Session type: Half Day Workshop (Afternoon)

Join Dan Klyn for this half-day workshop, which is designed to equip participants with the BASIC framework for looking at the architectures of complex systems.  

Attendees will get out of the conference hotel and into the streets of downtown New Orleans in a facilitated exploration of the myriad ways that features in the built environment are configured by people to store, distribute, and reify different kinds of information.

No special knowledge or equipment is required to participate, and the walking route for each of the two half-days is exactly the same.  The pace of the walk will be very slow, and the distance we’ll cover adds up to just under 1 mile. 

• The DECORATED SHEDS session (Wednesday, March 29th in the PM) is focused on an analysis of Natchez Street, which connects the conference hotel to the Piazza.

Agenda

Klyn and up to 50 attendees will briefly muster in the lobby of the Intercontinental for a review of the Resources and Script for the workshop before sallying forth into the city to learn about the BASICs of seeing architecture through a close “reading” and analysis of Natchez Street, which connects the conference hotel to the Piazza.

• Quick intro to Klyn’s BASIC Framework
• Walk to Piazza di’ Italia
• Walk back to the Intercontinental
• Debrief and Q&A

No longer accepting registrations

as of March 5, 2023

We all face difficult conversations at work – with our bosses, with clients, with stakeholders, and with colleagues. Often these can feel frustrating or deflating.

‘We don’t think your team has a strategic role.’
‘I don’t want to work with your team.’
‘Thanks but I’m going to do it my own way.’
‘We don’t have time to try something new.’
‘We’ve got more important priorities than that.’

This workshop will give you practical tools to help you prepare thoughtfully, and to handle conversations in the moment.

There’ll be lots of practice to get you comfortable with your most uncomfortable situations.

YOU’LL LEARN

• What makes a ‘difficult conversation’?
• Why some difficult conversations leave you feeling deflated
• Preparing for difficult conversations
• Opening the difficult conversation
• How to use summaries to create space to think
• How to end with positive purpose

Heard about Card Sorting and Tree Testing but not sure where to start? Ready for some hands-on fun with these techniques? This workshop explores the who, what, when, where, why, and how of Card Sorting and Tree Testing. Great for novices and for intermediate practitioners looking to refine this skillset.

Information architecture and UX are practiced as forms of design—the design of products, systems, and desired futures to satisfy human needs and values.

In practice, we use models of “”the design process” that are over 20 years old, if not a half century old. Our field is rapidly changing, and we know that the Double Diamond doesn’t tell the full story of how we work. Are existing models of the design process still applicable to information architecture today? Do we need new process models to help us design changeable and resilient structures for a complex, information-driven society?

For both new and advanced practitioners, this half-day session is both a workshop and a collaborative roundtable where we’ll explore these questions as a group.

We’ll use Hugh Dubberly’s compendium of design process models, and Design Methods by John Chris Jones, as source materials to compare, contrast, and critique historical models of “”the design process”. We’ll unpack core themes and theories that explain why and how design “”works”; discuss personal challenges/tensions we experience in putting a design process into practice; and come away with concrete ideas on how to improve our / our teams’ approach to design. Finally, we’ll look at examples of contemporary, more radical models of design that confront challenges such as system complexity, power dynamics, and ethical responsibility.

This workshop is an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of design methodologies, hear insights from peers who experience similar challenges in other organizations, and contribute to a conversation about the evolution of IA and UX practice.

Extended Reality (VR, AR, MR, collectively XR) promises to change, or possibly replace, the world around us, immersing us in a different “”here and now”, be it a company-controlled Metaverse, a remote location on Earth, a fictional world, or a different, augmented version of our home or of familiar places such as our workplace or our favorite supermarket.

But XR “elsewheres” are unique blends of digital and physical that introduce novel challenges and opportunities for designers, and that require knowledge and skills traditionally not associated with digital design practices. What happens when information is not conveniently bound to the 2D space of a screen but is instead disseminated and embedded into a 3D space? What if information IS what constitutes the 3D space? Where should we start?

This learn-by-doing workshop will teach attendees the basics of designing for XR environments: it first introduces the basic differences between traditional IA / UX practice and IA / UX for XR; it anchors those differences to embodiment, sense of presence, and sensory and proprioceptive input; it describes how some of the issues we have with XR design are old issues we have solved, contextually, in other mediums, such as film or video games; it provides an initial set of best practices that can be applied to the high-level design of XR environments; it presents a few techniques to low-fi prototype XR solutions using pen, paper, and a smartphone.

Pointers and references to in-depth exploration of the XR design space will be provided during the workshop.