Description
“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 academics and practitioners 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 two day Roundtable is open to anyone with an interest in IA and continues the Roundtable’s tradition of gathering practitioners, researchers, and educators 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 group make-a-thons aimed at developing artifacts capturing or summarizing the outputs of Day 1, and concludes with group presentations of their outputs.
To learn more about the Information Architecture Roundtable and the themes for the previous eight roundtables, visit https://www.iaroundtable.org/.
About the speakers
An architect, teacher, and researcher, Andrea Resmini is the author of Pervasive Information Architecture and Reframing Information Architecture, and a two-times past president of the Information Architecture Institute. He co-founded the Journal of Information Architecture, Architecta, the Italian Society for Information Architecture, the Academic / Practitioner Roundtable, and World IA Day.
Andrea is a compulsive reader of WWII submarine warfare trivia, Tolkien drafts, and Jack the Ripper case studies. He is also one of the regular hosts of Acoustic Jam Night!
Sarah Rice is an information architect with over two decades of strategy and consulting experience, designing and executing excellent user experiences for companies such as Google, Sony, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, eBay, Princess Cruises and Yahoo!
She has a master’s degree in Information Science and consults with a number of user experience firms under Seneb Consulting. She served on the Board of Directors of the Information Architecture Institute, is active in the American Society for Information Science and Technology’s Information Architecture Summit. She also speaks regularly at industry conferences.
Dan Zollman is an information architect and UX strategist living in Boston, MA. His interests in responsible, ethical, and systemic design have evolved through his experiences practicing IA and UX in complex organizations including Vanguard, Tufts University, and Massachusetts Digital Service. Dan is an organizer of the IA Roundtable (iaroundtable.org) at the IA Conference; World IA Day Boston; and an international online community for ethics in design and technology (ethicsofdesign.org), which was founded at the IA Summit in 2017.
Stacy Surla has created and led workshops for government, industry, and the UX community for over 20 years. Drawing on her experiences as a performance artist, UX practitioner, and teacher, Stacy helps people transform meetings into more engaging and effective ways to get work done. Recent workshops include a bootcamp-style training for Lean UX delivery managers, a team-driven workshop for integrating UX into Agile, co-planning the annual IA Academic and Practitioners Roundtable, and a workshop on designing and facilitating workshops. As with all her work, she integrates design thinking, Lean UX, and user-centered methods to put people at the heart of each effort. Stacy is Vice President of MetaMetrics Inc., an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland iSchool, and was a twice-elected officer of the Information Architecture Institute.