Christina;

This is nice. The timeline alone is a contribution to our field — I thank you for the delightful experience of reading your narrative and reliving the memories it brought up for me of a most formative phase in my professional life.

Regarding the IA/UX tension that has raged fierce and personal I believe you imply, but I will make explicit, the idea this is the a result of confusing a dialectic for a difference.

At the end of the day, the job is about helping humans do the pattern recognition thing that they do. Whether your personal interest is organizing data into structures or tools for manipulating those structures the thing you will argue, debate and finally coalesce around is that structure.

As such, I believe that the ‘new information architecture’ that you call for is an understanding that the fundamental shared assumption is the data model: the set of key:value pairs that define state for any interactive experience.

The model embodies the dialectic. IA describes the work to name it; UX, the work to manipulate it.