[IxDA Discuss] Information Architecture or Interaction Design

[David Malouf]

First the organizational answers:
IA Institute: http://iainstitute.org/pg/about_us.php
IxDA: http://www.ixda.org/en/about_ixdg/what_is_interaction_design.shtml

Interaction Design is abbreviated in this community as IxD
At Ideo it is IAD
At R/GA it is simply ID

Why add a letter? (or not?) ID in many situations means
Industrial Design (as in the case of Ideo)
Information Design
Interior Design
Etc.

Ok, to the meaty part of the puzzle:
Now the reality is that these are just names and in every context the
practice of IA or IxD can be the same or widely different.

In the advertising/interactive marketing agency IA and IxD are often just
synonyms depending on how that agency wants to be perceived.

But the choice of the term in all settings is just that, perception.
"Are we creating/managing/curating/consuming/structuring information?" - IA
"Are we designing the behavior of a system that a human will interact with
in a single context?" - IxD

Now IA can do the 2nd thing and IxD can do the first thing. But it is a
question of focus and to some extent expertise.

Since in practice IA and IxD are so flexibly used, it is hard to say as a
discipline where one begins and the other emerges and some would say that
the distinctions are really not worth the trouble.

I think of this quite differently as many people in both communities have
listened to me wax on and on about this.

These are disciplines distinct by their core focuses, and to some extent
their influences.

IA's focus is on information structure for the purpose of consumption. It's
core influence is from information design (Wurman) and library science.

IxD's focus is on complex behaviors of products and systems where
information may be but one element of data transfer. Some have said that IxD
is about facilitating behaviors between two or more humans, but to me that
isn't quite right. It's influences are from HCI (Cog Psy & Comp Sci),
Product/Industrial Design (Moggridge), and general design practice.

But I would say to Antoinette, that the answer needs to really come from
your context as the User Experience (UX) Community has made an implicit
decision to not focus on separation and definition and rather look at our
contexts of practice. Most discussions about defining and differentiating
any of the UX fields from one another usually ends up in a rant around "this
is my space; and you keep away" -- thus very unhelpful.

I hope this at least gives you some guidance towards thinking about this
stuff.

-- dave