Yes, IA IS DESIGN.
And guess what? Increasingly, design is IA. Last year, this was the “5,000 foot view,” but it gets closer to earth every day.

What do I mean? I mean that the methodologies we kludged together to account for a situation of explicit informational flow – a user interacting with the Web – also happens to be very useful for situations of implicit informational flow. Such as the interaction of a user with, say, a citrus juicer.

You think I’m kidding? I drew up a persona, developed a (admittedly barebones) scenario bringing that persona into contact with a citrus juicer, elaborated a use case specifying each point of informational flow between object and user…the results were illuminating.

If designers don’t learn to think this way, I’m betting they’ll be swept aside by those who do.

But it’s a skill the best writers, and designers, have to learn how to do. It’s the flip side of having the courage to make the creative leap.

The biggest difficulty I’ve had with younger designers (both print and web) is getting them to understand it that’s its not personal, since as John says, they’ve got their egos invested in it.

However the same might be said of usablity folks as well. Sometimes usability concerns need to be balanced against other concerns, for example as Dan Shaffer talks about in “Building Brand into Structure.” But too often, I hear usability results presented as an all-or-nothing proposition.

As Edward de Bono once stated,

“You can analyse the past, but you have to design the future”

This relates to IA very clearly, on one hand we can come up with the deliverables for IA in a project by applying rules learn’t from past experiences (be it our own or other people’s). This approach would give us a technically correct solution based on tried and tested principles.

But, that solution will not likely be very ground breaking or serve to push the development of IA (as a whole) forward.

To do that we need to design, to use our intuition, to take risks, to discover new ways of doing things and perhaps be a bit crazy.

So my boring conclusion is that there will always be room for both the “non designer” IA person and the “designer” IA person, just as some projects need a “standard” level of usability where as other projects may need a more “innovative” approach.

The sad thing is, for me, is that the majority of people I have worked with in software development or web design, fail to recogonise the importance of IA or indeed how far it can (and must) develop.

Design is seeing a problem to be solved or a task to be accomplished and figuring out (or borrowing from established practice) the best way to solve that problem or accomplish that task.

When you cook dinner–whether you make the dishes up yourself or follow someone else’s directions–you are designing. When you decide whether you will mow your lawn in rows or in a circular pattern, you are designing. When you drive to work, choosing the best route based on traffic and other factors, you are designing. When you take a shower and decide to put the shampoo on your hair before scrubbing your face, you are designing. And when you organize a Web site’s information and provide for a computer user the optimum path to get to that information, you are definitely designing.

I had a conversation with Nick Ragouzis at CHI in 1998 about design. I denied that what I did was design, for exactly this reason. Call me a web architect, web cinematographer, webmaster, even a web engineer, anything but a web designer.

I still have a hard time explaining what I do. There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s a creative endeavor. I make web sites (gee, that wasn’t hard). When I’m done, there’s something there that wasn’t there before, or there’s something there that’s better than what was there before. Is it design? I don’t know. I suppose so, especially if you define “design” the way Dave Parker does above. But I still have a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach knowing that the term is most often used to describe an approach to web site creation that, in my experience, has most often resulted in unusable sites that I’m then asked to tinker with to make them more able to meet the objectives laid out by my clients.

I was just in one of those meetings with my boss telling him what I really want to do, and I said “I want to design. I’m sick of intuiting my wireframes. I want to use the design process to create informed designs.” Something that there is currently no time in the design process to do. Even when I was at an agency where I controlled the consulting gigs the best design process I was able to conjour was just doing wireframes.

How many of us out there are in positions where doing interfaces is just about doing it? How often do we supply a client 3 versions of wireframes? I would sit in awe at how the visual designers get 3 weeks to not even come up with a final product and I would work my ass off to finish wireframes at 50 wireframes in 2 days.

This mentality that interface design is a chore, and visual design is an artform is what we are fighting against.

Christina (and myself) might be alienating a group of people in the BIG ia world, but lets please focus people about what IA is and isn’t instead of trying to fit everywhere, especially in places that have long been filled by good people doing amazing work.

I found that often usability engineering is equited to a compliance audit. It might be the way it is sold and practiced. This might be a result of the emerging nature of this discipline, and opportunists climbing on the bandwagon after they’ve read three sets of guidelines.

To design (structure) an information space, or web space, and the nvaigation within this space, as well as the look-and-feel of ti, is multi-dimensional, and requires a combined skill-set. The most visible result is the look-and-feel – so graphic designers can sell themselves more easily as being required in the design process.

Also, please understand that when I say IA, I also wish to include all the structural design professions that may wish to hide behind a scientific objectivity, including Interaction design, interface design and information design. It’s all design.

Whether it’s done by different people depends on the temperment of the people involved and the context.

In “traditional” graphic design, one of the things that elevates you to senior designer or art director is developing the ability to look dispassionately at your own designs, which is something that generally only comes through experience.