Today, information design is a chi-chi professional trade that is so rarefied it has split into a series of subdisciplines with names like “user experience design,” “library and information design” and “user interface design.”
(Cory Doctorow, “Flights of Fancy on Flexible Chips,” NYT 12/7/05)
“Chi-chi”? Oy vey.
In my experience, the User Experience Designer, the Information Designer, and the User Interface Designer are all the same person, working at different firms or agencies. I’ve been a user experience specialist, an information architect, and a design analyst, and I just keep doing the same wireframes and sitemaps and card-sorting tests.
The irony that a field whose basic mission encompasses naming and categorizing cannot decide what to call itself we shall, of course, pass over in silence.
(Cory’s piece, by the way, is an interesting take on the same custom-fabrication trend Clive has written about, focused on home-toasting computer chips. Tasty.)