Session type: 20 minute talk

Non-information. Dark UI patterns. Misinformation. Unclear terms of use. Misuse of personal data. Our sources of information have shifted from editor-supervised to algorithm-derived, and expanded. Published in 1989 and 2001, Information Anxiety and Information Anxiety 2 by Richard Saul Wurman spoke of the deluge of "bits” and proposed solutions including the importance of a questioning and curious human perspective and the need for human control of the bits. Controlling the bits can be interpreted to mean people shaping their use of information tools, serving as editors of their experiences and taking control of algorithms through settings. Configuring tools requires understanding complex product and ecosystem models. The curiosity required to bend the bits to our world view is on constant call and the transparency needed to exert control is increasingly obscure.

Catherine D'Ignazio and Laura F. Klein wrote about the "god trick" in their book Data Feminism in 2020. The god trick is the appearance of neutrality. It comes up when I am teaching interactive information design and when someone realizes items of content they interact with and considered information are of questionable or unknown origin, and not information at all. It extends to messages and alerts that are not from who they appear to be, or that coerce. Students come to realize that they are numb to the quantity and quality of these noninformational and worse "bits” that they are exposed to. They realize that they spend their leisure time absently managing these bits – deleting spam while watching a movie after work, and that these micro interactions can leave a quiet numbing residue.

I argue that the god trick is an information architecture problem, and that we need to expand our influence to address it.

"Headless” CMS tools, in which the structure of content is decoupled from its presentation as "pages” on the front end, have seen rapid and growing adoption over the last several years. This is with good reason: decoupled approaches to content are unrivaled in their support for creating flexible, reusable omnichannel and personalization-ready content. In practice, however, many organizations struggle with adopting a "decoupled” mindset: when our familiar "page-focused” shortcuts for structuring and authoring content are gone, we tend to fill in with what we know: more pages.

In this talk I will provide an introduction to headless CMSes and identify the conceptual gap decoupling creates. I will then identify and show real-world examples of three places where information architects can use principles from the practice of taxonomy to fill these conceptual gaps and make the most of their headless CMS: between digital resources, within digital resources, and within block level content.

Explore the lessons learned from using practices and principles of Information Architecture and service design methods to develop a game that teaches service innovation. Investigate the game as a thinking and teaching tool that produces new methods of connection between people, organizational units and subject matters.

Join the journey to deconstruct the principles and methods of service innovation in order to reconstruct them in a serious game. Find out how the different aspects of service innovation was linked to the different parts of the game and game dynamics in order to develop an engaging and thought provoking game that spurred connection and collaboration among the players.

The emphasis of the workshop will be on the transition from structured and useful methods of service innovation to the various parts of the game. The audience will also be given a chance to test the various methods necessary to produce an interesting and captivating serious game based on the need for structured game play, proper imbalance and dramatic effects

The audience will also play the game (at game night) so that they can evaluate for themselves, if the objectives of the game are met.

Content strategists sometimes talk about structured content as a panacea. Good structure sets content free, we say: it helps content teams adapt to change as new channels proliferate, and it guarantees resilience by 'future-proofing' content.

But that's not how it always works in practice.

Sometimes, even getting stakeholders interested in structured content is a challenge – they can't get on top of content in a single channel, so the future we promise seems a pipedream. In other cases, clients will buy into a content modelling project, but it won't have the long-term benefits we hope for.

Angus Gordon has spent over a decade as a content strategist and advocate of structured content. In this talk, he speaks from experience about why structured content intiatives don't always go to plan, whether because of technology, people and organisations, or the content itself. And he'll suggest ways we can advocate for and practice structured content while avoiding the pitfalls.

Complex applications that support experts' specialized work with large amounts of content and data like cloud computing, user analytics, or catalogs depend on good information architecture to make them usable. Come hear an overview of the best UI patterns for handling complexity and density and how to grow them over time because, yes, that complicated thing you're managing is only going to become more so.