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Subject:OT: information architecture From:"Jessica N. Lange" <jlange -at- oee -dot- com> To:"TechWR-L" <TECHWR-L -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 1 Jun 2000 13:20:04 -0400
Thought some of you might be interested. Some may already
know all about it.
I stumbled over a reference to the American Society for
Information Science (www.asis.org), and learned about
Information Architecture, and followed a link to a (very nicely
done) site with text from a talk at the ASIS summit: http://www.enteract.com/~marc/asis
The speaker wrote about the talk: "It was called "Ethnography and
Information Architecture," but turned out to be half about that and half
about the "what is IA" conversation that ran through the two-day summit."
Reason I'm sending this post to techwr-l is the following, found on
slide0009.htm of the talk:
the ethnographic point of view
1. you aren?t your user, you aren?t like your users
2. it isn?t possible to sit around a conference table and imagine
correctly what people need & want
3. the tools of understanding: immersion, observation,
story-telling, a child-like ignorance
So now I'm trying to figure out who these information architects are
and how they're different from technical writers. If anyone knows,
I'd appreciate enlightenment!
