People who know me know that I love metaphors and analogies (annoyingly so). So when I decided to make a poster for the Explain IA contest it was only natural that I’d choose a metaphor. For me, IA is a lens.

A simple definition states that a lens refracts light so that it converges. I think that IA, done well, refracts information and perspectives so that they converge. IA takes input from multiple sources, including business, technology, and users and helps teams to converge on a single, unified solution to a problem.

In my experience, IA isn’t so much about inventing, or innovation, or being the one to think up the perfect solution (although sometimes it can be these things). Instead, IA is about helping people to understand the problems we’re trying to address, and the range of possible solutions. It’s about gathering ideas from different sources and figuring out if and how they can be combined in a coherent way. It’s about prototyping ideas so that they can be evaluated. It’s about facilitating the convergence. That’s what IA means in my world.

As a cautionary note, it should be mentioned that lenses can also cause light to diverge. This is IA done poorly. Perhaps divergence happens when we hold too tight to our own ideas; when we fail to gather input from the right people; when we allow politics to cloud our judgment.

I should say that I’m not one of the people who gets excited about defining IA or IxD or UX or any other acronyms you might toss out. I’m sure there’s a time and place for such discussions, but they can mostly happen without me. They just don’t have much impact on my day. I’ve been called a designer, an information architect, an interaction designer, and even a business analyst. To me, the titles have been mostly irrelevant. I aim to facilitate convergence. I aspire to be a lens.

Posted in on January 27, 2010

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