Session type: 45 minute talk

A student-hosted community conversation about our hopes, fears, and ideals around diversity, equity, and inclusivity on the teams and in the workplaces where UX design and research get done in our world today.

On Saturday afternoon, please join 5 graduate students from the University of Michigan School of Information in a structured conversation about prospects for career development, personal growth, and social justice in the global community of IA practice as budgets tighten, armed conflicts rage, interest rates rise, and waves of layoffs complicate the futures we-all want to picture together in the middle of the 2nd decade of the 21st century. What's possible to do together begins with what's possible to say with and among ourselves, so please come to the session and lend your voice to the discussion.

Being “the first” to do something can come with a lot of reward. It’s the classic superhero tale that proves the “impossible” possible. At the same time, it’s not always happily ever after. What happens after you’ve reached your goal or after you’ve slayed the dragons of adversity and won the war?

This inspirational session provides a non traditional approach to product design. Looking through the lens of adversity through personal narrative case studies, we will explore, unpack and redefine resilience in the tech industry. In addition, we will analyze those moments of resilience can shape product design and user experiences. In (I’m)possible, we will offer tactical recommendations on how to evaluate adversity to design more holistic and effective products. Finally we’ll open the floor for discussion around how this insight can help you in your own personal and professional growth to think as a more holistic designer.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is dramatically changing—reshaping—the human and design landscape of computers, the internet, and society. It is increasingly used in engines behind many decision-making tools and information resources, as well as in machines (vehicles, drones, robots, etc.).

AI uses information models, structured data/content, real-world contextual sensor data, and formalized instructions to shape the machine's "understanding” of information spaces and tasks. These elements are familiar to anyone working in the field of IA and UX. But the focus is changing: We now need methods to shape software that learns dynamically.

This talk presents an emerging framework to support AI design, helping us think about language, models, methods, and how we communicate with developers. The goal is to encourage a conversation within the IA community about how our involvement in creating responsible and engaging AI tools will change and shape the IA community over the coming years.

Governance can help people to manage change. It allows us to both respond to changes in our environment and to direct changes in the behaviors of our organization.

This session will explore the architectural elements of governance and identify the dynamics of how people interact with various parameters. We'll explore the inter-relationships between various nodes: actors, groups, roles, rules, incentives, access, availability, and permissions.

The talk will draw on the speaker's experience in enterprise content governance and working with product designers to develop features that support such governance. The methods introduced will be widely applicable to anyone defining the information architecture of large-scale systems, including service design and citizen sovereignty.

Experience debt never sleeps. As our digital ecosystems grow ever more complex, the ensuing content sprawl pays IAs no favors. And yet, data-driven designs—from notifications to recommendations—can start small, and even stay small, while delivering powerful results.

This talk will highlight:

• A personalization model showing the base parameters (ingredients) required of every automated or personalized interaction (recipe)
• The zone-targeting method of isolating small "precincts” of your digital experience's surface area to habituate users to dynamic content
• Fast-track taxonomy work with a crosswalk to identify the art of the possible, including ways to express content more dynamically by harmonizing terms across vocabularies and systems

Specific project examples that demonstrate less is more, literally, when it comes to expediting journey progression and tying content performance to business revenue