haydee
Chicago, IL:: myhaydee@hotmail.com

When people see that my undergraduate degree is in Anthropology they all wonder why I became an Information Architect and if there's any relationship between the two disciplines.

My response is that Information Architecture is one of the best practical applications of anthropology. As a cultural anthropologist, you are trained to be culturally relative i.e., to see things from the other person's point of view. You are trained to be unbiased, to see the logic in other group's ways of thinking. You look for behavior patterns.

This skill is essential to becoming a good Information Architect. By observing my users in their native environment, I learn not only what they do, but how they do it. This leads me to build better products.

Example:
In one project, I was asked to investigate why it was taking so long to transform ads from an idea into production. I casually interviewed employees, watched them at work, searched for bottlenecks, traced an ad from start to finish, and ultimately came to a startling conclusion: the marketing and production teams never spoke to one another. They only spoke if a crisis emerged. With this knowledge, we created a better process and created a new application that enabled both teams to follow the production of any ad.