Information and Technology—Time for a Divorce

Information and technology have been dating since the creation of the printing press. However, they consummated their marriage in the digital age. Now it seems that they are inseparable. As the newlywed bliss has faded and the two live together, they have fallen into an enabling relationship.

Technology is the one who wears the pants in this relationship. Information is a willing subservient, waiting to see what technology will serve up.

All too often when people and organizations have trouble gaining, retrieving, or using information, they blame the technology. "Buy another server," "get more band width," or "upgrade the software." are often the answer. Do you ever hear "Are our information organization schemes optimized?" or "Do our meetings produce and use information that is useful to the Enterprise?"

The field of IA has been co-opted into the co-dependent relationships of technology and information. The practice of information architecture is the answer to structuring information for the presence on a technology platform (a website, intranet or mobile device for example).

Why should Info Architects look only at information on technology platforms? Should not the IA look at Information in any form? They should for both practical and theoretical reasons. Practically because information rarely lives solely in the digital world and theoretically because the more types of information an Info Architect sees, the better he or she better their craft.

IA Summit 09

Just finished the keynote and first session of the IA Summit. I Will post more as time permits (I hope). Added the the Twitter #ias09 feed for the duration of the Summit.

Information Archeology

I just finished a half day seminar on Information Archeology and gained a whole new insight on User Research.

Lorelei Brown and Hallie Wilfert lead the seminar and it was a very good survey of techniques for gaining user data through web analytics and research. It was a fresh and convincing approach to gaining user data for design.

While I knew what the seminar was going to be about before going into it (from the IA Summit website), I have always had a different meaning for archeology as to when it comes to Business Architectures. Namely, archeology was the act of studying, and understanding systems, applications of practices that came before. Usually archeology is performed when what came before was either poorly designed or had no consideration of architecture. In enterprise architecture circles, you often hear:

"An ounce of architecture is better than a pound of archeology."

Normally this phrase is used as a club over the head of a client who wants to
implement something without deliberate though or planning. I don't think that anyone has ever considered formalizing a practice or methodology for this use of archeology. I think I like the use of Brown and Wilfert's practice. It is a more positive application and it may be the next discipline in the IT/IM pantheon.

Best of IA Summit 2008—Designing for the social: Avoiding anti-social networks

This was my favorite session. Why? First, I believe it was the most original thought at the Summit and it was brilliantly delivered. While the title denotes that the topic was going to look at designing networks in as less an anti-social way as possible, the session actually looked at how to detect, manage and even embrace anti-social networks. The session speaker was Miles Rochford from Nokia.


Miles made a very good point: When researching personas and user data, Ux professionals often default to the "cheery, happy, willing" user. However, we as interaction professionals often forget or ignore system users who have less than noble intents. How many "evil" personas have you seen? These personas would help designers and security engineers to design out features that could be used for negative intent.


All in all a great presentation!

IA Summit 2008

Attending the I A Summit in Miami

Here's a list of the sessions I attended

Session	Speaker
Keynote: Journey to the Center of Design	Jared Spool
Tagging: Five emerging trends	Gene Smith
Exploratory search and folksonomy: Exploration paths in social tagging systems	Tingting Jiang
Effective IA for enterprise portals: The building blocks design framework	Joe Lamantia
Content page design best practices	Luke Wroblewski
Designing for the social: Avoiding anti-social networks	Miles Rochford
Data driven design research personas	Todd Zaki Warfel
IA for tiny stuff: Exploring widgets and gadgets	Martin Belam