Saturday, 4:00pm, Venetian
Our community has developed a dangerous attitude of “superior complacency” - we know everything better, we’re smarter than everyone else, and the people who don’t understand us are just plain stupid. As a result, we have failed to forge strong links to related fields and organizations. Case in point: our community’s haughty attitude helped spawn the IxDA and has since impaired useful cooperation despite the clear overlap in both focus and skillset. And thanks to our internal bickering and incessant quest for “a definition,” our public image remains unclear - most of the business community is still confused as to what we do and why we do it. Worse still, those business folks who aren’t confused generally don’t give a damn.
Definitions (”the damned thing”) and distinctions (”Big IA”, “Little IA”) will ultimately relegate information architects to the ranks of lower-middle management. This was a problem several years ago and is an even greater problem today as thought leaders and visionaries continue to gravitate to other fields and more senior positions where “knowledge of IA” is sufficient and “practice of IA” is sent downstream to junior staffers.
The theme of this year’s conference “Expanding our Horizons” is ironic because the meek ARE inheriting our earth - forcing us into a culture of pedantry rather than progress, narrowing our world view by eschewing the celebration of “eclectic” diversity that made our community (and the SIGIA list) so interesting back in April-May of 2000.
This presentation will (briefly) review the current problems caused by internal bickering and spend significantly more time showing ways in which our not-so-perfect community can avoid political pitfalls, communicate more effectively to business executives, and maintain our integrity when 15 other organizations are eager to melt our iceberg (we ARE polar bears, aren’t we?).
INSTRUCTOR
Eric Reiss
Eric Reiss has been actively involved in the creation of menu-based programs, hypertext games, multimedia, and web projects for almost 30 years. In 2006, he co-founded FatDUX, a user-experience design company headquartered in Copenhagen with subsidiaries in Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
In November, 2000, his book, Practical Information Architecture was published by Addison-Wesley. In 2002, it became available in Japanese and Korean. He is also the author of Web Dogma, co-instigator of the original IA Slam, and a popular speaker at conferences and educational institutions throughout Europe and North America.
Eric recently completed his second term as president of the Information Architecture Institute. Since then, he has lectured at Instituto de Empresa Business School in Madrid, Spain as Associate Professor of Usability and Design-in addition to his ongoing duties as Senior Content Strategist at FatDUX Copenhagen, CEO of the FatDUX Group, and Chair of the EuroIA Summit.