760: on albers

I will openly admit that I’m a little confused now. Albers claims that information design (ID) is not the same as information architecture (IA). But I’m struggling with how ID is nothing more than a sequence of activities that technical communicators have always performed prior to developing an information product.

Albers says that ID is not "the practice of web navigation, creating graphics, picking fonts, laying out the page, or using particular tools. Rather, it must be considered the practice of enabling a reader to obtain knowledge" (7). And yet back on page one he states that “Information design is about the proper position of content within an appropriate/meaningful context -- content that is effectively assembled and presented” (1). Am I the only one who gets the sense that Albers can’t clearly define ID either?

OK, so let’s assume that the “practice” of ID occurs first. Do we then move to IA (page layout, fonts, headings, etc.), and then to the central task of authoring, collecting, and synthesizing content? If that’s the case, therein is my confusion because I’ve never seen or understood these practices to be mutually exclusive or necessarily sequential.

When Albers talks about the "essence of being a good information designer" it sounds a lot like good audience analysis and project planning. "They start with understanding the information needs of the audience and what data is available, and then decide if paper, web-based, or a loudspeaker is the best method of communicating the information. The medium used to communicate the message should not be chosen until the information needs of the audience are defined" (8).That, to me, is the necessary up-front work of building usable and effective information products.

The need to specialize the technical communicator’s activities into granular chunks isn’t surprising – in fact it fits nicely with the themes of value-seeking, self-preservation, and disciplinary struggles we’ve strung together since week 1. When Carliner lists the activities of the IDer on page 3, he’s describing many of the symbolic-analytic activities that all knowledge workers perform. Similarly, when Odell and Goswanmi state that, “In creating the optimal user experience, the information designer must also consider the social context of the user” (6), are they not simply talking about the work of the rhetorician?

If I come to this discussion through those narratives (above), then I can buy the claim that ID has emerged from technical communication. Similarly, I can accept the better of the definitions of ID presented in the introduction -- "Information Design Journal: Information design is the art and the science of presenting information so that it is understandable and easy to use: effective, efficient and attractive" (3).

I like the IDJ definition because it lists three key metrics that we use in tech comm to evaluate our information products. Those metrics are embedded in our training (or at least they were). So maybe we were taught information design without it being called information design. It's an aspect of good technical communication. Nothing more.