IAC20 Conference Sessions

Heuristic search is a discipline under the larger umbrella in AI. Heuristic search algorithms find solutions to a variety of problems, including pathfinding, logistics, and scheduling. Most of the problems heuristic search is applied to are hard in the formal sense. This forces us to find new techniques to tackle larger problems and new domains — we can’t simply wait for improved hardware to solve it for us. When developing…

An organization is its language. Large organisations will often create a common language to work more efficiently together, but such a common language can limit the organisation’s future vision. An organisation’s ability to change, evolve and innovate depends on its ability to change its language. Starting from this provocative idea (from Pangaro and Dubberly), this talk explores what could be such a language for transition. First, I will demonstrate how…

As designers and researchers, we spend much of our time facilitating conversations – articulating design decisions, getting alignment from stakeholders, interviewing customers, and any number of other activities centered around communicating with people and actually hearing them. It comes as no surprise that to become good at this, you must actually practice the art of facilitating and listening. But how do you practice something so ambiguous and unpredictable? Like jazz,…

We worry a lot about getting designs wrong for our users. The downsides, well, can be pretty dire. But what if you get it right for them? What are the outcomes downstream? What if your goal was to only make new mistakes? What if you could anticipate the ripple effects of getting the design right for your core user to see what happens when your design goes out into the…

How people make sense of complex physical spaces, like cities, can tell us a lot about how they might make sense of the complex digital spaces we design. In this talk I’ll share some lessons from Kevin Lynch, an urban planner who wrote “The Image of the City”, that are applicable to our work designing digital products, services, and systems. Lynch developed the idea of “mental maps” and even coined…

Tabular information typically does not work with mobile platforms, so this data (if it can be) should be presented in a more mobile friendly format. This presentation will outline the usefulness of “exploding” a typical database of tabular information into “bitesize cards” of information that have the same filter and sort options of a typical table of data. We will outline the design challenges, the successes, and the failures of…

Chronemics refers to how time can be viewed as system of meaning making. This might sound complicated but is actually quite straightforward. Just like we can use words or colours to communicate, we can also use time(ing) to express things and make sense of the world around us. Timetables are a perfect example of this, but time and timing can also be meaningful in other ways: how long we have…

Object models aren’t just for developers! They are also a simple and powerful BUSINESS TOOL for describing and designing complex systems in a way the whole organization–from developers to CEOs—can view together and understand. Some modeling efforts assume years of work with an organization, but with object models a small team can do key high-level modeling in a week, and verify it with leadership in an afternoon! What’s different about…

We are often too busy to step back and take a look at our profession beyond the tasks and skills we need to perfect. Let’s head on a journey to discover what are the bits and pieces that make up IA and UX. To get there, we will go meta: Use information architecture…to create an information architecture…of information architecture. How far down the rabbit hole can we go? What will…

In a world…where only 65% of B2B content ever gets used, nerdy heroes and heroines are hard at work building ecosystems of content. Their weapon? Metadata strategy. In this session, you’ll learn how to: – Conduct a content audit without going insane or spending the rest of your life in a spreadsheet. – Build a tagging structure that puts your users and their challenges first — while also making your…