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SIGIA-L Mail Archives: Re: SIGIA-L: taking another stab at the

Re: SIGIA-L: taking another stab at the big/little IA debate

From: Ziya Oz (ZiyaOz_at_earthlink.net)
Date: Sun Dec 16 2001 - 20:13:05 EST

Eric Scheid wrote:
> I'm not entirely satisfied with the term "TechnicalIA" though. Someone
> else suggested "PreciseIA" once which is a close fit too.
>
> What do you think?

I applaud your effort to redefine these really obnoxious, poorly-worded
labels.

Imagine calling what advertising designers/art directors do littleDesign and
what creative directors do bigDesign or what newsweekly reporters do
littleWriting and what editors to bigWriting or what coders do
littleProgramming and what project managers do bigProgramming, etc.

For a profession obsessed with classification and labeling, these are poor
choices, at best.

(As IA becomes a more mature profession, I'm sure better terminology will
emerge, defined by the scope of the work involved. To cite one example, if
you wanted to hire a software programmer today, it would help if you
specified whether he will work on objects, components, frameworks, web
services, applications, etc., each with increasing scope -- instead of
awkwardly dividing the entire field of software programming into little/big
camps.)

But if you insist on having just two labels, 'conceptual' and 'production'
define the rendering of related tasks better for me.

Best,

Ziya

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