How are you curious? What does curiosity mean to you? What does curiosity have to do with information architecture?
Cu·ri·os·i·ty: the pleasure of asking, exploring, experimenting, discovering, learning, and understanding
Curiosity means to be prepared to go on a journey of which you do not know the outcome. To challenge what you – and others – think you have known so far. To change perspective and perceive other points of view.
Being curious gives us the opportunity to reach out beyond what we have been aware of so far, to create new connections and relationships, with other people, from other backgrounds, disciplines, or parts of the world.
As information architects, we develop strategies to understand what we are trying to structure. By giving information structure, we learn to understand. We do this to encourage others to explore and understand. By being curious, we recognize our own and others’ discovery strategies.
This year gives us the chance to find out how others are dealing with the restrictions we are facing due to the pandemic, to reimagine World IA Day and information architecture, and to find new ways to be curious.
If you have questions kindly reach out to newdelhi@worldiaday.org.
Program/Schedule
Introductory Session: Designing Curiousity
Welcome and introduction to WIAD 21
Computational Gastronomy: A data science approach to food
Speaker: Ganesh Bagler, Assistant Professor, IIITD
Cooking forms the core of our cultural identity other than being the basis of nutrition and health. The increasing availability of culinary data and the advent of computational methods for their scrutiny are dramatically changing the artistic outlook towards gastronomy. Starting with a seemingly simple question, ‘Why do we eat what we eat?’ data-driven research conducted in our lab has led to interesting explorations of traditional recipes, their flavor composition, and health associations. Our investigations have revealed ‘culinary fingerprints’ of regional cuisines across the world, starting with the case study of Indian cuisine. The application of data-driven strategies for investigating gastronomic data has opened up exciting avenues giving rise to an all-new field of ‘Computational Gastronomy’. This emerging interdisciplinary science asks questions of culinary origin to seek their answers via the compilation of culinary data and their analysis using methods of statistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence. Along with complementary experimental studies, these endeavors have the potential to transform the food landscape by effectively leveraging data-driven food innovations for better health and nutrition.
Choice Architecture in Interaction Design
Speaker: Asad Ali Junaid, Experience Designer, Adobe Inc.
Choice Architecture is the careful design of
environments in which people decide based on the choices available.
Research has shown that people’s decisions can be greatly influenced
by small changes in the context of how choices are presented to them.
A Choice Architect has the responsibility for organising the context
and furnishing the choices using which people make decisions. Since
Interaction designers (IXDs) are constantly creating environments with
their designs which influence the way people choose, every Interaction
Designer is a Choice Architect. A critical responsibility of Choice
Architects is to protect people’s right to choose. With relevant
examples, this talk makes a case of how Interaction Designers need to
create applications where the user feels that he is in control, where
they use ‘nudges’ to guide — not force — the users down a certain path
and in the end, design applications which are a delight to use.
Using IA to garden better
Speaker: Anshul Tewari, Founder, Youth Ki Awaaz
As an obsessive gardener with over 2000 rare succulents in the collection, how Anshul is organising information to make better decisions around complicated indoor gardening challenges.
Visual narratives to feed the curiosity
Speaker: Gurman Bhatia, Graphics Journalist, Reuters
Do I zoom in to a data point or do I give the big picture first? Do I explain first or do I let the reader interact and explore from the get go? Since scroll is the most powerful interaction on the page, how does one structure a visual story? How do all these pieces fit together to make sure the reader’s curiosity is met or at least piqued?
A data and graphics journalist tries to answer these and many more questions! You’ll walk away with a sense of what goes into structuring information for narrative visualisations in news.
