Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

Article Idea:

IA or not IA

suggested by Christina Wodtke on 2006/10/11

Some of my more regular readers, and certainly anyone who knows me personally, will be aware that for the last few years, I’ve been more or less backing away from public identification with the information architecture community. I no longer identify myself professionally as an IA, that is to say, and I’m no longer so terribly interested in attending or presenting at IA-centric events.

Given how very much this community has given to me, though, I feel like I owe folks an explanation for my increasing alienation…even if nobody’s asked for one. If I’m able to express myself correctly, it should shed some light on why I have been so reluctant to endorse, let alone embrace, the various events and causes to which more a few of you have invited me to lend support over the last few years.

Please bear in mind, as you read the following, that in this case all the usual disclaimers are utterly sincere. I really do respect the hell out of the parties involved, and equally, I mean this criticism – however blunt – to be both constructive and useful.

A lot of this distance is a healthy, and probably inevitable, structural consequence of the field’s reaching maturity. The stirring challenges of those first couple of years are now largely resolved, and to the extent that those challenges were constructed as dialectics, most of them broke against the “big IA” viewpoint I was personally most invested in. Practitioners in the field, by and large, now spend their time and energy not in abstract definitional debates but in the nitty-gritty, day-to-day details of managing information flow in the large-scale enterprise. Given that this was never anything I found particularly captivating, it’s understandable why I’d look elsewhere for inspiration.

But some of it is due to what I cannot help but see as a revenge effect. The early champions of IA – and here I’m explicitly thinking of Christina Wodtke, Lou Rosenfeld, Jesse James Garrett, and the Peters Morville and Merholz – were successful beyond any reasonable expectation in creating a welcoming, nurturing community. We all owe them a debt of gratitude for that; so, in my opinion, do the literally tens of millions of people who have used sites designed or improved by IAs who came up under their tutelage. Their contribution cannot be overstated and will not be forgotten.

But the less salutary flipside of nurturance is an environment in which pointed criticism is rarely heard or countenanced. It’s not that there weren’t expressions of divergent viewpoint at the various IA events and gatherings I’ve been to over the years; of course there were. It’s that the field has seemed (to me, at least) more interested in being supportive and in welcoming all contributions – even long past the historical moment when this made sense – than in imposing a more rigorous quality control.

More concretely: I want you to go and at least have a glance at this article, recently published as the lead article on Boxes and Arrows, which remains the IA community’s premier source for professional development materials. Put with maximum bluntness – and with all due respect to its author, who was doubtlessly writing in good faith – the problem with the article is that it presents as an “interesting new idea” a concept that has been extensively investigated, considered and published on elsewhere.

There is prior art here, in other words – and not a little, either. Author, editorial staff, and (perhaps most worrisomely) the commenters on the article seem entirely unaware of two decades of published work on the problem in the HCI field. From the perspective of a serious practitioner, both article and communal response are nothing but noise; the comments worry me most because, in a sense, they represent the collective intelligence of the IA field, and because nobody seems willing or able to point out the piece’s essential vacuity.

(Ironically, this is in part nothing but a knowledge management issue – ironic because the fields are so closely interrelated that for years Yahoo actually listed IA as a subcategory of KM.)

Nor is the piece, or B&A itself, the only example of this. For a community that claims as its domain the structuration of information in the service of a human user, IA as a body seems startlingly uninterested in the much deeper and more interesting challenges that emerge around mobile and ubiquitous encounters with information. After years in which many of us tried to argue that IA potentially constituted a powerful, general skillset applicable to situations far beyond the Web, it seems as if that “beyond” extends only as far as corporate intranets and the like. And this strikes me as a failure, locally and globally.

Now, before you leap to remind me: I know that both B&A and the various IA summits and retreats are almost entirely volunteer efforts. I know that it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep up with developments in one’s own field, let alone the other streams flowing alongside. And nobody is more dismayed than I by the sour bleatings self-appointed experts emit when they feel that the benisons of their knowledge have been insufficiently appreciated. So I’m sure not trying to score points here, and to the extent that people are personally hurt or offended by my comments, I apologize.

But that leaves the question of why so very many articles and presentations in the field seem predicated on the assumption that IA is something coextensive with Web technologies, most especially as used in the enterprise. I, at least, cannot take seriously, and do not want to take part in, a community where one not-terribly-interesting flavor of current practice trumps intellectual curiosity and the will to learn and grow.

Another way of looking at all of this is to say that the community has voted with its feet, that the people who are and who do IA at this point in time have made it clear where their interests lie. I once argued that IA is “whatever we say it is,” and so it is – simply with a different “we” in the driver’s seat. But given my feeling that the mobile and ubiquitous context offers individual information architects the prospect of a vastly expanded, more influential and, frankly, more important field of inquiry and practice, if IA is as a whole not interested in what’s going on here, then I am afraid that I am not interested in it. I hope those of you in IA from whom I have learned so much will understand and forgive my feelings.

FORGIVE? LET’S GET HIM TO WRITE THIS UP PROPER!