Matthew Milan
April 8 9:00AM
Innovation is rarely something that can be undertaken in isolation from the
chaos of an organization's day to day operations. Most of us aren’t on
specialized teams and we can’t innovate in isolation from the chaos of our
daily work. It’s tough just trying to find people to innovate with. We
don’t have special places to innovate and more importantly, we never seem to
have the time. Innovation seems like a luxury that no one can afford.
It’s time to challenge some of the current myths of innovation: that it is
always expensive, time consuming and requires deep specialization and skills.
Innovation is something that anyone can do, as long as they’re willing to
practice.
The Innovation Parkour Field Lab is a chance for individuals to learn the
basics of practicing innovation as a team discipline. The session leaders
will introduce attendees to the framework, its historical foundations and
practical elements. Then it’s all about learning through co-creation as
attendees work in teams to practice the core skills of Innovation Parkour in a
live-fire exercise. Let loose in a dynamic game-like environment, teams will
navigate a range of challenging constraints and then regroup to critique what
they’ve learned to help collaboratively design the next iteration of the
innovation parkour practice. Part learning exercise and part design activity,
the session will build off of previous successful field labs and exercises
conducted over the last year.
At the end of the day participants will have an evolved view of what innovation
looks like, how it works and most importantly what it feels like. They will
also have the capability to start start teaching Innovation Parkour to their
peers and contribute to the future of the framework.
April 11 8:45AM
If you’re looking for a presentation that links experience design, military
strategy, second-order cybernetics and systems thinking in a new model for
strategic thinking and doing, this is the presentation for you.
If you’re looking for a presentation that clearly and simply explains how to
envision and deliver experiences that create value for both individuals and
organizations, then this presentation is also for you.
If there’s one constant in the organizations that we design for, it’s that
change is inevitable and increasingly unmanageable. We live in a world where
strategy is a lost art and many organizations are stuck in competitive
environments where incrementalism rules and efforts to innovate are
increasingly unsuccessful.
What we need is a structural way of looking at strategy; how to think about it,
develop it and most importantly how to see its impact on in the environments we
work in. “The Structure of Strategy” will explore and attempt to addresses
these questions by looking deeply at what strategic success looks like across a
range of contexts, how strategy is framed and represented at different
conceptual levels and most importantly, how to think about developing the
capability to “make” strategy happen.
Building off of the 2008 IA Summit presentation “The Information Architect
and the Fighter Pilot” and the 2009 IA Summit pre-conference workshop
“Reframing IA Practice & Strategy for Turbulent Times”, this session will
connect perspectives and practices in fields ranging from business strategy to
systems thinking with the goal of providing session attendees with a clear
framework for understanding and creating strategies that are actionable and
valuable for both organizations and their customers.
April 7 9:00AM
The IA Institute presents a day of expanding your skills, tools and strategic perspective. It's the power of a whole conference packed into a single day!
New Update: All workshop attendees will receive a free copy of Social Mania - the social patterns design card game unveiled at IDEA09!
Read game co-creator Erin Malone's description at her blog. http://bit.ly/1xv1Mq
Changes are happening fast in technology, the economy, and even the various User Experience fields. In the midst of such turbulence, conventional information architecture can have trouble seeming fully relevant. Some may see it as a commodity, or a narrow specialty that has little to do with the game-changing emergence of social media, ubiquitous & mobile computing, and the rest.
The fact is, information architecture plays a powerful role in business and design, and its critical importance is only increasing. Learn how to expose the broad, but often invisible influence of IA, and why it matters more than ever for what we make, as well as how we collaborate with designers and clients.
Among the topics covered in this session:
1. Designing for context using scalable frameworks: Understanding how IA affects user context can help put it in perspective for designers and clients. Learn pitfalls to avoid, and models for helping us think through the challenge of shifting context in digital experience. In addition, we'll explore how dynamic IA frameworks allow for scalable, emergent architectures, and look at examples as reference points attendees can use in their own work.
2. Design patterns for the social web: Increasingly, all experiences are becoming socially-enabled. Your employers, clients and users are coming to expect almost anything they do to be shareable and re-mixable. If you're not already working on a project with "social" somewhere in the requirements, you soon will be. Learn the essential building blocks for social architecture, and how to determine which pattern combinations could be best for a given situation.
3. How IA can help drive business & design strategy, rather than merely answer to it: Too often, we find ourselves being handed highly defined “business rules” and being asked to make wireframes and “site maps” for them. But often it feels like we’re being handed a Titanic and being asked to arrange the deck chairs in alphabetical order. How can we do a better job of bringing User Experience to the “strategy table” of our clients and employers?
4. Tactics for integrating IA with other design disciplines & peers: Who’s supposed to do the wireframe? The “Information Architect?” The “Interaction Designer?” The “Developer?” What’s the difference, anyway? We’ll put the elephants in the room right on the table, and explore how to keep the tensions healthy while still doing great design work. In particular, we’ll look at how to manage the dynamics of different practitioner communities on the same project, and the role of IA as a facet of UX design.
This will be a team-facilitated workshop that covers both theory and practice: there will be Big Ideas to fuel discussion, and practical tools to use at work, as well as opportunities for attendees to learn from one another.
Who will benefit: Anyone who wants to take their IA practice to a higher level of understanding, performance & significance.
About IAI: The Information Architecture Institute provides the IA community with both “practice” leadership and “idea” leadership. Things that support practice (e.g. tools, mentors, discussion list, project opportunities) give UX professionals the methods and tools they need for their day-to-day tasks. At the same time, the ideas and discourse that make information architecture an exciting and hard-to-define profession also drive the development of new tools and practices that serve emerging needs.
While the IAI believes in core, traditional IA practices, we also believe they have relevance far beyond the conventional understanding of IA. Information Architecture has the power to describe and contribute practical solutions addressing the profound disruptions caused by globally networked digital spaces. This workshop is one effort at helping IA practitioners build an excellent toolbox for a broad, strategic, and practical application of Information Architecture.