asist me
After day 1 of the asis&t conference I’m completely het up. There is nothing like being surrounded with smart people in the community, talking about day to day issues that make you crazy, or happy, or… well, it’s all family.
Erik, IA at music bank, came up and said “I’ve found my tribe.”
Apart from the general good feelings of a community get together, I will say this conference is different from the Boston conference a year ago. There is a general attitude of “let’s quit fucking around here.” They could have titled this “pragmatic information architecture” rather than “practicing information architecture” I think the market climate has given people an certain impatience with the theoretical and a desire to get down to brass tacks: how do you actually accomplish what you do, how do you help your client understand their business model, how do you work more quickly and effectively? What do deliverables look like, what do we call them? How do we sell IA? It’s time to stop navel gazing, and get on with things.
Saturday night I facilitated for Jesse James Garrett’s talk on “what do you do all day,” a group discussion on our roles and responsibilities. It was educational. Even though our core responsibilities are pretty alike (site organization, content architecture and interaction design) our outlying skills were many: information design, project management, coding prototypes, user testing– and sadly many of these things were being done by IA’s because “otherwise they won’t get done” or “I understand what has to be done better than anyone else so I do it.” I don’t have to say it do I? These are the wrong reasons, people. This is why we end up working 12 hour days. We are control freaks. We need to cut it out.
Jesse said it best “The less you do, the better you’ll do it.”
more to come…. I’m tired!