New York City 2013

Continental Breakfast provided by Bloomberg

Where Did “The Architecture Part” of IA Come From? Presented by Dan Klyn

See Dan’s Presentation on Slideshare

This year we will celebrate 15 years since the publication of the seminal, “touchstone” work of Rosenfeld and Morville. Their venerable Polar Bear Book provides crucial understanding of “the information part” of users’ experiences with digital products and services. What about “the architecture part”? One particularly compelling set of answers come from a body of work developed over the course of three decades by Richard Saul Wurman, FAIA. The majority of this work pre-dates the Web and personal computers, and using a combination of photographs and authentic artifacts, @UMSI lecturer Dan Klyn unpacks 30 years of IA treasure from RSW’s Architecture of Information in 30 minutes.

IA for the Web: Original Intent

Presented by Louis Rosenfeld 

Lou Rosenfeld, co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, will regale us with stories of where the field was when the book first debuted in 1996, how things have changed since, and what might happen next.

Putting the Architecture Back Into Information Architecture

Presented by Christina Wodtke

See Christina’s Presentation on Slideshare

What can we learn from dancing buildings, giant bowler hats, and purposely obscured views? More than you’d suspect… architecture has been struggling with how buildings create human places where we can fall in love, discover the divine, and even buy clean socks for centuries. It doesn’t matter if your medium is bricks or bits, humans just don’t change that much. In this 30 minute talk, Christina Wodtke will walk you through highlights of architectural thinking from Vitruvius to Gehry, and along the way perhaps we’ll find a clue for the future of digital products.

Panel Discussion with Dan Klyn, Lou Rosenfeld and Christina Wodtke

Topic Tables & Lunch provided by Bloomberg

The State of IA Education: A Town Hall (featuring instructors and students from General Assembly, Parsons, Pratt and The School for the Visual Arts)

Although its roots may be in Library and Information Science, members of the IA community come from a diverse array of educational and professional backgrounds. While its interdisciplinary nature is one of the field’s greatest assets, it also creates significant challenges for IA education. In this Town Hall session, we will convene IA practitioners, researchers, and educators to discuss the question of how to best prepare future IA professionals. Is there a “best” path to becoming an IA? Are certain disciplinary backgrounds more or less valuable than others? Can and should formal education play a role in preparing students for IA careers? This town hall will provide an open forum to address these questions.

How Data Becomes Information

Presented by Rick Smolan and Andreas Gebhard

See Rick Smolan’s Presentation at YouTube (video from his keynote at Strata + Hadoop World in October 2012 – this is the same presentation he gave at World IA Day)

Collection of data within most technical projects is no longer a pipe dream, but instead a best practice. A core tenet of information architecture is that data must be turned into information in order to be understandable by people. This tenet applied to today’s world of data overload leaves a few big questions that we believe should be discussed:

▪ What is the process by which data is turned into information that is able to be understood and can information architects help?

▪ How is this process expected to change as data becomes more available and the collection of data across multiple channels becomes more reliable?

During this conversation we have invited someone focused in Big Data to compare notes with someone whose focus is in small data.

Real Life Information Architecture: A Panel of Unexpected Uses (Panelists List below)

• Andrew Nicklin, Director of Research and Development, NYC Department of Technology and Telecommunication (Noreen Whysel filled in for Andrew who was unable to attend). See Noreen’s presentation on Slideshare
• Clark Holmes, Analyst, Bloomberg Open Symbology – See Clark’s Presentation
• Rhonda Ranney, Instructional Designer, Insurance Industry – See Rhonda’s Presentation
• Bruce Esrig, Design for Wellness project lead, IxDA Northern NJ – See Bruce’s Presentation on Slideshare

Refreshments provided by Bloomberg