Sessions

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/.