There’s no such thing as an interaction designer either. Not as a profession. Anyone who claims to specialize in [interaction design or information architecture] is a fool or a liar. The fools are fooling themselves into thinking that one aspect of their work is somehow paramount. And the liars seek to align themselves with a tribe that will convey upon them status and power.

Jesse James Garrett, The Memphis Plenary given at the 2009 IA Summit

Let me preface this response by saying that Jesse is a friend and colleague of mine, and I hope he wasn’t trying to personally insult anyone, even though it’s hard not to take the words above personally. Since I call myself an interaction designer and have sat on the Board of the Interaction Design Association, I suppose this makes me both a fool and a liar.

The design work I do is predominantly interaction design. I have a master’s degree in it. I’ve written books about it. I practice it. Thus, this aspect of my work is clearly paramount to other practices that intersect with mine (e.g. visual and industrial design, information architecture) and that make up the umbrella of user experience. Prominent not to the overarching experience design itself (which everyone is working towards with the same goal of creating good user experiences), but to the other disciplines I work alongside.

To call everyone who practices in the field “user experience designers” is not only a web-centric attitude (where information architecture and interaction design are more closely aligned than elsewhere), but it will have the effect of making us all seem like generalists. “User experience designer” implies that you can design all aspects of user experience to at least some level of competence. It would be as if everyone who practices medicine was called a “general practitioner.” Speaking for myself (and I suspect for many others), I’m not a generalist. I don’t do everything equally well. You don’t want me doing your visual design, nor your taxonomy, nor your content analysis. I understand them, and can do them if pressed, but I’m not an expert in them. To pay me to do them would probably be a waste of your money. There are people with more skill, talent, and experience in those areas and thus do those things better than me. I know, because I partner with them all the time to do those parts of experience design.

Are there going to be generalists? Sure. Many of them, working in small- or single-person teams. And perhaps since they will likely do the bulk of UX work in their organizations, “user experience designer” is a fine title and role for them. But my hunch is that, like general practitioners in the medical field, what generalists in the UX field will work on will be constrained to a set of limited problems. For anything really complex, specialists will deal with it. I’m pretty sure this is the situation we’re in right now, in fact.

Specialization isn’t a bad thing. In fact, for most industries, it’s a sign of maturity. If we use medicine as an example again, a century or so ago, there were pretty much two kind of doctors: doctors (general practitioners) and surgeons (the people who cut your leg off when it had gangrene). As the medical field matured over the last century, specializations emerged because we learned more about the body and understood that not all medical problems are the same. Nor are all design problems the same; certain problems require certain specialized disciplines to engage with them. Complex situations often require teams of specialists to solve them.

Logically, if everyone who works in experience design should be called a “user experience designer,” does this mean visual and industrial designers should take that title too? And how about architects? Sound designers? It’s simply an impractical and illogical call to arms, and ultimately unlikely and undesirable.

If we all switch to the title and role of user experience designer, finding the right specialist is going to get harder. How are employers and clients going to know which user experience designer to engage or hire? There is already a wide range of skills among the practitioners of information architecture and interaction design. To toss everyone together will make it even more difficult for the organizations that hire us to evaluate individual skills and experience to make sure they have the right person for the work they have. This is not a trivial problem; we want to make it as easy as possible to be found. (Findability, anyone?)

In a broader sense, it seems to me the movement to dissolve information architecture into user experience design is simply an admission of information architecture’s declining visibility and, especially, how limited information architecture actually is in practice. Outside of large online spaces, the percentage of time most people in the UX field spend doing the structure and categorization of information is probably staggeringly small, even among people whose job title is “information architect.” This is even granting that on the web, the difference between information architecture and interaction design can be trivial or academic. When we move to more functionality-rich (instead of content-rich) products, there is a huge difference between the two disciplines. A person with a library science degree and card sorting skills is likely going to be the wrong fit for a ubicomp or a consumer electronics project, whatever their title. But it would be easier to know that with a label, and isn’t labeling part of what information architecture is all about?

None of this, by the way, negates my stance that user experience is everyone’s responsibility, in the same way the health of the patient is every doctor’s responsibility. No matter what we’re called, no matter what role–specialist or generalist–we play on a project. Nor do I think that interaction design and information architecture are solely practiced by or the responsibility of those who have those titles.

I do not, however, want to be called a fool or a liar because I don’t want to be homogenized with other disciplines that I mostly don’t practice. I think you’ll find that many practitioners of the other specialized disciplines that make up the rich and varied field of user experience design wouldn’t appreciate it either.

Here’s some places you’ll find me in 2009:

I’m not speaking at it, but my client is debuting our product demo at CES in Las Vegas on the 8-11th.

In the Bay Area, I’m speaking at Stanford University’s HCI program’s Seminar on People, Computers, and Design on January 16.

Also in January, I’m speaking and signing books at the IxDA-SF’s monthly meeting on January 27, held at Adobe.

In February, I have back-to-back workshops and two amazing conferences. First, in Denver, I’m at Web Directions North on February 3-4, giving a talk and teaching a workshop on touchscreens and interactive gestures. Use my discount code WDN09DSa to get $50 off the conference and my workshop. The Web Directions conferences are always a lot of fun.

Then, on February 4-8, I’m at Interaction09 in Vancouver. I’m co-teaching a workshop with Bill DeRouchey (already sold out!) as well as giving a keynote called Carpe Diem: Attention, Awareness, and Interaction Design 2009. If Interaction08 was any indication, I09 will be one of the best conferences of the year.

I’m unfortunately not speaking or attending SXSW this March for the first time in about three years. Nor am I speaking at ETech this year, sadly. But on March 26, I will be speaking at CHI Atlanta.

In April, I’ll be speaking at the Voices that Matter Web Design Conference in San Francisco on the 27-30th.

May. Nothing scheduled yet?!

June brings two more blockbuster conferences. First is UPA 2009 in Portland on the 8-12th. And then on the 15-17th it’s UXLondon, where I’ll be teaching a workshop on brainstorming and giving a talk on designing from the inside-out.

July 19-24 finds me teaching a workshop at HCI International 2009 in San Diego.

Who knows where I’ll be in August, but in September, I’m also likely speaking at d.Construct 2009.

Whew! That’s a lot of hot air coming out of my mouth. I hope to see some of you at one or more of these events!

If this blog has been absurdly quiet lately, it is because I have a good reason. Over the last several weeks, I resigned my position at Adaptive Path and, with some colleagues, created Kicker Studio, a new design consultancy focused on products, not the web. We’re combining visual, industrial, and interaction design to make products that are holistic from the ground up. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a few years now.

Seldom in my life have I ever felt more like my ENTJ personality type (“The Fieldmarshall”) as have these last few weeks, to not only sell people on the vision for the company, but simply to marshall the troops to do all the myriad of tasks that are required to set up a small business. It is amazing how millions of people are able to do it. Between the accounting and the legal and dealing with all the rest, the set-up is amazingly tricky to navigate.

But anyway, most of my professional writing is over there now, on the Kick It! blog. Come join us, won’t you? (Send clients.)

From White Noise:

I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies.
 

From Underworld:

In her veil and habit she was basically a face, or a face and scrubbed hands. Here in cyberspace she has shed all that steam-ironed fabric. She is not naked exactly but she is open—exposed to every connection you can make on the world wide web.

There is no space or time out here, or in here, or wherever she is. There are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowledge is gathered and linked, hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a keystroke, a mouse-click, a password—world without end, amen.

But she is in cyberspace, not heaven, and she feels the grip of systems. This is why she is so uneasy. There is a presence here, a thing implied, something vast and bright. She senses the paranoia of the web, the net. There’s the perennial threat of virus of course. Sister knows all about contaminations and the protective measures they require. This is different—it’s a glow, a lustrous rushing force that seems to flow from a billion net nodes.

When you decide on a whim to visit the H-bomb home page, she begins to understand. Everything in your computer, the plastic, silicon and mylar, every logical operation and processing function, the memory, the hardware, the software, the ones and zeroes, the triads inside the pixels that form the on-screen image—it all culminates here.