Pre-Conference Workshop – Page 7 – IAC: Information Architecture Conference

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2021 IA Conference

April 19, 2021

Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced

Roundtable framing: The 9th Academics & Practitioners Roundtable welcomes information architecture practitioners and academics of all levels of experience as well as anyone from IA-adjacent or IA-overlapping fields. The Roundtable’s unique value proposition lies in its diversity of its participants and how it drives discussions of how information architecture continues to evolve as a discipline and profession.

2021 Theme: The Value of IA.

Information architecture has evolved to think broadly about designing information ecosystems. IAs play a vast and pervasive role in daily life, social structure, and the organization of economic and political power. And yet we still need, and struggle to be able to explain what information architecture is and what its value is.

If IA practitioners and academics aim to demonstrate the value of their work and improve the wellbeing of human beings surrounded by and immersed in information systems, there are critical questions they must answer:

What is the value of IA in society, present and future? Specifically, what is the value of IA as a discipline?
What narratives do we share in our IA communities about our origins, purpose, and value? What are the limitations of those narratives?
How can we redirect conversations about economic value or "return on investment" (ROI) toward a broader, more meaningful range of human values?
What concepts or vocabulary can we use in order to explain the value of information architecture to our colleagues, clients, and communities?

This workshop sets out to address these questions and to clarify the ‘Value of IA’. The multi-day Roundtable is open to anyone with an interest in IA and continues the Roundtable’s tradition of gathering practitioners, researchers, and educators of all levels of expertise and from around the world to discuss critical aspects of our discipline and share what is discussed with the broader IA community.

Day 1 consists of framing presentations, a series of lightning talks, group activities and discussion. Day 2 consists of asynchronous group make-a-thons aimed at developing artifacts capturing, summarizing, or developing the outputs of Day 1. Day 3 concludes with group presentations of their outputs and synthesis.

To learn more about the Information Architecture Roundtable and the themes for the previous eight roundtables, visit https://www.iaroundtable.org/.

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2019 IA Conference

March 13, 2019

More of our lives are happening online every day. We interact and transact through digital systems on a growing variety of devices. More understandable and coherent systems = better experiences. As a result, information architecture (IA) is more important than ever.

In this fast-paced workshop, you will learn the basic concepts and practices that lead to the creation and management of effective information architectures.

Sessions

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2019 IA Conference

March 20, 2019

Historically, design practices have focused on process, methods, and craft. But this limits design’s potential—design leaders can provide more value to their organizations by implementing robust DesignOps. In Design Operations Essentials, Dave Malouf will introduce participants to the three lenses of DesignOps, and how each one helps an organization increase the value it gets from its design practice. Participants will learn frameworks from strategic thinking and service design so they can start developing their own operational models for their design practices.

Who this is for

If you are in the early stages of implementing design operations practice in your organizations, this workshop will teach you both a broad and flexible definition of design operations as well as tangible activities for how to start.

What you’ll learn

How to create a plan and execute DesignOps for managing teams—from recruitment through promotion and even off-boarding
How to develop assessment criteria to evaluate and select current software for supporting design operations
How to develop methods for optimizing workflows
How to integrate DesignOps roles and responsibilities into the wider design organization

Dave Malouf

Sessions

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2019 IA Conference

March 28, 2019

Increasingly, our work is about more than just one app or website; we’re challenged with tackling whole ecologies of digital, physical, and blended interactions. Meanwhile, technology is making it harder every day to achieve coherence and clarity from touchpoint to touchpoint. It turns out, the best way to design for everything everywhere is to start with the fundamentals: how do humans really perceive and take action in their environment?

The Understanding Context workshop takes you deep into new ways of seeing the building blocks of human experience, with ideas and methods that will change the way you think about designing for humans. Spend a day going deep into making sense of making sense, by exploring and modeling the experiences around you.

In this workshop, you will:

Learn basic and advanced concepts about how humans interact with physical, semantic, and digital information.
Get on your feet and explore the real world around the conference venue, gathering data for analysis.
Collaborate in teams to analyze and model the contexts you encounter, and devise ways to make them better.
Get new ideas about how to make things make more sense, whether you’re doing web design, service design, or interaction design.

This workshop is suitable for practitioners at any point in their careers. Just bring a desire to explore and an open mind!

Sessions

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2019 IA Conference

March 13, 2019

ImprovUX is a series of fun and INTERACTIVE talks and workshops that apply the skills of Improvisation (listening, acceptance, support, collaboration, letting go of judgment, etc.) to the world of User Experience.

User Experience relies on gathering qualitative data from our potential users through interviews, surveys, and other methods. In order to connect with users, we need to build trust and empathy as quickly and strongly as possible.

During the interview process we need to be hyper-aware of all the information being provided to us by the users. For us, this means putting our own preconceptions and biases in the backseat and focusing on being in the present moment in order to collect all of the tiny bits of information, both verbal and nonverbal, which lead to a deeper understanding of the users and what they’re communicating.

Michael Gorgone