Abby Covert: Democratizing Information Architecture – Episode 157

Abby Covert As the digital practices have grown and evolved over the past few decades, the job title "information architect" has become less common. That doesn't necessarily mean that the work isn't being done, but IA is now often in the province of a designer, content strategist, or other practitioner. Abby Covert sees this situation as both a sign of progress and as an opportunity to more deliberately democratize the craft of information architecture. We talked about: her current work on democratizing information architecture her take on the relationship between information architecture and content strategy how the apparent current dearth of IA attention may actually be a sign of success how IA work is getting done, regardless of whether practitioners label their work as IA the importance of incentives and incentive structures the origins of her democratization work her shift from teaching corporations about information architecture to focusing on teaching individuals the hazards of bringing your IA ego into an organization when to step back from democratized practice and engage a true IA expert the crucial role of education in democratization opportunities as an IA to influence the incentives in an organization her stealth approach to teaching metadata Abby's bio Abby Covert is an information architect, writer and community organizer with two decades of experience helping people make sense of messes. Abby has written two popular books, How to Make Sense of Any Mess and Stuck? Diagrams Help. She currently spends her time making things that help you to make the unclear, clear, many of which she makes available for free on her website www.abbycovert.com or at accessible price points in her popular Etsy shop AbbytheIA. In 2022 she started The Sensemakers Club where she brings together sensemakers from different walks of life to learn from one another. Abby currently lives and writes from Melbourne, Florida where her most important job title is ‘Mama’. Connect with Abby online AbbyCovert.com The Practitioner's Guide to How to Make Sense of Any Mess The Teacher's Guide to How to Make Sense of Any Mess Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMNfdoRw950 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 157. The field of information architecture has seen a lot of change over the past 25 years. One aspect of this evolution has been a reduced prevalence of the role of "information architect." IA work is still being done, but often by folks who don't have the term in their job description. Abby Covert sees this situation as both a sign of progress and as an opportunity to more deliberately democratize the craft of information architecture. Interview transcript Larry: Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 157 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am super delighted today to have with us Abby Covert. Abby is a well-known information architect, who focuses these days on writing and teaching. Welcome Abby. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Abby: Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me. Let's see. These days, I'm really focusing on democratizing information architecture. I really want to bring the information architecture lessons I've learned over the last 20 years to as many people in as many industries as possible. So I've been focusing for the last few years on projects that really work on that. Abby: The first was I expanded my authorship into my second book, which is about diagramming. It's called Stuck? Diagrams Help. And then around the same time, I also launched something called The Sensemakers Club, which is a place for people to learn how to make more sense. So I'm working on expanding that into a series of community events. We have some monthly things, some quarterly things. And then of course our annual celebration Makesensemess,...