ia play

With all this fussing about professional identity at work, starting my archaeology course, and reading this…

“Prolific artists don’t question their artistic identities. They own the title of artist, writer, musician, etc. This might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s important. Prolific people aren’t shy about what they do, or about their love of art. When they have corporate jobs they tend to view themselves as writers with desk jobs rather than a corporate employees who also write. “

…I realised I couldn’t pin down that sort of identity.

Somehow this morphed into writing down a list of everything I have formally studied over the years. As one angle on trying to see if there is a picture:

GCSEs
physics, chemistry, biology, maths, english lit + lang, french, geography, graphic product design.

A-Levels
physics, maths, english (and more maths)

BA Communications with Philosophy

(by year and then in descending grade order)

• reason and argument
• history of science B
• technology and society
• history of science A
• intro to practical philosophy
• intro to theoretical philosophy
• the mind
• communications in the modern world
• philosophy of science
• audio-visual communications

(sucked at my major, ok in my minor, excelled in my electives – doesn’t bode well for judgement)

• political communications
• modern political philosophy
• social communications
• communications arts
• meaning and truth
• theories of meaning
• modern moral philosophy
• communications sciences and technologies

• technology and society
• film theory and aesthetics
• media ethics
• advanced topics in political philosophy
• communications theory
• matters of life and death 1
• matters of life and death 2
• philosophy of science 3

MSc Information Science

• dissertatation – organisation of newspaper websites
• fundamentals of information science
• principles of knowledge organisation
• media information
• information retrieval systems and applications
• data representation and management
• research and communication skills
• information resources and users
• advanced online retrieval
• information law and policy
• information management and records

Open University

• fossils and the history of life
• life in the oceans
• studying mammals
• starting with psychology
• archaeology

Any themes? Well I’m good at logic, maths & organising stuff. I like science, but particularly the history and sociology of it. I find politics interesting enough to get good grades.

There are always some random courses in there: graphic product design, english, film theory. And film theory was one of my best grades ever.

Perhaps I’m just a serial student.

30 is fine. I still get ID’d in pubs so I’m not likely to be worried by the laughter lines.

Pileswasp thinking my birthday is tomorrow also fine. It would be churlish to be picky about exact dates when he bought Ribenna lollies.

Work today being just like the current Dilbert thread. Less fine.
(As a result I won’t be able to go to the IA coffee morning on Friday hosted by the lovely folks at Wellcome Trust. If you’re in London you should definitely go, if only for that cake!)

Being 30 also means that career #1 is 80% sorted. I’ve got lots of careers planned so none of them can take up more than 10 years. The plan is to retire at 82. Might be worried about the laughter lines by then.

A Whole New Mind proposes that business and hence our careers are changing under pressures from automation, abundance and outsourcing to Asia. Daniel Pink challenges the reader to consider their job and ask:

1. Can a computer do it faster?
2. Is what I’m offering in demand in an age of abundance?
3. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?

He sees a rise in ‘right-brain’ jobs that emphasise skills like empathy and design.
Pink is only really addressing affluent westerners with the message “your jobs are going to India”. I found the failure to universalise the message occassionally jarring. I also don’t buy the idea that ambitious middle class mothers will be encouraging their kids to become nurses. I think there remains a difference between valuable, needed roles and aspirational, status roles.

I feel a bit like my reading list is eating its own tail. This time ‘A Whole New Mind’ referenced Pat Kane, Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi and Matthieu Ricard. Older reads that also featured were Isaiah Berlin, Powers of Ten, George Lakoff and Scott McCloud.

I think I may need to get out (of my reading rut) more.

Ilaria got in touch to ask me to answer some questions for her thesis about Information Architecture:

1. First of all, I’d like you to introduce yourself, your job, main stages of your professional career and of your education (studies) that have brought you to deal with Information Architecture.
2. Do you think Information Architecture is more of a scientific or arts subject matter? Why?
3. Can you tell me any advantage in your Information Architecture job derived from being involved in communication/journalism?
4. Why, do you think, Information Architecture is so important and relevant?

Here’s my waffly responses:
1. I studied Communications at the University of Leeds and when I graduated I took a graduate trainee position with the Guardian newspaper in London. The role was working in their research and information department. It mostly involved putting newspaper articles into the electronic and paper archives and carrying out research for journalists.

My manager encouraged me to apply to study for an MSc in Information Science. Around a month before I was due to start the course, the website manager for the Guardian emailed everyone asking if anyone was available to work night-shifts on the Guardian website. I realised this would be interesting and a good way to fund my MSc so I applied.

Whilst studying for my MSc I was introduced to the concepts of information architecture. I read Rosenfeld and Morville’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and had a ‘eureka moment’ as I realised that IA would combine my interests in media and information management and just generally organising things! I decided to base my dissertation on IA.

At same time I was still working on the Guardian website. One night one of the team came and asked me where the letters page was on the website. I didn’t know off the top of my head so I had a browse around and I couldn’t find it. I realised if two of the staff couldn’t find it then there might be something wrong with the site navigation. I decided that my dissertation would be about the IA of the Guardian website. I carried out a number of card-sorts and category membership expectation tests and subsequently proposed a simplified navigation structure in my dissertation.

On graduation I applied to the BBC for a role called Assistant Producer, Search & Metadata. At that time there were no information architects at the BBC but shortly after I joined the BBC hired their first IA. I talked with him and tried to learn where I could. Later the BBC initiated a content management project and hired Margaret Hanley who had previously worked at Argus Associates. She built a team of IAs which I subsequently joined.

2. It is both, I’m afraid. Individuals who approach IA in very different ways. Some are very focused on metrics, search log analysis, multi-variant testing and rigorous user testing (although we rarely test to levels of statistical significance). Others come from a more creative background and focus more on the ‘design’ aspects of the role. Personally I think the reason IA is powerful and that IAs are valuable to organisations is because they combine thinking styles and should be at ease with both logical/analytical approaches and with more intuitive and inventive styles, and be able to use whichever is more appropriate at a given point in time.

3. Studying communications was useful in getting a foot in the door in media organisations but I’ve also been surprised at how much of both my degrees I have actually used in my career, particularly the sociology of communications that I studied in my first degree. I often find myself going back to David Gauntlett’s work (http://www.theory.org.uk/).

Journalism has always been about structuring information clearly. This can mean that in a media organisation an IA will find allies amongst the journalists who also think about IA problems. In my experience, however, it is also true that these allies can be found in the software engineering teams, design teams and amongst the product managers too.

Sometimes it can be difficult to be an IA in a news organisation. In journalism-led organisations the journalist is king and other disciplines may be relegated to the status of support staff. This can make it hard to be listened to. Luckily this is less the case in the BBC, hence why I have stayed so long!

4. For me, IA solves two main problems:
* ensuring content is findable
* making the complex clear

You don’t have to have an IA to do this. Many sites run by smart non-IAs have cracked these problems without having a dedicated IA but if they have thought about and solved these problems then they were applying IA thinking.

So why have an IA do this? It might be necessary to have someone operate in the role of facilitator/connector, who can talk the language of both the designers and developers. Or the project may be large enough to justify a specialist who concentrates on the IA aspects and frees up the other disciplines to concentrate to concentrate on, say, the emotional design, or the scalability of the technical solution.

My experience at the BBC has been that once a project team has had an IA on a project then they want one on the next project. They can’t necessarily explain why but they know it mattered.

A dedicated IA might be a luxury for many websites but having someone who thinks like an IA is vital.

I’ll be presenting at the IA summit in April with Margaret Hanley, Anne Stevens and Henning Fischer on Developing junior programmes in UX teams.

This year’s summit is in Miami. Since last year the conference was in Las Vegas, I can’t be the only CSI fan expecting to hear that the IA Summit 2009 will be in New York.