Rob van Tol

I was just getting my head back into hardcore IA, without the distractions of Art Direction, Content Management, Project Management and all the rest. Working on a short-term contract at Cable & Wireless, restoring the big hole left in my personal finances by the collapse of the dotcom that I had helped to found.

It was so good to root around in a flurry of white papers and conference proceedings. It was so good to take a breath from the dotcom madness and refresh and re-centre yourself. So naturally I crawled all over Argus’ site: so professional, so thoughtful, so generously shared.

And then they’re gone, and I struck with surprisingly powerfully mixed emotions for a bunch of people in a foreign country that I’ve never met (I'm English). I felt sad that brilliance alone wasn’t enough, that a global centre of excellence couldn’t weather this temporary storm. I felt annoyed at the chronic short-termism of market forces that could commit such an act of intellectual vandalism. I felt vaguely comforted that if they couldn’t pull it off, then my own failure seemed not so harsh. And then seeing the intensity of the reaction from the IA community, I saw the compassion and the zeal which we bring to our work. And I felt better, because what we do, we do to create a better world.

Rob van Tol
Information Architect
EighteenGlobal and Cable & Wireless