Sun, Oct 8, 2006

IA is not about information problems

by Austin Govella

Information architecture models systems where users interact with discrete information problems.

Comments

I really was half-serious about seeing manifestos on Monday. There really are no wrong answers. It’s kind of the flip-side of working on your five year plan: what do you want to be when you grow up?

I totally blanched when Donna wrote she solved “information problems”. Information Architecture is not about solving information problems. I think Donna agrees with me: “It is about solving information problems, designing information solutions and thinking about how information embeds itself within people’s lives.”

The difference may be more about framing, than anything else, but still! I was trying to figure out why “information problem” resonated so negatively, I came up with a rough diagram:

Information Architecture is not about information problems.

Selecting the image opens a larger PDF that’s easier to read. Feel free to chime in and help flesh this out. I cranked it out rather quickly between baby feedings and Sunday chores, and it goes something like this:

Information Architecture impacts an organization’s outputs — products and services — at three different levels. In my mind, information problems refer to task-oriented design, an almost entirely tactical excercise that requires only sitemaps and wireframes.

Experience problems correlate to goal-directed design (as described by Cooper and Reimann). System problems are much larger problems that might be described as collections of experiences (in the way that experiences may be collections of tasks).

In Donna’s words, system problems are “thinking about how information embeds itself within people’s lives”. Or that’s my interpretation. (I should probably go though Peter Merholz’s slides on moving from products to systems.)

And I think this describes how I view the twisted dance between interaction design and information architecture: IA designs frameworks that create a setting for interactions, and IxD designs the interactions from which we extract these frameworks. The two are symbiotic.

Talk About "IA is not about information problems"

Adam Greenfield said:

I'm not disagreeing with you, Austin, but I think that at the distal
end of your continuum (the end, naturally, that I'm most interested
in) we have to acknowledge that we're getting into territory that's
been pretty comprehensively worked over by other thinkers, and sorts
of thinkers, over a very long time. And one of the questions which
inescapably emerges from even a superficial consideration of this
pre-existing body of thought is that of valuation.

If we're conscientious about this kind of work, we get to a place
where our efforts are inflected quite as much by social and cultural
questions as by purely technical considerations; we bump up against
conditions in which the lower-level phenomena of task and goal are
embedded. Shouldn't we be more upfront about the fact that the
frameworks we're designing are in no way neutral or objective? That
they serve certain ends and the requirements of certain groups, and
not others?

I find that the persistent refusal to engage these questions in our
practice amounts to a kind of willed blindness. I'll go a step further
and admit that my frustration with this blindness was one of the
factors driving my recent rant on the subject - maybe what I'm asking
for, at last, is a "critical IA."

Tue, Oct 10, 2006

Gene said:

I just gave a talk about systems thinking and UX you might find interesting. Funnily enough, a lot of systems problems have to do with access to information.

Tue, Oct 10, 2006

Austin said:

Gene, thanks for linking to your slides. I meant to pick your brain about your keynote today...

Adam, I don't think people miss the lack of neutrality. I do think they abdicate responsibility.

Thu, Oct 12, 2006

AG said:

You're probably right. It's distressing, and ultimately untenable, and I mean to do something about it, in whatever humble, partial way I can.

Sat, Oct 14, 2006

Christopher Fahey said:

Austin, can you describe a real-world situation in which a System Problem is solved by examining the socio-cultural forces that frame the need for the interaction?

I'm not being facetious here -- Perhaps I'm missing something, but the enormous scope of your definition of a "System Problem" seems less the purview of a lowly designer or information architect and more the purview of, say, a government official or a master planner along the lines of Robert Moses or Mao Zedong.

Okay, I'm being a little facetious there by extending your "socio-cultural" a little broadly... how's this: on a smaller scale, such as in a corporation, socio-cultural problem solving is the purview of a manager, someone who organizes people and how they interface with each other.

Are you (and others) trying to suggest that interaction design for machine/software systems is a kind of training ground for people who can eventually enter into a kind of organizational design for human systems? That IA is a path to management?

Conceptually I'm sure that the fat end of your spectrum is extant somewhere in the cosmos of culture and practice, but it's just hard for me to see how it applies to information architecture. Maybe it's just me, but concrete examples would help a lot.

Tue, Oct 17, 2006

Christopher Fahey said:

Hey Adam: I looked up "distal" in the dictionary and I still can't tell if you mean the pointy end or the fat end!

Tue, Oct 17, 2006

Christopher Fahey said:

Hm, I posted two comments here yesterday, they both showed up immediatley. But today they're both gone.

Tue, Oct 17, 2006

Christopher Fahey said:

And now they're back. Weird.

Tue, Oct 17, 2006

Austin said:

Christopher,

An example. At work, I was tasked with designing a new home page and a new article page for a portal, two very specific projects.

Our outputs for this project are systems:
* A map that describes how all our brands intersect with this portal
* A map illustrating how content is created and shared across our various products (including the portal)
* A map showing all of our services and how they are consumed by all of our products across our four channels (only one is the web)

These maps generate a related line of suggestions, a framework for how we should function for greatest effectiveness. A system.

That's the socio-cultural context of this business, and what i was referring to when I said socio-cultural. Maybe not the best phrase. (It was a quickie diagram.)

I definitely believe that the tools used by any discipline can be "leveraged up" to solve the broader, more systemic problems (where a project only addresses a symptom). This applies to accounting, management, hr, and all species of design.

I definitely believe that what I do is information architecture.

If it's not IA, what would you call it?

Tue, Oct 17, 2006

Christopher Fahey said:

Thanks Austin, that clarifies things enormously.

The three deliverables you describe are definitely the kinds of things I sometimes expect senior information architects to perform as we work on projects for clients. But non-IAs do that stuff, too -- in fact, if an IA is doing that work, I'd wonder why someone else in the org more closely associated with the knowledge was not already doing it. In my company, the first one is often spearheaded by the creative/design lead, for example, working closely with our client's marketing people. Your second deliverable is content production (and knowledge management), and whoever's responsible for that should have their own processes documented and mapped already. And traditionally, the third one should be the direct responsibility of a marketing director.

Please note that I'm not faulting your organization for dropping the ball or anything -- I'm obviously describing an idealistic situation. I'm merely saying that the deliverables you describe are hardly artifacts of what we traditionally call IA, and in fact all of them have existed in the corporate world long before anyone uttered the words "information architecture". That you as an IA are doing them is not inappropriate, but it's not ideal either, nor is it traditional.

In fact, IAs should ideally be the consumers of these kinds of deliverables. To the extent that you, me, and other IAs are actually producing these deliverables I think bespeaks the extend to which lots of IAs are doing plenty of non-IA work -- marketing, branding, business analysis, management. Or, to put it another way, as IAs get older and more experienced, we are able to perform broader organizational tasks that help improve both the company's core operations generally and their information architecture needs in particular.

We can certainly broaden the definition of "what IA is" to include all of these things. Or we can keep it narrow and simply admit that IAs have long been expanding their skills into non-IA fields, bringing our skills to bear across other business practices, and growing our careers by leveraging our deep experience designing information, interfaces, and processes.

Wed, Oct 18, 2006

AG said:

I meant the fat end. ; . )

Chris, not disagreeing with you so much as pointing out a peculiar emphasis in your last graf, an emphasis that it shares with a lot of the current intellectual production in IA, and which I find troubling in its implications. You speak of bringing IA skills to bear "across other business practices." We see this, too, in calls for such endeavours "across the enterprise."

For my part, I'm left wondering when IA got so deeply in bed with business.

Thu, Oct 19, 2006

Christopher Fahey said:

The business emphasis isn't just in my last paragraph. It's in nearly every word I -- and almost everyone else -- has ever written on the topic of IA (and when not exactly a "business", then some other "organization" structurally similar enough to a business to make the distinction moot). When exactly was IA not in bed with business?

This is why I asked for specific examples: Austin's example of what the "fat end" means is still squarely within the realm of business, but my initial interpretation of the fat end -- and your current one -- is that the fat end transcends business and extends across society and culture into other fields of creative and purposeful practice.

This is, I think, the world of art and politics, two of my favorite topics. I agree that these two areas are rarely spoken of in IA contexts (I remember at the 2003 IA Summit, where I met you for the first time, when Stewart Brand mocked me for using the word "art" and talking about his long now project in the same breath).

The stuff that IA is all about, the language and tools of it, certainly exists outside of IA (just as cinematography, writing, and music exist outside of advertising), but IMHO IA doesn't really exist per se outside of business (just as advertising doesn't exist outside of business). Not saying it's a good thing, just saying.

Fri, Oct 20, 2006

Austin said:

I disagree about the business bit. For me, business is synonymous with organizations, or groups. That means IA deals with how people collect and operate in groups.

I will venture that you obviously can;t be *serious* about IA unless you're talking about business, but that's just an unfortunate side-effect of how the practice is growing right now.

Fri, Oct 20, 2006

AG said:

For me, business is synonymous with organizations, or groups.

See, I just totally disagree with that, and much as I respect him, with Chris's idea that IA doesn't exist outside of business. Or, rather, I'd tend to agree that this is how the IA community-of-practice as it's currently constituted has chosen to construct the situation.

But that screams failure to me, on so many levels that I can't even articulate just how. To me, acceding to that definition would mean pushing to the periphery any consideration of the other reasons why people form themselves into groups both small and large, from simple affinity to mutual aid to organized resistance. And that's something I simply can't countenance - in my practice, anyway, or in any I'd want to identify with.

Mon, Oct 23, 2006

Austin said:

I didn't mean to say all groups are like businesses, but that a business is a group of people, just like any other.

My main drive is definitely "reasons why people form themselves into groups both small and large". Business is just one of those reasons.

And this is reflected in my practice. At the fat end of the above diagram (though it's a primitive and not fully thought out), the study focuses solely on groups. Why their formed. What they do. What they beleive. What they don't do.

These observations are applied ot the groups specific context. This could be a business, a small non-profit organization, a bible study group, a band, a subculture, or a family. I personally feel the methods apply to all kinds of groups.

Mon, Oct 23, 2006

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