archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Focused dialog between senior practitioners who come together to share experiences, insights, practices, knowledge, and thinking in a face to face forum is one of the critical mechanisms for the healthy evolution and growth of any professional field. Despite the proliferation of venues for advancing the collective knowledge of Information Architects (more than three or four years ago, certainly), the Information Architecture community lacks a forum that mixes teaching, discussion, and exploration of previous experiences amongst a small and focused group of accomplished Information Architects who are together in the same room.
I’m thinking of something like the Master Classes common in music, painting, and some of the other fine arts. An Information Architecture master class would occupy some of the space between the short-form conference session of an hour’s duration, the half-day or one-day workshop on a broad topic (like building a CMS), and the general UX get-togethers of networking, showcasing, or other varieties that we have now.
The benefits and value of a forum like this over a scattershot conference agenda or a one-way workshop presentation structure are substantial when judged against limited training opportunities and budgets. A gathering of senior practitioners with a defined focus, moving beyond the summary or introductory aspects of a topic, offering substantial examples of relevant knowledge and experience, and providing time to cover a subject in depth with discussion would surely attract interest, participation, and likely even payment.
Now for the call to action: It’s time to bring about Master Classes for Information Architecture. Who’s game to work on this?

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It was a friend who was considering a career change to IA that kicked off this theme originally. I didn’t mention that in the last posting, which on re-reading might have made some of the questions and recommendations in the first entry sound a bit more like friendly advice, which was what I’d hoped. Apologies to all for lack of context. I’ve since heard that she’s read the Polar Bear book(s), actively done IA work on a well-known product company’s web site, and has the backing of management to invest in further development, possibly by even hiring a mentor.
Here’s my reply, and some recommendations on how to go further:
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It sounds like you’re doing all the right things. And if your manager is willing to back you with some dollars, then you’re way ahead of the game already You could look to hire a mentor – and I might be able to help with finding one – but I’d recommned using some of the time and money to look into education or training. And, ideally, a mentor would help you out for reasons other than simple payment. There should / will be a program available from the AIFIA soon to match mentors and candidates together. You might be able to use this.
AIFIA is the non-profit IA organzation started a while back to help support the community, further the discipline, etc – check the site at aifia.org for more info. It’s a cheap membership ($50 ?), and it will give you access to a good set of resources and professinal contacts that can help with more specifics on what and how to get started. Other organizations to look into include ASIST, ACM, and the UPA; none of these focus on IA exclusivly as AIFIA does, but all have strong communities and resources available.
There are a ton of education and training options, from full-on M.A. and Ph.D. programs, to half-day seminars. What areas related to IA interest you most? Where do you want to take your career? Do you think you’d like to approach IA from a strongly visual perspective, which might be rooted in laying out interfaces and defining page templates and standard control sets for user interactions? Or maybe usability is more interesting to you?
Some things to consider adding to your skills portfolio and using as a basis for pursuing IA further include usability, user research, interaction design, library sciences techniques like taxonomies and thesauri, business analysis, use cases and UML, task analysis, information design, systems architecture, knowledge management, community design and social architecture, most anything related to CMS, navigation design, etc.
All of these are relevant – it’s the way you put a set of them together that will define the approach you use for IA, and the work that you’re best suited for. I’d say try to follow up on one or two of these, put the techniques into practce, and then see how it goes. The decision to go to school obviously depends on your time and opportunities.
Eventually, you’ll want to emphasize and publicize the shift in what you’re doing; maybe with a title change, or a branded freelance offering, or a formal education reference like an MSLIS on your resume. If you can’t make the shift officially inside your current workplace, then it might be time to make a move into a new context that definitively shifts your role.
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Noth­ing like being blind­folded and lost in the woods to teach you how things look from the out­side…
Dur­ing an Out­ward Bound ses­sion last week, I was part of a group of IAs and Design­ers tasked with walk­ing a short dis­tance through the woods to a com­mon meet­ing point while blind­folded. We had twenty min­utes to pre­pare and twenty min­utes to fin­ish; the total dis­tance was about 50 yards.
After the clock started, I took my blind­fold off to look around. I saw a dozen peo­ple stag­ger­ing through the woods, with their arms wav­ing around and sticks in their hands, fum­bling through brush and trip­ping over logs. It was really funny. And a bit sad.
It was also a very good les­son in how silly things can look to some­one on the out­side. Shift­ing con­texts to the realm of IA, I’d have been upset if I were pay­ing for high-class con­sult­ing time from ‘experts’, and this is what I thought saw them doing.
Of course, from the inside, what we were doing made per­fect sense: we were simul­ta­ne­ously using dif­fer­ent meth­ods of tak­ing on a prob­lem com­pletely new to all of us. But you wouldn’t know that unless you’d either spent some time in the woods bind­folded before, or you’d watched us exper­i­ment with many, many, options for find­ing a tree (which all seem to feel exactly alike) dur­ing our prepa­ra­tion time.
We made it in the end, but it was as much luck as the result of our ‘opti­mized wayfind­ing strate­gies port­fo­lio’ — which is surely how you’d have to label a bunch of peo­ple wan­der­ing blind­folded in the woods in order to per­suade some­one to pay money for them to do so.

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Information Architecture is getting a bit of a buzz these days – as someone just noted on one of the discussion lists – so I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that a few friends in related fields have asked how to get started as an IA.

The real question is – do you *want* to?

Beyond this, you’ll be getting into deeper water that could become downright chilly. Ever read a thesaurus just for fun? Is your first answer to every question “It depends on -” ? Do you instinctively read through and itemize in order of priority all the categories on the menu in a restaurant before you look at the descriptions of any of the dishes?

Before you nod your head to the above and slap a sticker on your bumper, I’d recommend buying / borrowing / stealing “Information Architecture for the WWW“, and reading the intro and the first chapter. There are other good titles dealing with some of IA’s many facets out now, but a quick read through the front of Rosenfeld and Morville will give you a feel for the perspective and outlook that IA uses without too much of a time investment. If you don’t like the feeling at that point, then I’d say that something else is more your forte. Unless of course you have pressing needs, or disturbing masochistic tendencies that lead you to pursue specialized disciplines that you don’t really enjoy.

If it does feel right, then skim the rest of the book and try reading through the case studies at the end. If you’re still interested, then it might be a good way to go. If at any point your eyes glaze over (did someone say “schematize” again?) or you’re genuinely bored, then I’d suggest that either setting this particular quest for personal and professional enlightenment aside, or shifting your goal to learning some of the basic language and possibly acquiring some specific IA skills.

After that, the sky’s the limit. I’m active (well, ‘active’ might be a bit bold, but what’s life without aspirations?) within the AIFIA mentoring initiative, so I’m part of a group of IA’s looking at exactly how to go about matching candidates for mentoring with the right teachers.

If you’re curious about education options, there are courses, certificates, and even some new masters programs coming on line.
Resources for all these questions and more can be had for free at the ia wiki.

Hope this helps…