IA Summit 2007

The Information Architecture Summit is a premier gathering place for information architects and for discussion about information architecture. Everyone who touches on IA is welcome to share and learn. The 2007 IA Summit attracted over 570 attendees, including beginners, experienced IAs, and people from a range of related fields.

The 2007 conference was the 8th IA Summit and was be held in Las Vegas, Nevada at Flamingo Las Vegas.

Slides are available for many presentations, and we are preparing audio at the moment.

Keynote Speaker—Joshua Prince-Ramus

Our keynote speaker was architect Joshua Prince-Ramus—a Principal at Ramus Ella Architects (REX).

The title of his presentation was "The lost art of productively losing control" - he spoke about challenges for the architecture profession and walked through recent projects, highlighting design challenges and design thinking.

Closing plenary—Rashmi Sinha

Our closing plenary was given by Rashmi Sinha. Rashmi is a designer, researcher and entrepreneur. She leads the team that created SlideShare (often described as "YouTube for Powerpoint"), and MindCanvas (think online surveys meet online games). Read more about Rashmi.

Rashmi's presentation was called "Fast, cheap & somewhat in control: 10 lessons from the design of SlideShare". She spoke about the process of designing her company's two quite different products - one following traditional user-centred approaches; one following a more flexible approach.

Theme

This year's theme was 'Enriching IA', examining three trends:

• Rich information: More and more information becomes available to users and systems alike and these days most of the information comes with metadata, built-in links to other information, and API's or micro-formats that allow for mashups. How rich is your information?
• Rich interaction: The web is moving towards a more interactive environment, and desktop apps are adapting web metaphors. How does this affect the way you design applications?
• Rich relationships: We are all already linked through information and social computing is increasing the possibilities to exchange information. Is your information a social lubricant or is it an obstacle for building relationships?