Friday, 4:00pm, Grand Salon B
For Information Architecture to stay relevant in this world of highly dynamic social websites and massive datasets, it must adopt new bodies of learning and new strategies. This panel will use scenario planning to look at four futures of IA exploring ways IA can evolve, including one dystopia in which IA does not. Four senior practitioners will outline each scenario, then invite dialog from the audience.
Scenario 1: IA focuses on the architecture of social systems, leaning on Psychology and group behavior understanding to create patterns for human interactions and collaborative content creation online.
Scenario 2: IA goes deeper into the realm of information retrieval, expanding into its search roots, evolving into recommendations design and focuses on better algorithm creation.
Scenario 3: IA focuses on new methodologies, adapting approaches as websites change. IA has been bizarrely hidebound for some time, relying on content inventories, personas, and wireframes. Isn’t there more?
Scenario 4: Little IA continues to be more and more rigid, IA’s more like craftpeople, and the IA practice is a marginalized practice used in highly rarefied situations like digital libraries.
At the end, we’ll vote on which scenario (or blend) we think is likely to come true with help from our audience.
SPEAKERS’ BIOS
Christina Wodtke
A natural born instigator, Christina has most recently been developing new products at LinkedIn. Previously, she founded Cucina Media and developed the CMS PublicSquare. Before that she founded Boxes and Arrows, an online magazine of design; founded the Institute for Information Architecture; wrote Information Architecture, Blueprints for the Web, built the Search and Marketplace design team at Yahoo!, leading reinventions of the search and shopping product designs and has spoken on the topic of the human experience in information spaces at conferences worldwide.
Joshua Porter
Joshua Porter is a writer, web designer, and passionate user advocate. He is the founder of Bokardo Design, providing web design and strategy services for social web applications. Prior to founding Bokardo Design, Josh was the Director of Web Development at User Interface Engineering. Josh writes the popular blog Bokardo.com. He wrote the bestselling Designing Social Web Applications, published by New Riders.
Gene Smith
By day, Gene Smith is an information architect who works with US and Canadian organizations on challenging strategic information architecture and design problems. By night, Gene writes and thinks about how people use information and technology. He gave the opening keynote at CanUX 2006 on disasters, systems thinking and user experience. Gene is a founding member of the Information Architecture Institute, and served on the Advisory Board for 2004-05. Gene also wrote the book Tagging published by New Riders.
Russ Unger
Russ has been working on websites since 1993—when there was only Notepad to code with and Mosaic was the only browser around. Since then, he has worked with a number of major brands, as well as on large scale Intranet and Extranet applications, biometric (fingerprint reader) applications and interfaces for mobile applications. Russ blogs on topics in User Experience Design at UserGlue UserBlog (www.userglue.com/blog) and recently wrote a book on User Experience Design with Carolyn Chandler for Peachpit Press.