Sessions

Over the past several years it’s become increasingly clear that the IA community needs to move beyond being a practice and figure out how to become a discipline.

To explore what this entails, and begin to craft a way forward, we’ve convened a series of Academics’ and Practitioners’ roundtables at IA Summits past. In the 6th year of this community event we will focus on the topic of Ethics.

As much as we would wish it, Information, and by extension, information architecture, is not neutral. IA is a channel and provides a lens through which people view information or an experience. All design, and therefore all of information architecture, involves value choices.

We have been considering this at the micro level, finding ways to do good in specific interactions, but what about as an overall profession? Do we, as practitioners, surrender our moral authority to someone else? Or do we follow a code? If we follow a code, what is it? Is it shared among our collective IA community?

We need a discussion around ethics that we can:

• leverage for discussion with our business partners
• engage with society
• acknowledging the change in scope that our practice has been going through (moving beyond just web sites to broader practices)

This day-long session will offer a set of lightning talks focused on ethics, some active scenarios for participants to play out, then group discussion to better understand what the information architecture community needs at a macro level to guide professional behavior and activities.