IA Roundtable: Polycrisis, Positionality, Hyperlocality, and Information Architecture

We invite you to join us in exploring a simple and profound question: how do we adapt the discipline and practice of information architecture for an evolving world? 

As Andrea Resmini said in his 2025 World IA Day Global keynote, we need information architecture to make our day-to-day experiences and our connected lives more human, meaningful, and valuable for everyone. We need IA to make artificial intelligence human-centered and planet-centered. And we need it to help us understand and solve the world’s pressing social and environmental challenges.

Recent IA Roundtables have articulated key challenges for IA as a practice and a discipline. This year we convene to delve more deeply into several of these issues. Our aim is to articulate tangible approaches and identify artifacts that we can develop to advance IA’s progress. Topics will include:

• Defining the work required to advance IA’s academic, business, and social location to a place where its authority can match our responsibility
• Exploring IA’s role in addressing wicked problems – the complexities generated by interactions across the multiple crises that characterize our present period
• Expanding IA’s potential to be locally relevant, including how teaching and practice must be adjusted to communities, and how local system information can be made to more readily inform the infosphere

Format and Outcomes

The IA Roundtable takes place literally around a table, and includes the following structures.

• Lightning talks to ground ourselves in relevant frameworks, perspectives, and experiences around the topics (we will reach out to you in advance to offer the opportunity to present a lightning talk)
• Hands-on exercises to further discussion, definition, and exploration of the topics

• Team working sessions to co-create shareable artifacts to support wider conversations
• The opportunity to develop a poster summarizing our insights and recommendations, which will be presented during the IA Conference Poster Night to widen the discussion

Who Is This For?

The people who have historically participated in the IA Roundtable include IA and UX thought leaders, teachers, and practitioners who are interested in being a part of a global project to evolve information architecture as a discipline and a practice.