I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about learning some more about code. Doing a bit of skills development.
Don’t laugh, programmers.
As I see it, there are two schools of thought.
School A: Specialisation
I’m going to hand over to Jonathan Korman again to take us throught this school of thought:
The work done, and the skills needed to do [Information Architecture and Interaction Design], differ considerably between the two. Just as few people can fully master the skills of both graphic design and IA, few people will master the skills of both IA and IxD. It serves both organizations and practitioners for people to specialize.
In this school, you need a different person with specific expertise to take on each separate task in a project. Heaven’s knows where they draw the line between IA and IxD … does the IA just hand over a sitemap perhaps? (nice work if you can get it). Jonathan would tell me that I’m mad to even think about learning how to code my own templates. Jonathan would be too busy tell me off for doing IA and IxD.
School B: Multitasking
Whilst I’m sure that School A has lots more proponents than just Jonathan, School B sure has a whole lots of cool kids enrolled. Loudest kids in class are the guys over at 37 Signals. In their book, ‘Getting Real’ they said that 37 Signals would ‘never hire an Information Architect’ because their skillset is too narrow.
Continue reading “considering code (your help needed)” →
