The World IA Day was created to celebrate Information Architecture (IA) and to empower local leaders keep growing and sharing within their communities.
In 2020, more than anything, we want to reinforce this celebration – highlighting how IA is Elemental (or integral) to having the best results.
How IA ties and binds different ideas involved, the end users, the stakeholders, the designers and the developers. How IA is often the bridge element between them all and tying together through understanding. How IA filters the noise for a better collaboration for a growing community.
IA is essential, IA is key, IA is Elemental.
The IA Element.
The IA element is the one that ties past, present and future.
Excellence in Design. Excellence in Thinking. Excellence in Usability.
With the dissolution of the Institute of Information Architecture (IAI) in 2019, the main institution behind WIAD, we will be carrying the torch from now on.
More than ever, our goal is clearer with the words of the IAI: to get the word out about this important practice, so more people have the words for this work and can therefore better educate themselves and others on it.
IA is elemental. We want to go back to the basics, to the simplicity and rebirth stronger. Surprises are the rule – this is Practical IA, the balance between rigid, flexible and strong ideas.
Join Rania Glass for an exercise in Empathetic Inquiry.
How well can we understand each other, our colleagues, or our users? Asking questions is a powerful means of bridging gaps in understanding across people, and approaching inquiry with deep empathy makes them that much more effective. We'll practice deep empathy questioning with a particular focus on aligning perspectives in this interactive workshop. Bring a notebook, something to write with, and your human-centered curiosity.
Matt tells the story of his 15 year journey through the tech industry which began with departure from a Buddhist monastery in 2004 and concluded with return to contemplative life in 2019. He shares a bit of optimism based on lessons he learned by setting aside plans for a 3-year meditation retreat, starting an open source software company, striving to achieve positive impact through good design and ethical leadership, and eventually concluding that the ancient tools of meditation and mind training are the most important technology to deploy in the face of today’s global challenges.
Matt Zumwalt is not a monk, though he seriously considered it. Instead of taking a monastic path, he has spent decades threading together disparate activities such as Buddhist philosophical study, meditation retreat, making queer performance art, founding small companies, crafting open source software and building empowered communities of practice.
Drawing on a BA in Comparative Religion from University of Washington, an MSc in Human Computer Interaction from University of York, and 3 years of life at Kagyu Thubten Chöling Monastery in New York, his 15-year career has been driven by a wish to make workplaces more compassionate, a fascination with the ways people arrange information, a curiosity about the role of data curation in the information economy, and a deep concern that people’s ability to possess and own their data is constantly being eroded. He's helped many libraries and archives create software to curate their digital collections and in 2016 he joined Protocol Labs, creators of IPFS and libp2p, to advocate for decentralization of the web. This unexpectedly put him near the center of the storm of blockchain enthusiasm that roared through 2017. Matt now focuses his energies on meditation retreat, contributing to community-based work in Philadelphia, and creating opportunities for people to participate in meditation retreats.
Home and the permeable boundaries around it. Between learning algorithms and expectation, ritual and automation, surveillance and care. The convenient systems we build to keep things under control, and the breakdowns that occur. Can I come in? This talk covers a series of experiments reclaiming our homes as smart humans.
Lauren McCarthy is an artist based in Los Angeles whose work examines how issues of surveillance, automation, and network culture affect our social relationships. She is the creator of p5.js, an open source programming language with over 1.5 million users, for learning creative expression through code online. She is Co-Director of the Processing Foundation, a non-profit whose mission is to promote software literacy within the visual arts, and visual literacy within technology-related fields—and to make these fields accessible to diverse communities. She is an Assistant Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts.
Lauren's work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as Ars Electronica, Barbican Centre, Fotomuseum Winterthur, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, Science Gallery Dublin, Seoul Mediacity Biennial at the Seoul Museum of Art, and the Japan Media Arts Festival, and she has worked on installations for the London Eye, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts. She is a ZERO1 Arts Incubator Resident, was a Sundance Institute Fellow, Eyebeam Resident, and has been in residency at CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Autodesk, NYU ITP, and Ars Electronica / QUT TRANSMIT³. She is the recipient of grants from the Knight Foundation, the Online News Association, Mozilla Foundation, Google AMI, Sundance Institute New Frontiers Labs, Turner Broadcasting, and Rhizome. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BS Computer Science and BS Art and Design from MIT.
The path that Amon took to become a professor of Computing and Innovation at the Olin College of Engineering involved challenging "the rules." The tools and programs that his Extending Access to STEM Empowerment (EASE) Lab produces typically promote young people programming computers as a means of remaking rules as they explore where social justice meets STEM.
Dr. Amon Millner is an Associate Professor of Computing and Innovation directing the Extending Access to STEM Empowerment (EASE) Lab. His research and teaching is informed by his work in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) domain, drawing heavily from his specialization: developing tangible interactive systems for making and learning. He develops technology and community platforms to facilitate learners becoming empowered to make and make a difference in their neighborhoods.
Millner creates engaging environments and tools that support learners of all ages increasing their capacity to innovate - leveraging a hands-on approach. Dr. Millner especially enjoys designing, developing, and deploying technological systems that allow novices to invent their own interactions between the physical world and the digital world. An example hardware interface is the PicoBoard (selling at sparkfun.com), a sensor board that Dr. Millner co-created while helping to invent the Scratch programming language. An example software interface comes from a startup that Millner co-founded, Modkit - producer of the graphical programming interface to the VexIQ robotics system.
Dr. Millner has established local and international hubs for learning, making, and digital fabrication, shaping the ways in which networks such as Computer Clubhouses and Fab Labs have evolved. His international recognition includes a designation as a Fulbright Specialist/Grantee. Millner, a champion in the Maker Movement, has authored computing curricula for K-12 classrooms.
Millner contributes to multiple research communities, particularly conferences that focus on: tangible user interface design, interaction design and children, and digital media and learning. Dr. Millner, a patent holder, earned a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT; a M.S. in Human Computer Interactions from Georgia Institute of Technology; and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.
amonmillner.com
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