During the closing plenary of the IA Summit on Sunday, Jesse James Garrett said that “Information Architecture is not a profession … and neither is Interaction Design … we have and always will be User Experience Designers”. I’m paraphrasing a little from memory (the podcast isn’t out yet) – but the gist is there.
I’m a big believer in this viewpoint (and I chaired the IA Summit last year!). I believe that both IA and IxDA are disciplines or “fields” – but are inseperable enough that the “job” is User Experience Designer. This puts the emphasis on the end product rather than the tools we use to achieve it.
So … to see if I can start some kind of grass roots movement i’ve set up itsjustux.org – go there and sign the petition to show you believe too!
A More Mauvy Shade of Pinky Russet 
I am still on the fence on this. I agree that UX is the big tent but, to me, IA and IxD are substantially different professions. IA is focused on structure and wayfinding – connection to use your terminology. IxD is focused on operation and well, interaction. Though these two things are so closely related that they often blend, I do not see them as being identical. They each have a sufficiently different focus. I hope hearing the full presentation sheds more light on this issue. As of now it doesn’t sound so great to me.
I don’t think they’re different professions because that implies you can often do one without the other and in my experience that is *very* rarely the case. I do think they’re different foci, or fields, or disciplines, or whatever but opportunities to exclusively do one are VERY limited.
So you end up with a whole bunch of people who do “UX Design” – some of them calling themselves IAs, some of them calling themselves IxDAs, some calling themselves whatever.
But in actuality, probably the biggest benefit of being a “UX Designer” is that the focus is on the end experience, not on the IA/IxDA/whatever part of it. Users and Business folks don’t give a fetid dingo’s left kidney about the IA or IxDA. They care about the User Experience.
I think end-to-end user experience designers are people that have enough years of experience to be able to see things from end-to-end. I see IA, IxD, and ID as paths that can lead to becoming a UX Designer but I can’t see anyone starting their careers in that role. We still need IAs, IxDs, and IDs to do their part in the end-to-end design process AND we need people focused on UX design and strategy to shape the forest, not plant the trees.
I think people can start in UX if we teach them correctly (Jared just wrote a great post about this on the IxDA/IAI lists). To start in UX someone has to *do* each of the core disciplines (IA, IxDA, ID, Usability, Content, Business Strategy) for a while – 6-9 months each maybe in a rotational fashion.
That may be possible but it creates a UX dilettante rather than an expert. It would be like a tech lead that didn’t cut his or her teeth on some hard coding, or back end support. Would you want a recent college grad to be building UX strategy?
Actually this reminds me of the old “webmasters” from the early 1990s.
Who said the only thing UX Designers do is Strategy? UX Designers do UX Design and I think its a mistake to say that people can’t start out with that intent, hence why Kent State is broadening their focus into UX: http://iakm.kent.edu/programs/user-experience-design/