IAC21 Conference Sessions

It is ultimately the time to talk about and bring home the truths about the tech industry. We venerate the new and young all the time – not the lessons learnt, the wisdom, methods and the approaches that have worked previously. So what happens if you are in the industry over 20 years and the focus on developing tactical solutions to digital problems isn’t what you want to do, and…

This year has accelerated the pace at which critical infrastructure has had to move to digital primary. Where these platforms had often been designed and tested for the primary user groups, they must now consider the needs of a much more representative set of audiences. Some of these audiences have mitigating issues that the IA needs to consider: a reluctance to use the platform; misinformation; or are facing a range…

This session will share a project done in collaboration with the Anti Defamation League’s Center for Technology and Society to visualize this ecosystem in a series of models and to discuss the questions we looked at, the questions we still have, the continued investigation and how we are using these models to stimulate conversations about policy, product design and moderation with industry, academia, law enforcement and civil society organizations. DQoJCQkJPGgzPkFkZGl0aW9uYWwgc2Vzc2lvbnM8L2gzPg0KCQkJCXtAYWRkaXRpb25hbF90aW1lc30NCgkJCSAg[/pod_if_field]

Cynicism is easy. Hope takes work. Trust bridges the distance between them, and it’s under attack. Our users suffer from a crisis of confidence in services, brands, interfaces—and in themselves, when they need to assess information or make decisions. Years of gaslighting cause sales cycles to slow and people to question the goods, services, and science that could benefit them. But through choices of design and content, we can empower…

The Japanese Wikipedia is the most visited language in Wikipedia after the English Wikipedia. Increasingly, it’s contributing to the rise of historical revisionism in the country. On the pages of particularly sensitive historical topics, Japanese Wikipedia tends to exclude important information inconvenient to the Japanese public and/or include inaccurate and biased information. In recent years content from Wikipedia has been used as a source in historical revisionist books, such as…

Curious about emerging IA and higher education together? Come and listen to the journey at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Get playful with our IA approaches, and hear our story to turn a learning management system into a virtual collaborative workspace.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging in every industry and as it does, members of our practice may respond with mixtures of awe, confusion, concern and inspiration. In our work, we seek to expand collaboration between the human and machine, placing the machine in a role of enabling human outcomes and understanding. While sometimes we hear people describe AI as an “emerging intelligence” it is, in truth, the emergent collaboration with…

When cities locked down as COVID-19 gripped the world, instructions about what to do were locked down themselves. Trapped in pages and pages of dense legalese public health guidance. In PDFs. Having Google trawl through it was not enough to provide understanding. As businesses began to reopen, confusion became a matter of life and death. But in public health, clarity and trust are the levers we have to wield. In…

Most of us know to design keeping accessibility in mind. But, you may not have thought much about what it means to design for a multi-generational audience. “Designing for aging” usually calls up images of medical or health-focused products, not the programs and websites used in business today. But the workforce around you is evolving at a rapid rate. Gains in longevity, advances in healthy aging, and increasingly flexible workspaces…

When structuring and organizing content, it’s tempting to develop a single end-to-end information architecture that governs everything from content creation to delivery. But how do you balance serving upstream authors and downstream consumers, especially when the latter includes several distinct groups of users, systems, and needs? The answer is to separately define multiple IAs—one for management (how content is created and stored) and one for each delivery channel (how content…