[IxDA Discuss] Bill Moggridge talk at Ideo tonight

[Jared M. Spool]

At 11:20 AM 11/4/2006, Dan Saffer wrote:
>On Nov 4, 2006, at 7:30 AM, Christina Wodtke wrote:
>
> > As a former IA on this list, I can tell you 99% of what is discussed
> > here is what we've already figured out in IA, and one could make a
> > pretty good argument that Interaction Design has nothing to offer IA
> > based on that.
>
>This reminds me of my favorite Lou Rosenfeld quote:
>
>"...we often see interaction design and IA compared. Let's
>acknowledge once and for all that information architecture is the
>more difficult of the two. Interaction design addresses a finite
>realm of problems. Huge, but finite..."
>
>http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/
>the_indie_life_talking_with_louis_rosenfeld
>
>Apparently denigrating professions works both ways. :)
>
>(This is from 2002 and his reasoning is so very Web-centric. I wonder
>if Lou still believes this?)

First, I'm excited to read the Moggridge book and want to thank Gregory for 
posting it. I'm disappointed that this thread has turned in this direction 
when it should be about celebrating what could be another seminal book in 
our work. I would love to see us continue to talk about the contributions 
this book can make and how we might use it. (I'm already considering using 
it in my Experience Design Management course at Tufts.)

Second, I'm not surprised about the "Our discipline is better than your 
discipline" nature of this conversation. It's not unique to the UX world. 
Just a little while ago, I was listening to some of the world's best 
Cardiologists argue with some of the world's premier Pulmonologists using 
the exact same discourse, sans the discpline names. Apparently, everything 
done in Cardiology today was discovered my Pulmonology years ago, and vice 
versa.

This tells me that this type of discipline-bashing is a symptomatic 
response of a more systemic problem: we don't have good tools to share what 
we know. We can learn a lot by diving deep into a discipline (say, IA, IxD, 
or e-commerce), but that makes our learning myopic. We can try to cover 
multiple disciplines, but the demand is way too hard. (In the field of 
biology alone, there are more than 10,000 new research papers published 
every year. How can any biologist keep up on what is "known"?)

Interestingly, at UIE, we regularly communicate with more than 20,000 
people interested in UX related fields. And most of these have no 
allegiance to one discipline or another. Most don't refer to themselves as 
an interaction designer or an information architect. They just think of 
themselves as the people responsible for making a system as good as it 
could be. How do we serve those people, by getting them the information 
they need to do their jobs as well as possible?

Can we get a good night's rest, snap out of this bickering about whose 
personal name tag has better foundations, and focus on how we get our 
entire community to know what they need to know to create winning designs? 
That's the question I'm most interested in.

Jared



Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike Street, Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
978 327-5561   jspool at uie.com  http://www.uie.com
Blog: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks