Plating The Bird

Black Boxes, Rap Metal and Screwdrivers

About six months ago, I posed the question during my presentation at the IA Summit: "What Killed Information Architecture?".   While I had some glib answers for the audience at the time, I didn't really have the perspective to answer the question.  Only now am I starting to get a handle on what I think is wrong, and what can be done about it.

I won't be answering the question today, but I am going to start to set some of the stage for the answer that needs to unfold.  I've realized that my perspective on the stagnation of Information Architecture as a field is quite complex, and can't be boiled down into a nice clean answer.  I certainly don't think that it's about "Defining The Damn Thing".  Sorry folks, I've decided to stop putting all of my effort into digging that hole.

Mashup Methods

At the AAAA Planning Summit this summer, I talked about how I thought that IA's were somewhat good at method innovation, especially when it came to building new methods out of mashups of old ones.  I referred to this as the "Robin Hood Effect" - stealing from other fields to prop up our capability as a discipline.   Over the last 15 years, IA has been extremely successful in stealing from other fields to cobble together "a way" of solving problems around the organization of information.  I'm now convinced that it's protected us from having to do any real work in the area of creating new tools and methods for IA.

The problem with stealing is that it's breeding out the ability of information architecture to create new capability and value. We're getting lazy, and we're starting to accept whatever tools other other fields put in front of us. This laziness has been a long slow slide.  Jesse James Garrett wrote IA/Recon back in 2002. When I read Recon today, I feel terrified.  While we haven't regressed, we didn't move forward either. If we stay this course, information architecture is probably only a few years away from being marginalized and mostly irrelevant.

To be fair, the last few years have been very good for the information architecture field. If you have a bit of experience you're probably happily employed and have a nice title with "Sr" or "Lead" in front of it. You're most likely an expert at wireframing and card sorts and you can put together a mean mental model. You might even be mashing up some of your own methods. Wireflows? Swimlanes? Mashup methods are good, right? 

I used to think they were, but now I'm not so sure.

Black Boxes and Rap Metal

People I've worked with may have heard me throw around the term "Rap Metal Innovation" before.  It's a disparaging quip I use to describe what happens when you take two seeming good ideas and try to combine them into something better and more powerful.  It doesn't always work.  In the case of Rap Metal, combining Anthrax and Public Enemy eventually resulted in Limp Bizkit.   

Real innovation creates long-term change and sustainable advantage.  It's not a fad, and it's not something you discard; its value does quickly not diminish. 

I'm not seeing much method and tool innovation in the information architecture community these days, and when I do, it's increasingly the equivalent of Rap Metal. I'm not suggesting that method mashups are killing information architecture, but I am suggesting that they are a symptom of a larger problem with the discipline. Like a lurking shadow, most of us would rather whistle and walk faster than turn and face the darkness.

Getting back to my point about laziness, I'm going to draw an analogy from software engineering.  Using an API is not the same as writing a library of software objects.  It's not too hard to throw together a mashup from a bunch of exposed interfaces on a web API.  It is a lot harder to write the library itself.  With IA right now, most of our problem solving is based around superclassing and subclassing a relatively small number of tools and methods from other fields.  We don't seem to care what's inside an object; we're comfortable with the fact that it's a black box that we can instantiate in the context of IA. 

This is part of the problem.  It's superficial problem solving for the here and now.  In the last five years, I can't identify a single original method that has grown up inside the IA field.  Everything, including my own work has been stolen and instantiated from some other field's parent class.  This is keeping our head above water, but I don't think we can keep treading for much longer. 

As we continue to solve yesterday's IA problems with borrowed tools, we're increasingly stuck playing catchup with the emergent nature of the web. Today it's about the link, but one day we'll wake up to discover that the link is just one part of the rich environment that the web is becoming. I know I'm being overly dramatic here, but we'll never have the tools to build the future capability of information architecture if we're just borrowing stuff from other places.  It's time to seriously invest in a new set of tools, and we're going to need to build some of them from scratch.

Hand me the Screwdriver

During my IA Summit presentation last spring, I suggested that information architects weren't good at deconstruction.  I still believe that, but I'm starting to think that we'd benefit more from taking stuff apart in a thoughtful way instead of just breaking things.  This means we need to take a screwdriver to some of these black boxes and start looking inside.  This won't give us insight into what kinds of tools and methods we need to build, but it just might give us a sense of what kinds of thinking goes into rolling your own. 

We have to start somewhere.  If we can't build our own tools, we can't build our discipline.  Tools and methods are only one part of the solution, but they're something useful and tangible for the practitioner because they create immediate value. They're also something that we can use to bump up against the real problems and see if we're making any progress. I'd like to be able to go to the IA Summit in 2010 and see a couple of really good presentations about failed methods.  That's one of my performance indicators for the health of the IA discipline; people talking intelligently about failure. 

In my mind, learning from failure is a damn good screwdriver.  It's something we need to embrace if we want to build a discipline that's based on original thinking, and not just Rap Metal. 

Losing the Battle, Winning the War

I found out on Monday morning that I didn't win a spot on the Board of Directors for the Information Architecture Institute this year. While the competitive lizard-brain part of me doesn't like losing, the overall outcome of the Open IAI initiative and its impact on the Board elections was extremely positive, so I can't help but be very pleased.

I want to congratulate the newly elected board members, Andrew, Russ and Livia, as well as returning board member Christian. As many have remarked, the pool of candidates for the board this year was among the strongest ever. Not unlike the NBA draft class of 2003. This election went very deep, and the overall strength of the candidates means that the the biggest beneficiary has been the IAI. To the other candidates who didn't succeed this year, don't stop pushing. I expect to see all of you running against me for a spot on the board next year!

Talent was not the only element that made the IAI board elections great this year. The conversation around the issues moved beyond the candidates page on the IAI website. Facebook, Twitter, blogs and the IAI Email list all saw fantastic conversations that really cut to the core of some of the unresolved issues facing Information Architecture today. As I mentioned before, Livia, Russ and I were all very pleased with the impact that the Open IAI platform had on the process. I expect this isn't the last that the IAI election process has seen of multi-candidate, platform based campaigning. It's certainly not the last you've seen of the Open IAI. That's something I'll address in an upcoming post.

To be clear, it wasn't just the Open IAI initiative that made the engagement around the elections great this year. Many people, both candidates and members, got involved and made a difference. Christina Wodtke did an amazing job instigating some great conversations on the IAI mailing list. David Malouf was extremely effective in challenging the candidates to be clear about their perspectives. David and I probably sit about as far apart as possible on definition debate, but his passionate thinking was a very positive input into the process, and that's something I really respect.

The outcome of all of this activity between members and candidates quite positive. The Defining the Damn Thing conversation was frenzied and furious right up to the day before the election wrapped up, and it was great to see a pragmatic angle to what is usually a relatively unproductive conversation. In particular, Jorge Arango's new web app, thatword.net was a nice solution to the typical tail chasing - make sure you check it out.

If ever an incoming IAI Board has had a positive mandate from its members to make things happen, I have to believe that it's this one. The existing Board members and the new elects should make for a nice mix of experience and determination. I'm excited to see how they build on the work of past boards. With new initiatives like the IAI Vision project, things look very good.

I haven't seen the IA community this lively in a while, and I hope the IAI Board can harness this and keep the momentum going. As a member organization that is mostly volunteer driven, it's critical that members get involved in shaping the future of the Institute. If you're a new member, I encourage you to get involved - the IAI needs people who care about Information Architecture.

So again, congrats to the new board board members, and thanks to the outgoing folks for your hard work over the last two years. I also want to thank the people who voted for me and supported me publicly and privately. Your confidence is truly appreciated.

The Middle Child and the Mid-Life Crisis.

Over on the Zeus Jones blog, Adrian has written an excellent post exploring the relationship between UX and Account Planning - He's suggested that user experience is the new account planning.

I love Adrian's blog, he's one of the people in the account planning field who really seems to understand where planning needs to go. Needless to say, I was thrilled when he suggested in the Twitterstream the other day that I should respond to his post.

Birth Order

Like Adrian, I've done a lot of thinking on this subject. During my time at Critical Mass, I was involved in a brilliant and sometimes messy experiment run by Dave Robertson to mesh the Account Planning and User Experience practices. In the process of figuring out the relationship between planning and UX, we ended up uncovering a number of similarities and links between the two fields, as well as some troubling concerns about the present and future of both UX and planning.

Now, not only am I a couple of days late responding to Adrian's call, I'm also going to stir the pot. So please bear with me. I am going to try and take this somewhere.

Recently, a number of leaders in the planning field shared their thoughts about the state of Account Planning at 40. It's been suggested that planning is having a bit of a mid-life crisis; middle aged and starting to look back and question what it actually is and what it has accomplished. This isn't a bad thing, but in the case of planning the changes that the web has brought to the advertising and marketing industries have led what I'll call "self marginalization" and a bit of self doubt when it comes to planning and planners.

For a field that has been around for more then a few decades, there are still lots of questions about what planning is, how it fits in, whether it is still relevant, etc. I was at the AAAA Account Planning conference this past summer in Miami, and was reminded how tenuous the state of this mindset is. There was a lot of bravado in the air, but with an strong undercurrent of unease. There's a reason why it felt familiar. This nervous navel-gazing is similar in tone to what takes place in the user experience field.

If account planning is middle aged, then UX is a middle child: insecure, petulant and seeking validation. Whether trapped between account and creative in the agency world, or fighting between business owners and technology inside large organizations, the mindset of perceived marginalization exists in the UX world as well. While some folks hold their heads high and confident, for many practitioners the UX role is one fraught with uncertainty about how others perceive the value of their craft. There's a reason for this uncertainty in my opinion - planning and user experience are hard to define by nature. If you're always a bit fuzzy, you're never really sure how you're going to justify your existence.

Post-whatever

Just like Adrian suggests that Planning is a postmodern discipline, I've also suggested (as have others) that Information Architecture, one of the core disciplines that make up the UX field, is postmodern in nature. While I'm glossing the analysis over a bit, it's a notion I'm also willing to spread as a blanket concept to the UX field in general with the caveat that it's not evenly distributed. IA is more "PoMo" than Usability and vice versa. That being said, where there's foo, there's fire.

Whether you want to call it being postmodern or just "fuzzy", the complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, etc, of what makes UX great also contributes to its challenges. As an example, the "defining the damn thing" conversation is a constant source of grief within the IA field, and yet people can't avoid revisiting it. UX practitioners in many cases focus too much around justifying existence and not enough on just showing value in context. This may be an opinion, but when I look at the history of the planning field, I see many parallels. Both Planning and UX rose up to deal with the complexity of environments; the media environment and information environment respectively. They both focused on understanding how to connect with people more effectively. They attract the same people; synthesizers, problem solvers, curious types with one foot in the creative world and the other firmly analytical.

A lot of talented people fell into UX over the last 10 years, as did a sizable cast of charlatans. Luckily for UX, the dot com crash had a cleansing effect. In many ways, the crash was the best thing that could have happened to strengthen the UX field, but in retrospect this seems to have also highlighted a key challenge that Adrian hinted at in his post: UX, though much younger, is starting to see the same dysfunction that has limited account planning. It might be that UX is growing up too fast. In my mind, there's no substitute for time when it comes to discovering what your discipline ought to be. Even better, some things are left unfinished.

I'm not hating on UX. I love the field, the various sub-disciplines and facets, and the richness of the discourse throughout the community. I love the fact that we don't really have a clear understanding of what the boundaries of UX are as a practice. This malleability is an opportunity that more people need to realize and take advantage of. We just need to learn from, and more importantly partner with those like us - we can't progress in a vacuum. I worry that without a broader range of perspectives UX will burn strong and bright...and live a short life. This might be a possible outcome for the current form of UX and its sub disciplines, but I'm a fan of evolutionary prototypes and I'd hate to see UX not grow into something better and more valuable as it matures.

Convergence and Discourse

Adrian suggests that UX is the new account planning. I'll make a bolder prediction and suggest that UX and Planning are on convergent paths, though most practitioners in each respective field won't immediately see this. At this point, I think two things are critical. The first is that UX needs to carefully study the lessons learned by the planning field to date, and apply this insight in the context of the evolution of UX. The second is that both fields need to recognize that they're on convergent paths. The question is whether or not this convergence will result in something better for both, or whether they will pass quietly without influencing the other.

Five years ago, UX practitioners existed all over the design process. Each organization had its own way of fitting this capability in. Today, there's more of a sense, in theory if not always in practice that UX spreads across the "process". The hopeful "Big UX" talk of a couple of years ago is increasingly being realized in pockets. When I was at Critical Mass, I watched UX gain a seat at the table with many F500 clients. Planning Directors had UX chops and we lived and breathed "Experience Planning", happily making it up as we went along. In talking with other digital agencies over the last year, their goals have often been similar: find a way to knit UX and planning together to realize some increased capability. The titles may vary from company to company, but the focus is the same. Design Strategists look a hell of a lot like planners with design thinking skills, and the fact that a recent planning survey highlighted the fact that a lot of planners would like to work at IDEO suggests that there's a bottom up element to this movement as well.

The problem is that without a broader community discourse, it increasingly looks like a big ugly mess. In many cases, the practitioners don't match the capability that their titles suggest. UX people are weak at strategy. Planners don't know how to get their hands dirty. Everything seems half-baked.

So is UX really the new account planning? In some ways it is, but the web industry lives at an accelerated pace, and the growing pains for UX are just starting.

A better question in my mind is to ask what the future of digital industry is, and how the capabilities of the planning and UX disciplines can provide ongoing and increasing value for their shared focus; the customer/user. I won't even suggest I have the answers, but I do think that Planning and UX will both benefit from recognizing the opportunities that could come with an increasingly common future.

Why We Started the Open IAI

Recently I accepted a nomination to run for the upcoming IAI Board of Directors elections.

After a number of discussions with some peers, I decided to team up with two community members who I respect greatly, Russ Unger and Livia Labate.

Our decision to run on a platform, instead of individually - which most candidates have done in the past, is based on the idea that while ideas are good, alignment and openness are also key components of helping to make things better.  Welcome to the Open IAI Platform.

We're running against a number of exceptional peers, many whom I consider to be brilliant thought leaders and practitioners, as well as good friends.

As much as I would love to give back to the IAI by becoming a member of the board, my primary motivation for injecting party politics into the IAI elections was to help to bring more discussion to the issues concerning the IAI rather then focus on the candidate positions themselves.  The process was a bit too 1.0, and we need to start looking at the opportunities for the IAI that can be realized if it starts to operate as a 2.0 type of organization.  2.0-ing the election is as good a place as any to start in my mind.

This is also the reason why my personal position statement is relatively short compared to others.  In the 1.0 election process, your position statement was your identity, your brand, your definition of what you stood for.  In the 1.5 process you might have written a blog post to augment this.  In the 2.0 process you engage with the community, create artifacts and encounters, and hopefully raise the entire level of conversation around what the Institute ought to be.  Your position is always in beta, and you aren't afraid to change or expand your thinking if you feel the need to. My position statement was the start, but not the end of what I'll have to say during the election process.

This is why we formed the Open IAI, and why I'd encourage other candidates to join our cause, as well as persue a similar approaches.  I look at things like Austin Govella (another candidate running for IAI Board election) listening on Get Satisfaction on behalf of the IAI as a great example of this kind of thinking.

As much as I'm excited about the board elections, I'm even more excited about how the elections themselves this year can contribute to a step forward for the IAI.  I hope you share my excitement and optimism around what the IAI can be for its members and the Information Architecture community.

I've included our platform position statement below which has a few additions of my own over our common platform (we all did this).

I'd encourage you to check out what Livia and Russ have written as well as the other candidates.  Please also feel free to check out and join the Open IAI Platform Facebook group.  And tell us what you think we the candidates should be talking about.  We're your representatives and we're accountable to you.  Open IAI is about turning the IAI into a true members organization.  I hope we can count on your input and your vote.

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Here's my position statement as submitted to the IAI.

I'd like to recognize the IA Institute and the people who have nominated me, as well as the many community members who have helped me over the years.  This is an exciting opportunity, and I wouldn't be here without your support.  Thank You!

Candidate Profile

I've been involved with the web for 10 years and the Information Architecture community for the last 5 years, working in both practitioner and management roles.  I've worked for companies large and small, been an Innie and an Outie, and have led teams of 20+ people as well as worked as the lone IA. You can check my past experience on LinkedIn if you're interested in the details.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/mmilan

I'm a co-founder of the UX Irregulars, a Toronto area user experience group with over 200 members.  I've been a mentor and an instigator, and love both roles.  I present and speak at conferences and workshops on the subject of Information Architecture and I have a strong set of opinions as to what the future of the Information Architecture field ought to be.  If you'd like to get a deeper understanding of what I've been exploring, my SlideShare account is a good place to start.

http://www.slideshare.net/mmilan

As a practitioner, I've literally grown up with the IAI. I joined the Institute during graduate school and immediately fell in love with the strength of the community.  I was one of the first Progress Grant recipients; if you've been to one of my Backcasting presentations or workshops at the IA Summit over the last couple of years, you've seen the results of this investment by the Institute.  At many points in my career, the IAI and its members have supported me.  I'd like to return the favor by taking an active role in helping the Information Architecture Institute to be the best resource possible for the members of today as well as tomorrow.  I believe I will make an excellent addition to the board and I hope that you will consider me as one of your elected representatives.

Position Statement: Vision, Empowerment & Transparency

Russ Unger, Livia Labate and I are running on a common platform in the hopes of being able to make a more meaningful impact to the Information Architecture Institute if we are elected.

We believe that the IAI needs to be a more transparent organization.  We need to open a dialog with our members, encourage their involvement and find improved methods of making people aware of what is happening within the organization. 

We believe the IAI should take a leadership role in educating our membership, people who are new to the workforce, new to working within our field and the companies that will hire them.

We believe that the IAI needs to get better at marketing and selling Information Architecture. We need to, as an organization, provide the services to companies who want to hire our members and begin practice areas where our coaching would be invaluable.  Likewise, we need to train our members how to do this within their companies.

Finally, we strongly believe that the IA Institute should have a clear vision of its role within the User Experience community and more importantly how it contributes to the advancement of the field of Information Architecture. With strong vision comes strong capability, and we have a duty to our membership to provide this role.

We strongly believe in our platform, and the value that a unified perspective can bring to the IAI Board.  Your duty as members is to elect a board that will serve you best.  We hope that our platform demonstrates our commitment to understanding and addressing your needs.

If you elect me, I will commit to helping the Institute achieve these goals.  I believe that one of the increasingly vital roles of the IAI is to act as a vehicle that creates a valuable future for its members. The next two years are critical to the long-term sustainability of the discipline and practice of information architecture.  There is an opportunity for the Institute during this time to not only to protect Information Architecture from marginalization but also to help it grow and adapt to serve the future needs of its members.  If elected, I will not shy away from these challenges, but help the board to meet them head on so that we can truly begin to realize the promise of our field.  I hope that you share my conviction and support our goal to make the IAI one of the best member organizations in the web industry.

I am happy to further explore our position in greater detail. Please feel free to connect with me at any of the following points of contact.

Personal points of contact:

Email: mmilan [at] gmail [dot] com
Blog:  http://mmilan.typepad.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mmilan

Platform points of contact:

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/openiai
Facebook Group: http://bit.ly/openiai

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Stealing isn't wrong.

Just popping up quickly to link to a presentation of mine that was recently featured on SlideShare.  I've been meaning to post this for a while now, but it seemed to keep getting pushed aside.  It's a presentation I gave in late July at the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) Account Planning Conference in Miami.  As per my usual style, it has too many theses and talks to more audiences than it should. I'm learning to accept my limitations in this regard, so it's all good.

Stealing From The Information Architects

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: design design thinking)