About the Summit

The IA Summit is the premier gathering place for those responsible for the structural design of shared information environments; those who dabble or dive into the art and science of organizing and labeling information to support usability and findability; and anyone interested in the community of practice that brings principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

The Summit is most definitely a community conference. It is sponsored & run by ASIS&T and is planned by a hard-working group of volunteers from IA and like disciplines. The conference program is heavily influenced by feedback from the previous year’s summit and blind peer reviews of submissions (this year 50 reviewers completed over 1000 reviews on 180 submissions!)

2008 Theme: Experiencing Information

The 2008 theme of “Experiencing Information” shifts the focus back to users. A user experience exists only to allow people to “do things” (in the broadest sense ... buying books, sharing photos with friends, looking something up on wikipedia, etc).

What dimensions of information do users typically experience while “doing things”, and how can we design information environments that best support these users and activities? Such dimensions might include:

• Information quantity and the experience of choice (e.g. Barry Schwartz – The Paradox of Choice);
• The timing of information encounters and information use (e.g. Jared Spool – “seducible moments”);
• The subconscious consumption of information (e.g. BJ Fogg – Persuasive Technology);
• Rapid or intuitive processing of information (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell – Blink);
• The social and participatory aspects of information and information communities (e.g. David Weinberger’s work);
• The wide range of information media: the Web, virtual worlds, ubiquitous computing, mobile technology, physical spaces (e.g. Joshua Prince-Ramus’ and Michael Bierut’s work)

Attendee feedback about the summit

The 2007 IA Summit attracted 560 attendees with varying degrees of IA experience and from many related fields. Attendees of the summit are passionate about information architecture and user experience and many are actively involved in the community and the summit itself – over 230 of the attendees provided feedback about the event with 93% indicating that they would attend the summit again and 95% indicating they would recommend the summit to a colleague.

What people have said about the summit

• "The vibrant sense of community at the IA Summit is its greatest strength." - Pabini Gabriel-Petit, Conference Review: IA Summit 2007
• "For me, attending my third IA Summit, it still feels like a wondrous experience." - Laurie Lamar, IA Summit 2006: Gathering of the Tribe
• "...you don’t dare snooze, yet you can’t help join hallway conversations, can’t help writing down how a speaker’s talk will affect your work, and you don’t dare sleep for fear of missing the concept that will shape your year." - Christina Wodtke, Learning, Doing, Selling: 2006 IA Summit Wrapup