It’s been a week since I got back from the Information Architecture Summit. It was great, and fascinating, and interesting. There’s been a lot of food for thought churning in the back of my head, and now I’m going to try to make sense of it. One of the strongest themes was about pulling together IA as a field, and about how in-fighting about the definition of IA is weakening our position in the job market. This was manifested most strongly in Jesse James Garrett’s closing plenary speech, in which he declared that there was no such thing as an information architect, there never has been, and anybody who calls himself an information architect is a fool or a liar. Rather, we’re all user experience designers.

This is obviously a controversial move, and as a newbie to the IA field, I can’t help but wonder where this puts me. On one hand, I had hoped to leave IAS09 with a clearer idea of what it means to be an information architect, and on the other hand, simply being told that we’re user experience designers doesn’t quite ring right for me. It makes sense when I think about it in the way that Chiara Fox explains it, but it seems like we’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Perhaps the field of information architecture has evolved and we’re not all doing content inventories and taxonomies (but this seems inaccurate), but just because our tools have changed doesn’t necessarily mean that our job hasn’t. I wonder if one factor in what’s happening is a split between the job duties of the marketing, branding IAs who work with crafting cross-platform experiences and social websites, and the IAs who design business applications and heavily functional, database-driven websites. In the former case, I can completely see why the title user experience designer makes sense, but in the latter case, I don’t know that I could say with a straight face that digging into databases to redesign a report front-end is user experience design. That still seems like old-fashioned information architecture to me.

When I think back to the connections between real-life architecture and information architecture, and remember some of the lessons in de Botton’s Architecture of Happiness – namely, the concept that architects design space for use, to evoke certain feelings and actions, to guide people’s thoughts – it seems that the basic, fundamental concept behind information architecture hasn’t really changed. But I say all of this with a grain of salt – as a newcomer to the field, I don’t particularly have much invested in one job title or the other.

And who knows, maybe this is all JJG’s way of saying “IF YOU KIDS DON’T QUIET DOWN THERE I’M TURNING THIS CAR AROUND”.

Anyway, I saw some really great, non-politicized, educational sessions too. Some of the ones that really stick out for me are Stephen Anderson’s “designing seductive interactions”, Jared Spool’s “design treasures from the Amazon”, John Pattengill’s “How to save mobile internet”, and Chiara Fox’s “what IAs need to know about Web 3.0″ (aka semantic web). I have tons of notes and impressions from all of these, so if you wanna hear more about what I thought, just ask me! For I must get ready for CHI 2009 and cannot sit here typing away at my blog any longer.