Adaptive Path Blog

Even though it was in Miami this year, a California kind of vision came to me at the Information Architecture Summit last weekend. Everywhere I looked, I saw pioneers and homesteaders.

Pioneers

It used to be that I went to the Summit because of the pioneers. It was the one place where you could find all of IA’s early champions all together. There’s Jesse James (Garrett) and Kid Peterme! The Argus Gang! Polarbear hunters! They all came together year after year at the Summit. And even if you were a new kid in town, you could walk around in your stiff new boots and your ten gallon hat, and sort of bask in the reflected glory.

Homesteaders

But this year I found myself inspired by a different group — the crop of people who are working as teams of one in organizations that haven’t previously known user experience professionals. And these are the homesteaders. It’s like they’re building little ranches and growing crops in soil that can be hard to work with and — heaven help them — they’re spreading our civilization to places where it’s never been before.

I used to be a homesteader myself. My presentation at the Summit on how to be a user experience team of one was my attempt to share my thoughts on the experience. But even I was surprised by how many people I found last weekend who identified with the situation, and how much they seemed to crave a larger discussion about how to be successful when you’re a team of one.

Hardscrabble living

The challenge is, when you’re just bringing UX to an organization, the role can feel very embattled and small, and it can rattle your faith in your own contributions. I met a lot of people who told impressive stories about what they were accomplishing, but who nevertheless seemed almost sheepish about their work and how they were going about it.

From time to time I also hear more established folks in the field talking about how IA is yesterday’s news and the future is interaction design, design strategy, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. That’s stuff and nonsense. Don’t get me wrong, those things are all great and important and it’s wonderful that we’re advancing collectively as a field, but there are still a lot of places where basic problems of structure, findability, and language have yet to be resolved, and it’s the homesteaders who are making that happen.

Homesteaders, the work you’re doing helps us all. You’re spreading our field to new outposts, and you deserve as much support as we can give you.

So, I’ll open up the question, what can we do to help?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Conference commentary, Information Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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