Subtitle: an enthusiastic audience member’s biased account of the IA Summit 2007 panel with Karl Fast (Kent State U), Grant Campbell (U of Western Ontario), & Don Turnbull (U Texas - Austin).
Karl gave a great introduction to the origins of the “Grand Challenges” construct for researchers. This is a way of identifying the major issues for research in the field, the things that will have major impact on the field and its future. Karl also presented two challenges he has identified for IA research: 100-year thinking, and vertical explanations. By 100-year thinking, Karl refers to the sort of outlook and philosophy represented by Stuart Brand’s “Clock of the Long Now,” a fascinating piece in itself. A long-term perspective helps us focus on the larger issues and problems that will come; it encourages researchers to focus on building a basis for an indefinitely lengthy engagement in the research. This perspective goes hand in hand with the concepts of building vertical explanations; we have to start our research at the bottom, in these early days of IA research, and build upward toward the 100-year outcomes we envision.
Vertical explanations involve building bridges to other research; as we begin to develop a body of research specific to the practice and theory of information architecture, it is particularly important to root our studies in the literature from other disciplines. This may seem obvious; currently, there is very little in the way of research that is specifically branded as relevant to information architecture, but there are longstanding and extremely valuable insights to be gained from the literature in many fields, such as psychology, information-seeking behavior, human-computer interaction, and even information economics. I couldn’t agree more; just because this literature does not call itself information architecture does not make it any less relevant to the practice and body of theory that we are working to develop.
Grant Campbell also made two points, and I’m not certain that I really understood what he was attempting to communicate with his second item, though he provided a lovely quote: “Failure makes you small and weak and shivering and afraid.” This quote followed his statement that academics are failures, inasmuch as we tackle problems that we can never solve. They are problems that we know we can never solve, but as we fearlessly fail to solve these problems, we can contribute valuable learning nonetheless. It is much the same with information architects in professional practice: they fearlessly attack seemingly impossible problems with a steadfast intent to make the information world a better place.
Grant’s first point, however, is one of the larger challenges faced by academics, from my perspective. Developing the educational structure for future IA practitioners is a significant challenge; we may as well just admit that academics will always be behind the practitioners in terms of current tools and trends in IA practice. Our panelists were honest enough to admit this fact, and I was relieved to hear that the academic researchers in IA are well aware that the academy cannot keep pace with practitioners when it comes to tools and techniques. Academics and practitioners work on different time scales and are subject to different expectations. This is simply a fact of life.
What academics need to do, as Grant succinctly stated, is develop the educational structure to teach the right theoretical base; tools and techniques are best learned in internships and practice. Learning how to use the tool of choice in a given environment of practice is something that professionals often learn on the job, during that first week when learning the location of the washrooms and where people go for lunch. This is not to say that we should not be teaching students how to generate wireframes, but rather that we probably shouldn’t be hung up on whether those wireframes are generated with OmniGraffle, Visio, or even PowerPoint.
The abstraction of IA skills to a theoretical base from which pedagogical fundamentals can be extracted and curricula built is not a trivial challenge, but I believe this is one of the first and foremost issues with which we should be concerned. From my perspective, as a student of information, having a really good professional practitioner as an adjunct instructor for courses on topics like interface design and information architecture is a wonderful answer to the challenge of the lag between practice and academic research, but it comes with a potentially significant problem. The problem is communication; do the faculty really know what the adjuncts are teaching? For that matter, do they know what their peers are teaching?
For example, I’ve had instruction in persona development in four different courses–that’s a full third of my required MSI credits! Now, personas are great and we all know that they are useful, but four repetitions of the content most assuredly feels like a waste of my time. Master’s students are smart enough to “get it” the first (or perhaps second) time that the material is presented. Multiple contexts of understanding and some level of repetition are inarguably beneficial in education, but I think that at the graduate level, the students should be able to take some responsibility for that learning.
Don Turnbull of the University of Texas at Austin, a fellow iSchool, brought up several challenges, though some seemed sufficiently specific that they might not be so grand. And that is good news, my friends, because that means there’s an even better chance we may be able to step up and answer them.
The first point Don mentioned, with which I strongly resonate, is exploring the impacts of open source software and user-generated content, the social aspects of information architecture. This is one aspect of my primary research interests, so Don really got my attention with this point. The essential challenge that he pointed out is learning the attributes of structures that generate and support community so that we can better accomodate our design to enable community-building.
Don proceeded to note that everything is miscellaneous, that information doesn’t necessarily mirror its provider. I’m not clear as to just why this is a grand challenge for IA, but I agree that it’s an important perspective to maintain and explore. He also suggested a navigation stress test methodology to evaluate findability–again, I’m not sure that this is a grand challenge either–but it sounds like a really interesting and useful approach to building a context for understanding how a user may experience the site based on entering through a “back door” instead of the front page. He also mentioned the mobile and virtual online life phenomena, which are certainly paradigms that induce difficult design challenges, the exploration of and solutions to which can become a research agenda for a larger framework of information architecture problem-solving. A grand challenge? Perhaps not in its specifics, but undoubtedly so in its overarching themes.
Don’s next four points seemed to be genuine grand challenges to me. Academic researchers should tackle the unsolvable problems of trying to generate new IA tools, like templates and software; of data collection, instrumentation, and validation, a topic dear to my own heart; the continued development of work around the ideas of the semantic web in all its potential glory; and the development of robust research and peer review specific to information architecture. I don’t think anyone who was present expects that it will be a large research community, but that most feel that it would show value in novel contributions. And that’s what we’re all about, right?
Many comments made in the audience’s discussion revolved around this last point of the potential value and pitfalls of the branding of “IA research” but I think that to make real progress in the long term, there’s a lot to be said for the slower clock of the academic world, inasmuch as academics can pursue the kinds of useful research questions that practitioners are often unable to make time to engage. For this very reason, Don’s suggestion of a matchmaking of researchers to professional problems sounds like a great source of inspiration all-around; this suggestion is a solution to a significant (but maybe not grand) challenge: just where are we in IA research? Where do we go from here?
Some other points from the audience included these:
- What disciplines belong in an academic faculty that can create tomorrow’s IAs? It was clear to all that interdisciplinarity is a desirable characteristic for the education of an IA, in a most unanimous agreement of audience opinion. Just what disciplines should be invited to the table is indeed a significant challenge, one which I believe the iSchools movement has formed to answer.
- Information architecture needs to pursue the challenges of information management and information overload.
- Research on the convergence of structured and unstructured data certainly sounds like a grand challenge to me!
- We must guard against the loss of theory in favor of practice; an astute parallel was drawn to traditional library science, from whence information architecture emerged.
- Exploring the rhetoric of connecting these small and loosely related things - sadly, I can’t quite remember just what was intended by this interesting-sounding comment that I have jotted in my notes…
- The creation of information is important; information is not just content. We “lost the gestalt” when writing became content provision.
A final perspective from the panel that is useful to me is the idea that building thoughtfully-defined relationships to other fields will reduce the burden on individual researchers. Creating a research community around information architecture will allow the continuance and viability of the research, which has great potential to make valuable contributions to the professional information architecture community.
And these are the grand challenges for information architecture research, as of the 2007 ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit.