IAC21 Sessions

April 30, 2021

4:00 PM to 5:00 PM CT

Certain, Grown, Model – defining elderhood in Design

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 neither is management.

But what is next?

This presentation focuses on defining and exploring concept of being an Elder in Design, using the lenses of Certain, Grown and Model.

Additional sessions

The Live Q&A for this talk will begin as soon as the livestream ends.  In the event the livestream runs over, the Live Q&A and any follow-up conversation will continue inon the Discord channel for this talk.

April 30, 2021

3:00 PM to 3:30 PM CT

Creating an Information Architecture for a Complex Range of User Groups

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 of accessibility and exclusionary concerns.

Public health and higher education in particular, are two of the industries that were forced with accelerating their digital experiences. They have had to adapt to the reality that users at all stages of the customer journey will be relying on this digital experience.

In this session we’ll explore how public health and higher education have had to adapt. We’ll discuss case studies conducted by our team where we applied service design methods to assess and synthesize the needs of a representative audience. Through targeted recruitment and rapid prototype testing we developed an information architecture model for a complex range of user groups that helped to bring down barriers.

As more organizations rely on their digital services, information architects will be asked to take on more prominent roles in enhancing the customer experience. This session will help you prepare for that shift.

Additional sessions

The Live Q&A for this talk will begin as soon as the livestream ends.  In the event the livestream runs over, the Live Q&A and any follow-up conversation will continue inon the Discord channel for this talk.

April 29, 2021

2:00 PM to 2:30 PM CT

Deconstructing Online Hate for Understanding with the Anti Defamation League (ADL)

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.


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Additional sessions

The Live Q&A for this talk will begin as soon as the livestream ends.  In the event the livestream runs over, the Live Q&A and any follow-up conversation will continue inon the Discord channel for this talk.

April 29, 2021

1:00 PM to 2:00 PM CT

Designing for Trust: Our Opportunity, Our Responsibility

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 people and renew their sense of trust. Drawing examples from GOV.UK, America’s Test Kitchen, the NHS, Crutchfield, Zoom, and others, gain a bold vision for the future and a three-part framework of voice, volume, and vulnerability to nurture user confidence, renew trust in your organization—and even strengthen society itself.

Additional sessions

The Live Q&A for this talk will begin as soon as the livestream ends.  In the event the livestream runs over, the Live Q&A and any follow-up conversation will continue inon the Discord channel for this talk.

April 29, 2021

2:30 PM to 2:45 PM CT

Disinformation: How Wikipedia is contributing to historical revisionism in Japan

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 “History of Japan,” a best selling book by Naoki Hyakuta, a nationalist writer known for denying Japanese war crimes during WWII.

A similar trend exists in other languages, such as Croatian Wikipedia. It has received attention from international media for promoting a fascist worldview and historical revisionism.

Studying the accuracy of Wikipedia is difficult, and the findings are mixed. And what’s often missed is the fact that the level of reliability may be different depending on the language. Non-English Wikipedia communities such as a Japanese and Croatian tend to be much more isolated and likely have inherent bias on certain topics.

Users visit Wikipedia pages to be informed about certain topics. When they see so much biased content without knowing it, it’s not meeting the needs of the users. I’ve tried to inform Wikipedia about this problem and suggested a design change, but after a month of trying I couldn’t even talk to the right person.

The focus of this talk is the process of creating a global website such as Wikipedia in the first place. English speaking designers and developers may not realize the implications of how their product gets used in other countries with different languages and cultural backgrounds. When creating a product, we must be aware of cultural bias that exists in the nations and communities where the product is used.


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April 28, 2021

2:30 PM to 2:45 PM CT

Emerging IA and Remote Learning in Higher Education

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.

Additional sessions

The Live Q&A for this talk will begin as soon as the livestream ends.  In the event the livestream runs over, the Live Q&A and any follow-up conversation will continue inon the Discord channel for this talk.

April 30, 2021

11:00 AM to 12:00 PM CT

How IAs Can Shape the Future of Human-AI Collaboration

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 humans that fosters positive personal, societal, and environmental outcomes. This collaboration places Information Architects in a central role for developing valuable AI capabilities.

In this talk we’ll introduce three scenarios as an approachable entry point to explore the relationship between AI systems and the people engaged with them. The scenarios demonstrate that AI systems and their human counterparts both bring unique strengths and weaknesses to the relationship, and as they are both (somewhat) autonomous entities, their interactions require coordination and negotiation. With these scenarios as introduction, we will draw on our range of experiences to outline a framework that IAs can take away to help them think about the key issues in design for AI systems. The framework encompasses items that are common across various types of design for AI, as well as items that are unique to particular tools, projects and contexts.

Additional sessions

The Live Q&A for this talk will begin as soon as the livestream ends.  In the event the livestream runs over, the Live Q&A and any follow-up conversation will continue inon the Discord channel for this talk.

April 29, 2021

3:00 PM to 4:00 PM CT

How Information Architecture Can Save the World: IA of a Pandemic Response

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 this session, I will recount how San Francisco has (so far, as of October 2020!) avoided surges of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths with the help of information architecture.

By bringing clarity and trust into the equation, IA helped save tens of thousands of lives. What more can IA do, if we allow it to flourish out in the wider world?

Additional sessions

The Live Q&A for this talk will begin as soon as the livestream ends.  In the event the livestream runs over, the Live Q&A and any follow-up conversation will continue inon the Discord channel for this talk.

April 29, 2021

11:00 AM to 12:00 PM CT

Learn to Design for an Aging Population, Cause Guess What? You’ll Be Designing for Your Own Future

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 mean workforces in the future will look very different than they do today. More folks are willing and able to work into their 70s and 80s, and due to economic realities, retirement is not an option for many. Add in declining birth rates and you can see why companies are gearing up for workforces that may include up to five generations. But few are talking about how to design for these new users who are tech-savvy, but have needs created by aging.

After years spent designing accessibility into AT&T’s, recently, I began looking at how to design for this aging population. The good news is “We’ve got this. You already have the tools you need if you apply the VIMM model of user loads and the Accessibility Guidelines published by the WC3 to your work. In this talk, we’ll walk through the requirements of an older generation of worker and how to create effective solution using these tools. You’ll discover that the designs you start creating will bring you back to the basics of what good design is all about. By designing products that are accessible to all your users, you’ll be creating work that will enable the changing workplace to be a productive and inclusive space for all – including yourself. ‘Cause let’s face it – we’re all aging, but as the old saying goes, it sure beats the alternative.

Additional sessions

The Live Q&A for this talk will begin as soon as the livestream ends.  In the event the livestream runs over, the Live Q&A and any follow-up conversation will continue inon the Discord channel for this talk.

April 30, 2021

12:00 PM to 1:00 PM CT

One is Not Enough: The Case for Separating Management and Delivery Information Architecture

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 is presented and used). In our presentation, we’ll discuss the key differences in these two forms of IA and how interaction between them enables business success.

Additional sessions

The Live Q&A for this talk will begin as soon as the livestream ends.  In the event the livestream runs over, the Live Q&A and any follow-up conversation will continue inon the Discord channel for this talk.

April 28, 2021

3:00 PM to 4:00 PM CT

Shedding Light on Dark Patterns: A Case Study on Digital Harms

You’ve been there before. You thought you could trust someone with a secret. You thought it would be safe, but found out later that they blabbed to everyone. Or maybe they didn’t share it, but the way they used it felt manipulative. You gave more than you got and it didn’t feel fair. But now that it’s out there, do you even have control anymore?

Ok. Now imagine that person was your supermarket. Or your bank. Or your boss.

As designers of digital spaces for consumer products and services, how often do we consider the relationship we have with our customers? What does they need to know about us and what do we need to know about them before we can say we are “in a relationship”?

  • Are we spying on our users? Do they know what information we are collecting about them? Or how we collect that information?
  • Are we manipulating users? How much information is really needed? Are we gathering more than we need, just because we can? Are we using it to force actions the users wouldn’t normally make?
  • Are we keeping our promises? Are we being good custodians of our user’s information? Who are we sharing it with? Do we know what they do with our user’s information?
  • Are we designing dark patterns without knowing it? Also, is the term “Dark Pattern” itself a dark pattern?

In this talk, Noreen Whysel will discuss a framework for evaluating the relationship that digital technologies have with consumers and the digital harms and dark (or anti-) patterns that, whether we know it or not, violate that relationship. You will come away with an understanding of how to determine that what you are creating is fair, secure and in the user’s control. And that your relationship will be sound, respectful and long lasting.

Additional sessions

The Live Q&A for this talk will begin as soon as the livestream ends.  In the event the livestream runs over, the Live Q&A and any follow-up conversation will continue inon the Discord channel for this talk.

April 29, 2021

4:00 PM to 5:00 PM CT

Sight & Foresight: Organizing Spatial Information for Predictive Visualization in Augmented Reality

The era of spatial computing is here. Augmented and virtual reality is more accessible to creators, designers, and end users than ever before bringing new opportunities for applications and digital experiences that enhance the world as we know it. This is especially true of mobile computing with over 75% of Android users and 94% of iOS users having a device capable of accessing augmented reality easily over the web without the need to download an app. With advanced spatial awareness capabilities like LIDAR on the most recent smartphone models, spatial computing represents a paradigm shift similar to what we saw when the original iPhone changed the way we think of mobile design and development. In this talk we’ll explore how IA and UX practitioners can get started in spatial computing through the lens of a real-world augmented reality case study.

Recently our team of designers and data engineers worked on a challenge to create an augmented reality interface for first responders, leveraging IoT sensor data to improve communications and make critical decisions faster in a disaster response. Our first step was to identify and organize the universe of data relevant to the disaster scenario, a flood emergency. Through early collaboration with our data team to organize and map the information to real world use cases, we identified an opportunity to develop a predictive model that could help first responders in the field visualize critical data in the context of the physical world and the areas of most critical risk and need.

Addressing the need to quickly make decisions and take action, we were further able to leverage augmented reality to visualize predictive models created by our data team, enabling the ability to visualize not only conditions in the present but also where the most likely areas of critical need would be in the future. This presented the opportunity to accelerate the time to proactively make critical decisions about things like road closures, business & residential notification, and deployment of personnel with the potential to operate more efficiently and most importantly safe lives.

While the project represents an early proof of concept, the importance of information architecture and collaboration early in the design process had strong benefits for helping those new to working with new technology become familiar with the opportunity for and challenges of spatial computing and immersive experiences.

To conclude, we’ll review and discuss how to apply these familiar IA and UX practices and techniques and combine them with new ones for working in 3D to a broad range of applications for augmented and virtual reality applications like education, training, immersive storytelling, and more.

Additional sessions

The Live Q&A for this talk will begin as soon as the livestream ends.  In the event the livestream runs over, the Live Q&A and any follow-up conversation will continue in the Discord channel for this talk.

April 28, 2021

1:00 PM to 2:00 PM CT

The Art and Science of Asking Questions

Everybody does it. Information architects do it. UX designers do it. Product managers do it. Even content strategists do it. They all ask questions. It’s part of the work. You’re asking users about how they accomplish tasks. You’re asking clients about business needs. You’re asking developers about technical constraints. Not a day – or hour! – goes by without you asking someone a question. I believe, to paraphrase Erika Hall, the question is the most important tool in our toolbox.

Have you ever thought about how you ask question? I mean, really thought about it? We use them all the time, and yet we don’t have much guidance on how to form them, how to tinker with them, or even how to critique them. In this talk, Dan will draw on decades of experience to reflect on the questions we use day-in and day-out to get input from users, gather domain knowledge, solicit feedback from colleagues, and run brainstorming sessions. Our questions have a purpose — the type of information they will bring into focus. They have an intent — a desired effect on the relationship between asker and answerer. And they may be tweaked and adjusted — the framing of the question itself to meet both purpose and intent. By the end, you’ll have a greater appreciation for the question, the most important tool in our toolbox.

Additional sessions

The Live Q&A for this talk will begin as soon as the livestream ends.  In the event the livestream runs over, the Live Q&A and any follow-up conversation will continue in the Discord channel for this talk.

April 29, 2021

12:00 PM to 1:00 PM CT

The Content Strategy of Civil Discourse: Turning Conflict into Collaboration

In the current political climate, it seems like we’ve all but given up on productive, respectful discourse. However, there are simple design and content strategy choices we can make that encourage collaboration over conflict, even when dealing with hot-button issues. In this thought-provoking session we’ll look at real-world examples of how the way we phrase a question or design an interaction (or even the objects in a room) can have a huge impact on the quality of conversation, and the three rules you can use to change course from a fight to a constructive exchange. You get the conversation you design for. This session will help you design a better one.

Additional sessions

The Live Q&A for this talk will begin as soon as the livestream ends.  In the event the livestream runs over, the Live Q&A and any follow-up conversation will continue inon the Discord channel for this talk.

April 28, 2021

4:00 PM to 5:00 PM CT

The Remote Leader – Distant but Not Removed

If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that the way we think about, well… everything has to change, including the way we think about work and leadership.

In this session, we will explore the differences between remote and in-person leadership, challenges and opportunities created by physical distance, and how to prevent it from also becoming emotional and intellectual distance.

We start from a set of questions we’ve asked ourselves both in the past and more recently:

  • How do you create and maintain connection and trust when you cannot look someone in the eye or walk by their desk?
  • How do you oversee work, advice, mentor and help people grow at a distance?
  • How does a team that can’t get together, stay together?
  • What kind of additional or different support does your team (and you) need?
  • And more…

Additional sessions

The Live Q&A for this talk will begin as soon as the livestream ends.  In the event the livestream runs over, the Live Q&A and any follow-up conversation will continue in the Discord channel for this talk.

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