Guarding the Borders or Blocking the Way? IAs to Be Banned

H ot on the heels of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Houston in May – where there was not a mention of information architecture (more on this later) – I return to find an alarming message in one of the IA lists. Apparently the State of Ohio has decided that information architects should be banned, or at least renamed. Seems that the Board of Certification for architectural qualifications has a problem with the use of the term architecture in the IT sector since it might cause people to have erroneous expectations of the services IAs offer. I can just hear the jokes now! There is no offcial word yet on how they view cosmetics manufacturer L’Oreal’s use of the term lash architect, but no doubt some crusaders will get around to that eventually; after all, innocent people might get hurt. Now this really does open up a can of worms. If you look hard enough, the term architect is used in some very original ways. There’s PHP Architect*, a magazine for PHP professionals (there’s a group that needs a name change), interaction architects (splitters!), Spiral Architect (a band whose aim is, apparently, “controlled anarchy”) not to mention the more mundane but real job title couplings of chip architect, community architect, screen architect, digital architect, human resource architect, leadership architect, strategic architect...you get the picture. I mentioned this tempest in a teapot to the dean of the School of Architecture recently, and he was similarly bemused by the apparent concerns of the certifiers. But this is not new in the emerging professions. Software engineers, for instance, have had trouble for years with people telling them they were not “real” engineers, but it hasn’t lessened the demand or the use of the title. This battle has also raged in the HCI world where objections were raised to the title usability engineer, a term one still cannot easily use to describe a profession in Texas. Nothing personal, I always hated that term anyhow, but it strikes me as odd that people get upset by labels such as engineer and architect but pay little or no attention to the use of scientist which gets attached to the most unlikely fields of practice (but let’s not go there). Here’s hoping common sense prevails but what are the odds of that once the lawyers get involved? Perhaps the Ohio Board of Certifiers had already had a word with the ACM and IEEE Guarding the Borders or Blocking the Way? IAs to Be Banned!