ia play

I’ve come across a few ads for a junior IA/designer that I think are for the same job. Always interesting to see the differences in how agencies advertise the same role.

From Skillbrokers, advertising for a Junior Information Architect/Designer

SME based in the centre of the West End is looking for a junior information architect/designer - the technical environment is made up of: photoshop, HTML, CSS, Wireframing tool (such as visio or axure), Ecommerce/ebusiness.

Ideally you will be able to demonstrate some experience in this area, have design experience, but want to become an information architect with a passion for user experience and business performance above design aesthetics - you will need to have a solid understanding of Web design and development along with a working knowledge of Web technologies, be well versed in tools such as illustrator, Photoshop and visio, an understanding of digital agency processes.

You will either be a Web designer with a good grasp of user experience design looking to move into information architecture or an Information Architect with a good eye for design.

And from ABRS, advertising for an Information Architect/Designer

Junior Information Architect / Designer sought by leading consultancy to create wireframes, site blue prints and input into the functional specification. You should be able to turn these into high quality site designs as well as contributing to other design projects.

You should have good photoshop knowledge, good understanding of HTMLS and SS, and wireframing tool (such as Visio or Axure).

To succeed in this role you will have some design experience and want to become an information architect with a passion for user experience. This is an excellent opportunity to develop competencies on high profile projects for someone with limited experience but with the right attitude and skills.

I had the opportunity last week to attend a brilliant course called An Introduction to Visual Methods.

“The aim of this workshop is to provide participants with a step-change career enhancing skills in visual methods; and to provide an ongoing and integrated visual methods resource for researchers with experience in visual methods at intermediate level that is stimulating, challenging and grounded in ‘best practice’.”

Dr Jon Prosser and friends are running an ESRC funded initiative to “build visual method capacity across the social sciences. Part of the initiative was these dirt cheap training courses, aimed at academic and non-academic researchers alike.

The two days involved three hands-on activities and a number of presentations covering:

• Katherine Davies : photo elicitation and family tree drawing to explore family resemblances and sibling relationships
• Stuart Muir: video diaries to explore contemporary rituals
• Rob Walker on children’s photo diaries
• Andrew Clark on map making and walkabouts to understand urban social geography
• Tessa Muncey on auto-ethnography through writing and photos
• David Gauntlett: making documentaries with kids, drawings of celebrities, identity models made of Lego
• Steve Higgins: using cartoon templates to find out childrens views
• Ruth Holliday: using video diaries to explore gender identity
• Jon Prosser on the ethics of visual methods.

There’s a Visual Methods Symposium in July that will explore some of these themes in more depth.

Pretty much every job ad asks for experience, which can make trying to break into a new field seem nigh-on impossible at times.

If you are trying to break into information architecture and hitting the ‘experience-required’ brick wall then consider doing some volunteering:

1. The IA Institute is always looking for volunteers. There’s a list of opportunities on their website and most of them can be done anywhere in the world.
2. Use the advanced search on do-it.org and select ‘computers, technology and website development’ to get results for charities looking for help with their websites. Or try idealist.org or the equivalent service in your part of the world.
3. Approach a local charity direct and offer to help with their website. Usually they’ll be looking for help write, publishing and troubleshooting but you can start there and suggest other improvements as you go along.
4. Get familiar with how people use technology - volunteer to help teach basic IT skills. Age Concern are currently looking for IT trainers and Help the Aged run a similar scheme. Schools and other community groups are often looking for help like this as well. Try the same computers search on do-it.org but narrow with the keyword ‘trainer’.

Volunteering gives you an opportunity to try out what you’ve read about, build up your portfolio and it is great experience at making IA improvements with a limited budget (or more normally, no budget). That’ll be attractive to any employer.

Undoubtedly family business represents the most lasting type of business. The expert in family business, Professor Willian O’Hara, in one of his books mentioned about family business the following: “Before the multinational corporation, there was family business. Before the Industrial Revolution, there was family business. Before the enlightenment of Greece and the empire of Rome, there was family business.”

from The 100 Oldest Companies in the World

The oldest UK company in the list is Brooke’s Mill in Yorkshire which dates back to 1541. It is still owned by the same family but is no longer a wool mill, nor do the buildings date to 1541. These days it is a “Heritage Office Park”. The name, family and location persist but everything else has changed.

For most of my BBC career, the website wasn’t really about TV & Radio. Discussion were filled with talk of news, sport, weather, recipe finder, GCSE Bitesize, initiatives like iCan and products like Connector, MyBBC, and search.

There were lovingly crafted programme showcases for the top shows like Eastenders and Doctor Who. And there was Radioplayer, well ahead of its time.

But most programmes had no coverage (a temporary schedule snippet notwithstanding) as I discovered in my first few weeks at the BBC. Part of my job was to respond to users who had emailed us via the ‘contact us’ link on the search engine. Query after query asked for information about a programme recently and not so recently seen or heard. We resorted to back catalogues of RadioTimes and lots of apologetically framed replies.

Now the situation is somewhat different, with a number of projects having re-homed programme content on the internet, mostly notably:

• iPlayer 7 day catch-up, TV and Radio
• Catalogue (currently offline) Text based records of the back catalogue, based on the BBC’s internal catalogue produced by Information and Archives
• Archives Trial collections of archive audio, video and written material
• Programmes A page for every programme from October 2007 onwards, some with embedded audio & video from iPlayer

Diverse teams tackling the original problem (no programme support) from slightly different angles and a more experimental, innovation-friendly culture has resulted in an information architecture headache. Part one of solving the resulting problem is integrating the data from Catalogue into Programmes. I’m sure that’ll be a cinch

This cheesecake is one of those all day baking exploits. It is very easy (apart from the flipping at the end which really requires two pairs of hands) but you have to make sponge cake, bake, mix up the cherry layer, make crumb topping, make cheese layer, put it all together, bake, bring to room temp, refridgerate for hours, flip, remove foil, eat.

I made it more complicated by using fresh cherries so there was the extra painful step of stoning cherries. It took me all day and a lovely day it was too. So what if I got nothing else done?

The resulting creation is huge and PW will be able to feed off it for days, sparing him last week’s fate of eating a whole box of muesli.

And yes, we did eat some for breakfast.

“Whenever I conduct workshops with any group, I ask people how free they feel and to rate themselves on a scale of 0 to 100. The responses are usually about the same whether I am talking to people in a correctional facility or at a workplace. I have learned firsthand that some people feel free while behind bars (and use their time in a positive way), yet others feel “locked up” while living in society.”

Why Leisure Matters in a Busy World in the New York Times

Writing is one of my favourite things and I find it pretty easy to start writing, whether that’s articles, academic essays or blogs post. Finishing is a different story. Time and time again I’ll get 75% of the way there and then just not finish something. Suddenly the washing up or gardening or putting the rubbish out all look way more important than finishing what I was writing.

These are my ten tactics for getting writing done (they don’t all work together):

1. just opening the documents

Odd one this but I’ve found that sometimes I need an agreement with myself that I’m just going to open the word doc and I don’t actually have to write anything. This makes sure that whatever else I do online that the document is there and waiting.

2. doing the mundane but easy stuff

When I don’t want to write I find that going back to the text and doing the non-creative tasks, like putting links and references in or spell-checking the article, tends to reengage me with what I was actually writing and I end up merrily writing away.

3. telling yourself you are just going to do a small bit

I’ll decide I’m only going to write 50 words. Seems trivial so I’ll usually get on and do it, and then do some more.

4. taking the internet away

The internet is a big distraction and when I’m writing it is always there. From Facebook, to mail, to RSS, the internet is a never-ending source of other peoples thoughts to read rather than write your own thoughts down. Switch it off or switch to paper.

5. reading it outloud (to the cat)

Has the disadvantage of making you look off your trolley if anyone catches you. You could read it outloud to another human being but where’s the fun in that? Just reading outloud helps you engage in a different way

6. printing and reading what you’ve done

Changing medium from screen to paper has been my solution since my student days. Still seems to work.

7. changing location

I think I’ve mentioned before my preference for sitting on the rabbit hutch at the end of the garden but in general just moving to another place in house, garden, office or anywhere else seems to restart my thinking

8. talking about what you are supposed to be doing with someone else

Just telling someone else that I’m supposed to be writing my article about ‘x’ is quite successful. Unless the topic is really boring (or they are playing Playstation at the time) then they’ll usually ask you something about the topic and telling them about it tends to get me interested again.

9. reading around the subject

I find the initial reading easy. This is when I’m learning stuff and that can be addictive. Writing is not about learning anymore but about sharing what you’ve learnt but if I get stuck with the writing then reading even more can help, if it looks like procrastination when you’ve already read enough to start writing.

10. draw it instead

This one’s been quite useful recently. If you don’t feel like writing then get a big piece of paper and draw your ideas.

“it is the first social environment created for the asocial individual, and in that respect it divides us into anomic particles and conquers us as effectively as any political tyranny. It returns us to high school, where popularity is the only standard of success, where taunts are the dominant style of amusement, and where self-absorption has yet to ripen into self-awareness.”

Lee Siegel at Comment is Free on why the internet isn’t an unqualified good

“Morgan has been making her own world as if the rest of the world didn’t exist,” he added. “She’s designing her own universe, her own lifestyle, with remarkable consistency. Somehow it all works together when people are in that environment.”

From In Her Own World in the New York Times

Ms. Puett’s vision reaches even into the refrigerator, which she has transformed into a strange, constantly shifting vignette of fresh food, old textiles and unusual scientific vials. “I buy beautiful and grotesque foods and try to put them in a new context,” she said. A broccoli floret sits on an antique candlestick, a pomegranate and brown eggs in a glass vase, carrots in ceramic pots. All liquids are decanted into glass measuring vessels.

Don’t be surprised if you come round and find my fridge looks like this