I think the housebuilding anaolgy is apt – in a previous life I was an Interior Architect I (and others) described the practice as like Architecture only backwards. I would suggest the IA is much like web design only backwards…

The comparison is apt also in that both are concerned with the design of environments and the attempt to structure them in a way that allows users to make sense of them. That IA need not be concerned with physics is in someways a blessing but of course it must adapt to it’s own set of constraints – e.g. usability(maybe).

The differnce is in the dimensions – architecture in many respects and most cases is designed to be understtod in a single (or only a few ways). Web must be always understood in many ways as there is rarely a right answer to the complexity of web navigation.

Man. You said it. You have a way of saying what I am thinking in a way that makes more sense than I could ever make.

I think IAI Board should read this. Our community needs to be thinking about this – where we are and where we are going. You have given us a cognitive map that we can use to frame the discussion.

awesome.

I regret using “housebuilders” as the analogy to some degree … I didn’t want to draw that comparison literally. I was trying to just describe the difference between a activity/tool (saw) and the practice (housebuilding) — I agree about real architecture as an analog. But honestly I don’t even see it as just an analogy. I think I quite literally create architectures for information environments (i.e. made of digital information).

But even architects can point at a building, because the actual physical structure is made of walls. Pointing to the harmonization of disparate elements is harder to do when you don’t have a big honkin’ structure for people to notice — on the Web, the structure is invisible, between interfaces. Architects can skin their buildings in cool aluminum and stuff, but the only physical manifestation of our work is the interface, which Interaction/Visual Design is primarily responsible for.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, just harder for us.

With regards to this:

“Unlike our friendly housebuilders, we can’t point at a shelter and say ‘we make that!’”

Could this be because we are looking at the wrong group for an analogy? What we do is closer to architecture (brick and mortar) than housebuilding. Architects can’t point to a building and honestly say “we make that!”, but they _can_ point at the building and say “this exists because I harmonized a variety of disparate elements and created the plans that enabled the builder to make it!” (or something like that. Whew, what a mouthful!)

In any case, I’ve used this analogy in the past to help explain what I do: “what architects do for buildings, I do for websites.” Most folks seem to understand this (as far as they understand what architects do.)