My Thoughts on Euro IA 2006

The Euro IA conference held in Berlin is in it’s second year and it is kind of like the newer, more junior version of the IA Summit. Only the newer and more junior.

That’s not a mistake, it really felt like that.

I went along with 12 other colleagues amongst about 200 or so others and I guess I came away hopeful for the future, but a little underwhelmed at the quality of speaker and content presented.

I’ve already mentioned in a previous post that I ran a session/workshop on ‘Wicked Workshops’ with a a colleague of mine, Jason Mesut. The rest of our guys had posters up and were there to attend the variety of lectures.

I hate top-down lectures. PowerPoint kills presentations and suffocates your personality.

The thing that struck me most about what I heard over the two days is that, in the mixture of backgrounds, disciplines and ideologies – there is a large group of IAs who refuse to be dragged into the interactive space and call themselves something more appropriate.

For me, the conference failed to really provoke any progressive thought or debate, and was a little ’safe’ for me. I was really hoping to have a good old discussion, rant or ‘ding-dong’ but it didn’t materialise.

I for one, am <u>NOT</u> and IA. I consider myself Experience Architect, which is lucky as that’s my current role at LBi (formerly Framfab, formerly Oyster).

I’m an architect of the user experience, not only for a single task, goal or use case deployed in a web environment, but across all channels. Our work at LBi is increasingly across multiple channels (web, wap, call centre, retail outlet etc) and to this end we feel that we are continually working in a ’service design’ capacity.

I didn’t study HCI or Information or Computer Science, I studied Product Design and then Branding & Innovation. If that counts me out of the club – so be it.

Many of the IAs I spoke with at the conference weren’t really that progressive with their discipline and were happy talking about taxonomies, controlled vocabularies and meta data. Whilst fine and appropriate, they talked in a robotic tone, often missing the subtler points of what it is to experience a system. In my opinion our raison d’être.

The ones I spoke to were from small companies where they are probably likely to be from multi-disciplinary teams, so I was further surprised. I could easily see them handing PowerPoint wireframes over to the designers to ‘colour in’ and deliver to clients, therein missing the point of their job entirely.

There were some interesting groups there, but I got the feeling that most people were there to listen and take rather than discuss and give. I picked up some new stuff, but not nearly as much as I hoped.

Personally, I consider Experience Architecture to be the engineering that supports the form. And that Experience Architecture exists in a world of tension where form follows function follows form.

My Product Design training is steeped in Bauhaus philosophies, so I guess I would think like that.

Peter Morville of ‘Information Architecture for the World Wide Web’ and ‘Ambient Findability Fame’ opened trying to convince us that there is a natural cycle and that the IA profession will once again bring order to chaos and that this was it’s charge.

This wasn’t the main thrust of his talk but there was a point when he compared IAs to trees and that leaves fall to the ground that would once again make trees stronger – or something. Not his words, my summary.

Either way, I disagree hugely with what he was offering us. I think IAs that refuse to become more progressive and start thinking about the ‘experience’ and less about the ‘information’ will fade and die.

Fade and die.

Creating digital experiences is easy, making them appropriate to the brand is difficult and to do this you have to be a cross-over, hybrid IA who understand brand, design, affordances and semantics. You need to work very closely with Designers. Even to the point where as the EA you can have a valid opinion on typographic hierarchy, photographic style ident lock-ups, etc etc.

I’d expect designers to have an opinion over the engineering of what I’ve done because it’s the underlying tone of the experience if not the visual representation, and therefore a vehicle for the brand to express itself.

Actually, come to think of it, of late I’ve worked with too many designers who take a similar stance with their discipline. They consider their art to be that of presentation and refuse to get embroiled in the cross-over of working with collaboratively EAs.

These people are Graphic Designers and not Interaction Designers. They think ‘branding’ is about logos and colourways. They call themselves the ‘Creatives’. They miss the point.

How arrogant is that BTW? Why do those labelled with the badge ‘designer’ consider creativity to be their sole domain? I know some very creative Developers. Actually, I know some creative Project Managers (!).

In a world of healthy tension, EAs will push onto the design discipline and Designers will push onto the EA discipline. This will result in better experiences, delivered in a way more appropriate to the brand. This symbiotic relationship is called ‘Experience Design’.

Maybe this is something I should take to the Grand-Daddy IA Summit?