IAC21 Poster Night

Attendees will learn about how life science gateways in higher education and biology/medical field can improve communication and accessibility through incorporating and advocating for improved information architecture. The poster describes four tenets of accessibility from the WC3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, a study of current life science gateway practices and suggested improvements.

Card sorting is a very useful tool when it comes to organizing websites and finding out how your users view the information space. Unfortunately, the tool that has gobbled up all the competitors doesn’t have a government terms of service, and it’s difficult to get approval to use within a federal agency. We didn’t let that stop us.

The poster will show how we planned the study, conducted the study, and analyzed the data as well as lessons learned. It will condense and visualize a lot of the content in this blog post (https://blog-nrrd.doi.gov/card-sort/)

In our day-to-day interaction with organizing systems (digitals or otherwise), we come across different types of resource/item groups. Sometimes the meaning behind these groups is explicit, with clearly explained categories (such as “Women” and “Men” in a fashion e-commerce), but in other situations we may find resources classified in a certain way without it being so obvious (e. g. resources grouped or structured by gender, but not explicitly labelled in a gendered way).

Users of these organising systems may derive meaning from these implicit classifications, becoming not only descriptive, but also normative, perpetuating assumptions about how we should interact with the world (gender stereotypes, gender binarism, power structures, etc.).

In this poster I want to show some concrete examples to bring conversation about these situations.

TBD

The architecture of information is a forever work-in-progress and it is all-inclusive for all the functions, roles, units, locations, and languages, in the organization.

We need to understand why IA is still important, still crazy, after all these years. We need to show our teams and our clients why IA matters‚ and we do do that by ensuring a focus on IA exists in projects. We disrupt the very nature of digital design by ensuring it addresses users, context, content, and a sense of meaningful place.

Neuroscience research has shown how people read and understand. Writing material to suit the readers requires more than clear and simple language. Key words include: structure, framework, and connections. In addition, layout and design must reflect primacy, hierarchy, and predictability.

The poster I present will focus on information visualization, current research, and what further research is required in the field.

We’d like to present the Integrated Value Model (IVM, see http://basilwhite.com/ivm/), a tool for understanding and visualizing an organization’s complex relational network of data in the context of what influences it and what it influences. We’ll show examples of the model and how it can be used to improve communication, decision-making, and change management.

Our proposal, “Islands in the Sky: Scenario Planning for Uncertain Future Contexts”, is an interactive digital poster which invites attendees to explore, and try their hands at, scenario planning in the tradition of the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach. This approach invites users to explore the imagined future contexts which their plans, strategies, acts, and architectures may have to inhabit. We look not at solely what is possible, probable, desired, or expected, but at plausible futures which lie in current blindspots and which challenge assumptions about what is emerging in the situations we inhabit.

Mana’, a VUI-based music app I created with my friends Malcolm Moore & Pallavi Banerjee, for our Inclusive Design class at the University of Maryland. The app aims to make the overall music experience more accessible and enjoyable for people with visual impairment.

My poster will be called “Non-Violent UX: Research & design that enriches all people’s lives.” It takes the concepts of Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication: A Language of Life and applies them to user experience / design projects.

Learn why we applied the process of creating personas to types of open source software installations rather than people, and what we learned.

We would like to present the design story of a digital platform developed for community members and the health & social service providers of a regional United Way chapter (United Way of the Lower Eastern Shore of Maryland). Our final-year (and fully remote) Graduate project aims to improve health literacy and social service outcomes by empowering non-profit service providers and community health workers. The platform extends their reach into the community, increases communication, and eases case management and work flow burdens.

A poster showing the work I’m doing at PayPal as an information architect/content strategist. We’re moving content from an unstructured to structured state. From content being managed in code to content being managed by content professionals. From not knowing what content we have or what job it’s doing to an intelligent content framework with near-effortless tracking and measurement. From updates taking weeks to updates taking days or hours.

Stock & Flow Diagramming for Adaptive UI: Repurposing a visual tool typically used by developers and to get cross-channel stakeholder buy-in.

I want to present information on The State of the Commons in the Time of COVID.

We are presenting a high-level approach to analyze domains and business verticals and how annotation taxonomies are used to inform models on conversations between customer service agents / chatbots and consumers. The poster will illustrate the process and how the phrase taxonomies of intents are useful for machine learning and conversational AI.

The goal in building the online Timbre and Orchestration Resource (TOR) is to create an innovative, pedagogical, web-based resource that is a tool for timbre (sound-colour) and orchestration education, bringing together the knowledge and expertise of the Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) Project.

My PhD dissertation research examined basic principles of orchestration, proposing and reviewing several new taxonomic categories designed to provide further insight into the underlying fundamental processes—instrumental combinations and transformations, and the perception of timbral structures — that operate as the building blocks of orchestration.

In structuring the information architecture of the TOR, the needs of many different users must be taken into account, from young musicians to college professors, from composers of many genres to new students of music to AI researchers.

Each year, the Academics & Practitioners Roundtable (the IA Roundtable), brings together information architects (and professionals from adjacent and complementary fields) from around the world to discuss the transformation of information architecture beyond its original context of web sites.

Each year, the IA Roundtable has a theme, often building on previous themes. In 2020 we focused on values IN information architecture (the values that drive and guide our profession) and now for 2021 we focus on the value OF information architecture (value to society, present and future, and to the discipline, as well as to practitioners, clients, and customers/users).

A critical component of the IA Roundtable are make-a-thons in which attendees work together to capture the themes, concepts, discussions, determinations, and other outputs of each Roundtable. Sometimes these artifacts take the form of traditional posters. Other times, statements, board games, templates or canvases, or even books.

Whatever the output of the 2021 IA Roundtable, we commit to capturing it in a digital format consistent with the requirements for the IAC Poster Night, then sharing it out with the larger community during the Poster Night, allowing for additional insights and inputs from Poster Night attendees, expanding both the reach of the Roundtable, and the community that makes it up.