Cost
$650 USDTime(s)
Description
Join Dan Klyn and Andrea Resmini on a literal field trip through the philosophies and practices of legendary Chicago architect Louis Sullivan. We’ll activate all of our senses as we consider what Sullivan’s famous axiom “form follows function” meant at the turn of the 19th century in Chicago, and what it has come to mean today.
Taking full advantage of the host city for the 2018 Summit, we’ll visit the actual buildings that embody Sullivan’s relentlessly misunderstood axiom. Along the way, we’ll consider architectures of information that are co-present in these architectures of wood, steel, and stone and ask: what are the traces of the flow of information through these environments? In addition to the devices we carry, how does the built environment support the storage and delivery of information and meaning?
As part of asking questions such as these, we’ll get hands-on with analytical tools from the work of contemporary architects, and learn together how much or little assistance they help us with the answers we seek. We’ll end with an exploration of what David Benyon calls “blended space” and Resmini’s work with Benyon to describe the design of cross-channel ecosystems.
NOTE: As this workshop includes a walking tour of Chicago architecture, participants must be able to travel through the city for long periods in weather that may be cold, wet, and/or windy.
About the speakers
Dan Klyn teaches information architecture at the University of Michigan School of Information, is co-founder of World Information Architecture Day, past President of the Information Architecture Institute, and is a founding member of the teaching faculty at Building Beauty. In 2011 he co-founded The Understanding Group (TUG) with Bob Royce, and has worked as an information architect for 23 years.
An inveterate speaker at digital design conferences, Klyn shares his deep curiosity about the architecture of information and the role it plays in supporting human well-being in keynote presentations, workshops, and architecture walks. Klyn’s writings have appeared in the Journal of Information Architecture, the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, and in the edited volumes Reframing Information Architecture (2014) and Advances In Information Architecture ( 2021).
Klyn is currently on sabbatical, writing the biography of Richard Saul Wurman.
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!