Cost
$200 USDTime(s)
April 21 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM local time
April 22 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM local time
(various groups around the globe on 21st or 22nd depending on their location/timezone)
April 23 at 7:00 AM EDT
Location
Virtual
Description
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/.
Sign in now to access workshop resources.
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 (Cambridge, MA, US) is an information architect, UX strategy, and human-centered design practitioner with an orientation toward responsible, ethical, and systemic design. With extensive experience practicing IA in complex environments including finance, higher education, and state government, Dan recently joined Last Call Media (https://lastcallmedia.com/) to lead its information architecture competency area. In the IA community, Dan has organized World IA Day Boston, co-organized the IA Academics & Practitioners Roundtable, contributed a chapter to the recent book Advances in Information Architecture, and held multiple presenter and volunteer roles at the IA Summit/IA Conference.