User Profile: Victor Lombardi
Victor Lombardi is a senior experience lead and information architect at Razorfish, the international digital solutions provider, where he manages client project design teams and practices information architecture, interaction design, and usability testing, for clients including Guardian Insurance, Sharp Electronics, J.P. Morgan, Instinet, Indigo Books, Bikeshop.com, Tolerance.org, and Ford Motor Company. “Victor has the most in-depth understanding of developments in the information architecture field of anyone at Razorfish,” says his boss, Karen McGrane, senior director of information architecture, Razorfish North America.  Lombardi’s training includes an undergraduate degree in journalism and mass media from Rutgers and a master’s degree in music technology from NYU. He teaches information architecture at the prestigious Parsons School of Design at New School University in New York. His course prepares students to adopt a human-centered design process; understand how information architecture becomes the supporting structure joining design, technology, and business goals; and develop the ability to document information architecture ideas.
|
Information architect Victor Lombardi crafts commercial Web sites for Razorfish clients, but personal website, Noise Between Stations, is devoted to the philosophical issues of web design, usability, and the experience of information mediated by technology. Lombardi emphasizes the notion of information architecture as a craft, as in this excerpt from his weblog: “I think of craft as the use of skill and experience to produce something of practical and esthetic value. The exploding Web has given us many tools to express our thoughts, creating a great, collective outpouring of ideas. Wonderful, important ideas, but they don’t amount to much if they don't contribute to better living. “I see a great imbalance, and really this makes sense to me, because the ideas are fascinating and fun to ponder and design is difficult work that reveals our shortcomings. Showing our work to others can cause anxiety and receiving criticism can feel worse. But we must let our love of the craft imbue itself in our efforts and let our worries fall away. “To bring all these momentous design ideas to fruition we must practice them. Better designs will not simply poke their noses through the soil this Spring. Practice requires generation and iteration and mistakes. The mistakes, as much as the resulting artifacts, will teach us and others.”
Lombardi is an enthusiastic Tinderbox fan. “I’m putting everything in it,” he says. “I organize information for a living, and I’m interested in experimenting with the many ways I can organize the things I have with Tinderbox. I’ve taken notes over the years, and I have hundreds of them. Keeping them in chronological order isn’t that useful. I’d love to go through and categorize by topic instead of just by time. Tinderbox is so much more flexible than a file system, than the way we’ve been storing our documents all these years. It just makes a lot more sense.”
|
Eastgate Systems Inc.,