Bram Wessel (He/Him) is an information architect, husband, and father. His experiences as a parent of a gender-transitioning, neuro-atypical child have reinforced his strong conviction that as we plunge headlong into the unplanned remaking of our society through the digitization of experience, we must vigilantly preserve that which makes us human. Bram has advocated for human needs and goals in his IA and UX work for a diverse array of organizations as co-founder of Factor, an information architecture and human experience consultancy.
Bram co-produced Interaction ‘19, the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) conference which was held in Seattle in February 2019. In addition to Interaction 19, Bram has spoken at or helped organize conferences such as Interaction 18, World IA Day, UX Week, ConveyUX, Seattle Interactive Conference, Taxonomy Bootcamp, Enterprise Search & Discovery, InfoCamp Seattle, and Seattle Design Festival. Bram assists with the planning of the IAC’s Academics and Practitioners Roundtable. He also takes pride in Factor’s six years sponsorship of World IA Day Seattle, support of the IAC’s scholarship program, and support of various regional UX and IA community meetups and workshops.
Bram is committed to educating the next generation of practitioners as an instructor of Information Architecture at the School of Visual Concepts, and as a guest lecturer at the University of Washington’s MCDM and MLIS programs. Bram is also a past board member of InfoCamp Seattle, the Information Architecture Institute and IxDA Seattle.
In his spare time, Bram enjoys fly-fishing, shellfish farming, and listening to his son Deck’s punk band practice.
Conference talks
- Got a Taxonomy Emergency? Call the EMT! (2018 Main Conference Talk)
- “Was Nate Silver wrong? Click here for why!” The Crisis of Modeling in an Era of Clickbait, Truthiness, and Fake Content (2017 Main Conference Talk)
- Atomizer: Microcontent and the Future of IA (2015 Main Conference Talk)
- AI for IA (and UX and Content Strategy) (2019 Pre-Conference Workshop)
- The Persistence of ‘Binary’ (2020 Main Conference Talk)