About
Nobody ever said, “I want to be an information architect when I grow up!”
When I was a kid I wanted to be a rock star. Or maybe a novelist. Then I wanted to swim with the dolphins. To those ends I sang a lot, wrote awful, angst-filled poetry and went to college on the ocean with a music scholarship and the dream of being a marine biologist.
After very nearly flunking calculus in my first semester and realizing that only crazy people make a living singing, I lucked into a literature class, changed my major and settled into reading and writing for the remainder of my education.
Then I had to get a job.
Figuring that journalism was a likely career choice for someone with a literature degree, I shirt-tailed into a job as a copy clerk for the St. Petersburg Times and slogged my way up to staff writer on the Obit Desk, where I consistently badgered people to get rid of this phone/fax thing and start taking advantage of email.
In 1999 I realize that the whole world was going (or had already gone) Internet and there was a significant need for content and organization on the Web. I also didn’t want to keep newspaper hours all my life. So in 2000 I jumped ship and became a content editor for a very neat company determined to create a “Yahoo-like” portal for lawers.
And then I got laid off.
But I persevered and eventually evolved an actual professional resume as a writer, editor and coordinator of online content, primarily for small, internal IT shops and non-profits. I did content inventories in excel and wireframes in Word, not having the slightest idea that there was an actual profession of folks creating these things for a living. I just did them because I realized we needed them. And in the process my love of all things Internet continued to grow by leaps and bounds and I increasingly wanted to do more and more online.
So I jumped from the safety of a non-profit and became a project manager for a small arm of a huge ISP with a vision of helping small business owners create affordable, e-commerce enabled Websites. It was one of the most exciting positions I’d had up to that point and it opened my eyes to the myriad of possible opportunities for folks with a knack for organization and the slightest amount of initiative.
And then I got laid off.
In 2004 I bullied my way into an information architect role at Resource Interactive in Columbus, Ohio. I was contracting as a content coordinator and someone said, “Hey, can you use Visio?”
Since then I’ve been immersed in marketing, advertising, strategy, design, creative and technology in ways that astound and amaze me. I’ve read as much as I can manage, attended events, worked on award winning sites, met some amazing people and have actually become the IA I always suspected I could be. Better still? I love what I do.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last four years listening to and absorbing what everybody else has to say about interaction design, IA, usability, accessibility, scalability and the social Web. This year I decided to join the discussion.