connecting*the*dots

Admittedly, it took me a few days to shrug off my last rant. I’m finding myself at a crossroads of my career (what type of IA am I?) and upon hearing the perception of my career choice as not being a creative one, a chord was struck within me. I began my career in a creative capacity, and I plan on ending it the same way. I refuse to dumb it down to another level, as I’ve invested too much effort to do so.

Four years ago I was on a path of becoming a solid interactive designer in this industry. I had worked my way through the multimedia years as a CG artist, dabbling in art direction and interface design, and eventually made the move to the web as a full-time art director in ‘97. After a year and a half at a small interactive marketing company, I became lost. Something was missing. Every project became a battle to produce and it started to wear me down.

I needed a new resume.

That year, I proposed to the president of the company for me to concentrate on becoming a "New Media Specialist." During the course of our conversation I’d unknowingly described the responsibilities of an IA to a tee, but unfortunately, he had never heard of an IA either and couldn’t justify the position as billable. So I was thanked for being proactive and received a pat on the back on the way out of his office.

While trying to cope within those difficult times, I was introduced to the work of three people; Janet Murray, Brenda Laurel, and Bill Buxton. While my day job seemed to work overtime to extinguish the passion I had for the medium, these three people emitted the vibe that something better, more creative, was on the horizon. With Janet and Brenda’s varied take on the interactive narrative, and Bill’s perspective on redefining HCI, from 3d interaction to input device’s, I became exposed to perspectives that blew my visual design goggles out of the water. I had to make a move.

I wanted to practice what Brenda preached, creating a narrative experience in an on-line application; to explore the path of convergence that made Janet’s wonderful dreams a potential reality; to become a participant in Bill’s vision of the next generation of interfaces where an OS and the application layer become as one.

So to make a long(er) story short, I became an information architect. I jumped from the world of communication design and landed right in the midst of this intriguing discipline, with such different contextual career possibilities.

Now, three and a half years later, I’m grasping to find my niche, first and foremost as an interactive designer. While our profession is feeling the backlash of a brutal economy, the last thing I need to do is lose sight of why I do what I do. No matter how you skin this cat, we create temporal experiences through creative thought processes while collaborating with smart, creative people.

And I’d scrap with the biggest bully on the block to keep it that way.

Alright, I’m a bit pissed.

Doesn’t anyone consider our profession a creative venture? I understand the library science angle (meaning I understand where they come from, not necessarily how they do exactly what they do all the time they do it), but doesn’t the remainder of the craft of information architecture help deliver a narrative expression? Not as in a Shakespearean format, but in the very least as a scripted experience, set in code and interface parameters, but flexible in exploration?

I got fired up over this because of a thread at the SIG-IA list, where it was suggested that we:

1. are not artists creating experiences
2. only create "web pages"
3. would have a "hypnotised mind" if we beleived otherwise

Where’s the inspiration folks? In taking the user along a path to pertinent information, we do script an experience for them. How they react to it is based on the work we perform; the ux umbrella designers.

If you’ve ever worked on a project in this field, hopefully you’ve created something more relevant than a "bunch of web pages." If not, then you’ve never designed a precise solution, one which creates navigation paths that readily resonate in the user’s psyche; or an interface which feels seemless and intuitive to the intended audience; or an information architecture that is succinct in it’s labeling, categorization and retrieval capabilities, which also has multiple points of contextual departure for the user, creating an underlining narrative structure.

I thought the days were long gone when you had to be broke with paint stained finger tips to be considered creative. I guess not.