All,

Agree with most that's been said here AND....

1. I personally view IA is a separate skill to "design" (where design = graphics or experiences) because it relates to understanding users, content, and *writing*. How many graphics people do you know that can really spell (arf!) Ditto how many IAs do you know that can really make arresting visual concepts and treatments?

2. We (at our company) have split IA into 2 parts:
> understanding the audience and client (in other words, contextual and ethnographical studies plus a bit of technical and business understanding of the organisation)
> building the "thing" (in other words, design prototyping and testing)
The reason we have done this is because these tasks are not covered by other roles in our organisation. Does this make our version of IA not IA anymore???

3. The difficulty as most say here is integrating all the skills. The problem in our industry (perhaps) is that talent moves around so much and devt teams are rarely stable. Is there are crossover from direct marketing where you always have a stable partnership between the art director and the copywriter?

Just some more for the mincer...

Cheers, d