).The theme of this year's summit was "Refining our Craft" and the tone was set early on to move
discussions beyond definition or role descriptions towards a more in-depth examination of where we currently stand after several years of effort. I made the point in the opening address that the notion of craft is more complicated
than many people initially think. Compared to engineering processes, craft is more typically considered to avoid the separation of design from manufacture. Clearly, IAs might well carve the development process into several stages
but, like most software design processes, it is only through embodiment of ideas that the design problem is fully understood, and locking ourselves into a pre-determined specification is a recipe for a poor final product.
Other notions of craft incorporate the concern for producing functional artifacts and the possibility of materials serving a dual purpose as both building block and tool. These aspects were also evident in many of the
talks, most noticeably the detailed case studies that were a feature of the summit. Each case was given an hour and while the parallel tracks meant the audience had to make a choice, I moved through them in rotation and was
delighted to hear the presenters reveal that their experiences were not all positive. Yes, real life design has problems, and mistakes are an inevitable part of the process.
The major talking point of the summit was a
comment (and invitation) by the keynote speaker, Steve Krug, who stated that research into user experience tended only to prove the obvious and was of little use to practitioners such as himself. Naturally this stirred the
academics among us (myself included) who feel that our research is often poorly understood or, worse, ignored by practitioners and in the response session, where a panel of "experts" gave their reactions to the address, this
comment sparked a dialog that would not fade with the weekend but bled over into the SIGIA list the next week.
Most interesting for me was the response of the participants at-large to this topic. Research was defended
by many in the practitioner community as essential to the development of the field. How true this is but how rare for a practitioner community to so clearly see this. Once more, the IA community shows itself a little more cultured
in their understanding of issues than others. Perhaps this is goodwill borne of optimism, and we shall see a more cynical view emerge in time.
But Steve struck a chord that resonated at length and raised many related
issues such as what is the purpose of research, what is the difference between proof and evidence, and when are findings that appear to be obvious really telling us more than common sense? Furthermore, where is the real research
base of IA? The field borrows so heavily from other disciplines that it is hard to identify anything that is uniquely IA. For sure, this is a theme that is to be included in a future summit.
And future summits there
will be. The ASIST Board agreed that we should have another. This will be the fourth and it will be chaired by Christina Wodtke of CarbonIQ.com fame. For a field that questioned its own existence in 2000, that is progress. As
Peter Morville noted in his talk, there are many species of IA professionals emerging across the information ecologies of contemporary organizations, and one hopes, as one audience member noted, that we can continue to get along.
The summit also marked the maturity of IA in a more formal way. The Education and IA panel provided details of the formal degree in IA being offered by Kent State, and the special issue of JASIST
on IA is to be published in September. A dedicated Web publication "Boxes and Arrows" (see
