consider dropping the word “User” or replacing it with “Customer.”

brandy — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:10 GMT

why a name is important?

Something for a company to put on a job list for one thing. I am tired of all these ass backwards job descriptions with the wrong title, or a weird title.

Designer can often mean production design.

It helps when it comes to getting a paycheck, title = money in a lot of classical work environments. I am aware though that web dev isn’t exactly a classical environment :)

It gives some people a sense of worth, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. People like to know what’s expected of them.

Madonnalisa — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:10 GMT

iOMAR

That’w what I’m calling the work that my group does. I wanted to avoid IA at all costs since it was so associated with websites only.

It’s definitely a big dose of the user-centered
LIS-IA…

information organization
information management
information access
information retrieval

and we do not have a mascot named Omar…yet!

Gene — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:10 GMT

I’ve always thought the “architecture” portion of “information architecture” was a bit of pompous inflation, especially when used in reference to the LIS-IA school. I mean, “information organization” and “information classification” work just as well, and are probably more descriptive.

(But I think I’m coming around to Matt’s POV that “architecture” is a useful term when we talk about the coordinating functions of Big IA.)

Anyway, I see what we do as information product design. I like that term because a) it’s simple and (I think) easy to understand, and b) it focuses on things we can control (the product and the information it delivers) rather than things we can’t (e.g. user experiences).

Owen — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:10 GMT

I find these discussions fascinating and bizarre in a ‘through the looking glass’ sort of way. As a self-taught freelance ‘web designer’ running a one-man operation, I wear all the hats and take all the beatings. Apparently there is a realm somewhere in the universe where design teams are enormous and budgets are gargantuan…a magical/mystical place where every nuance has a dedicated department of over-educated specialists who passionately wrestle with the most insignificant details. Wow. Can somebody tell me how to get there? Is there such a thing as an Information Hairdresser? That’s what I wanna be…maybe.

matt — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:10 GMT

haha and also – the tao that can be described is not the tao, right…

two quotes:

“Even the finest teaching is not the Tao itself.
Even the finest name is insufficient to define it.
Without words, the Tao can be experienced,
and without a name, it can be known.”

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/taoism/ttcstan3.ht…

and finally:

“Names is for tombstones, baby” -Mr Big, james Bond: “Live and Let Die”
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Land/8672/lald/tomb.wa…

matt — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:10 GMT

Wurman’s defn. still resonates because it’s nearest to what a “real” architect does. The orchestration of many crafts, skills and knowledge-domains towards realising a vison, mainly that of the architects sponsored by a client which renders a programme of needs specific to a site.

The LIS-oriented view of IA doesn’t begin to address this, which is why the Wurman view, the “big IA” causes so much arguement.

“Why do they want to own the process?” Cause they DO! Sweeping generalisation ahoy: “real” architects could care less in the main about participatory or user-centred design. It’s about their vision of how to solve the problem as presented to them by the client and the site.

The vision thing is the driving force behind those who lay claim to the Wurman defn., and the struggle of identity with interaction designers, user-experience designers, and hey… designers…

which brings me to the particular dead horse I keep in a cold store pickled in formaldehyde so I can keep a-beatin’ it.

we’re *designers* when we exercise our vision in a specific practice of creating for digital mediums.

we’re *architects* when we orchestrate those who specialise in the specific practices necessary to render our vision (library scientists, coders, technical architects, writers, visual designers, brand strategists yadda yadda)

I’m not helping am I.

oh well.

Nurse! Nurse! My tablets!!!!

RuthK — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:10 GMT

I agree with David. If you look at titles for other types of roles, such as Producer, Project Manager, and Product Manager, they encompass many responsibilities and skill sets. The problems I have had with titles is that they’re often too limiting. Even Information Architect, one of the more general titles for the discipline, has been too limiting. What do you call an IA generalist (as David has described above) who also does requirements, copy writing, and project management? Maybe all it comes down to is how to represent all this stuff on a resume. It usually doesn’t matter what your title is while you’re working within an organization.

David Fiorito — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:09 GMT

When I took on my latest job as Information Architect, I found that I was called upon to do IA (labeling, taxonomy, meta-data, etc.), UX (site flows and pathing), UE (usability testing and heuristic evaluations), and UI (page layout and prototyping) work.

So what am I? I prefer the title Information Architect because, in a literal sense, that is what I do. I craft the information presented by the business for presentation to the employees and customers of the business. I am essentialy an architect.

I guess what I am saying is that, as I see it, the title of Information Architect evokes the image of a professional that crafts an information space and a traditional architect crafts living space.

I see no problem with it.

Cheers,

Dave Fiorito

Greg — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:09 GMT

What is with everyone beating the dead “identity” horse? Really, is it relevant what we call ourselves? By and large, most of us have responsibilites that dictate we take care of certain tasks and roles, usually moving through most of the IA, ID, UCD, etc. fields that we spend so much time discussing. I don’t care what we call ourselves…I may have at one point, but it seems so trivial now. The fact is, these different fields are the ROYGBIV color spectrum of a development cycle. Each is a crucial part of the whole, blending ever so delicately from one “color” to the next. Let’s stop worrying so much about what we call ourselves and move on to the work we actually do and how we do it better!

David — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:09 GMT

I wonder whether *any* IAs actually do *all* of the things it is claimed IAs do!

I’m pretty sure most of the IAs I know don’t have any experience with facets, categories and meta-data beyond constructing a site map or carrying out a few random card sorts every now and again.

And I know that most people I talk to smirk when I say I’m a “Customer Experience Architect”.

Such is life… one day we will all be web designers again and that will be the end of it!

Cheers, d

Lyle Kantrovich — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:09 GMT

David, I also didn’t want to claim to be an “IA”—although I do some of the same things IA’s do. That’s why I selected the title I did: User Experience Architect. See a description here: http://crocolyle.blogspot.com/2002_05_05_crocolyle_archiv…