archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Slides from my talk Big Data Is Not the Insight: The Language of Discovery at Enterprise Search Europe in London last week are available for viewing and download from slideshare. The conference was a good gathering of leading perspectives on search in Europe, definitely one I’d look forward to attending again. And of course London is lovely in May, even when it feels more like winter than spring…

Big Data Is Not the Insight: The Language Of Discovery: from Joe Lamantia

Related posts:

I did a modest ‘meet the speaker’ interview with the organizers of next month’s Enterprise Search Europe conference in London – it’s published here:

http://www.enterprisesearcheurope.com/2013/LatestNews.aspx?id=151

Here’s an excerpt:

It turns out that you can use a very simple vocabulary to spot and describe complex patterns in searching and sense making behaviour, patterns that transcend typical boundaries like domain of use. You can also design solutions using the vocabulary; from the interaction design of workspaces, to the various data models and information structures that underlie your system. This combination of analytical and generative uses is unusual, and I wanted to share it.

And if you’re in the neighborhood of London May 13 – 17, and would like to connect to talk about search, discovery, or related topics, ping me – I’d like to meet up with some new folks for my first visit to London in a few years.

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I’ll be presenting recent work around the evolving Language of Discovery at the Enterprise Search Europe conference in London this May. Tyler Tate — co-author of Designing the Search Experience — and I are sharing a session on ‘creating effective interfaces’.

In addition to the regular sessions, Tony Russell-Rose is presenting a workshop titled Search Interface Optimisation (to use the British spelling) on Tuesday that promises to inform and enhance your understanding of how people search, and your toolkit for designing good search experiences.

ESS is the premier gathering of industry practitioners active in the search and discovery spaces, and the roster of speakers looks strong; if you need to engage with or learn something from the community, this is the place to do so.

And London is wonderful in the spring – hope to see some of you there!

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The audio recording of my presentation Designing Big Data Interactions in the Age of Insight from UX Australia 2012 was just published.

It’s available for direct download from the session page, in the iTunes store, and as part of the podcast series for all the sessions at UX Australia.

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Video of my BlogTalk presentation ‘What happens when everyone designs social media? Practical suggestions for handling new ethical dilemmas’ is available from Ustream.tv. The resolution is low (it was shot with a webcam) but the audio is good: follow along with the slides on your own for the full experience.

More videos of BlogTalk sessions here.

Quick update on spring conferences: I’m speaking at Blogtalk 2008 in Cork (Ireland) February , and the 2008 IA Summit in Miami (SOBE – it’s sort of the US, but not entirely…) in April. This is my first Blogtalk conference! I’m looking forward to meeting some new people and getting closer to the social software community.

At Blogtalk, my session is titled “The DIY Future: What Happens When Everyone Designs Social Media? Practical suggestions for handling new ethical dilemmas”

Here’s an excerpt of the description:

Both traditional design professionals, and the growing ranks of DIY designers, must be prepared to address the increased ethical complexity of the integrated experiences of the future. This presentation will share practical suggestions for the design and architecture of ethically sound social media using familiar experience design methods and techniques.

Full details for the session and the rest of the program are available at the Blogtalk site. I’m following Salim Ismail’s opening keynote. (Note to organizers: No pressure in that at all, thanks…)

At the IA Summit, my session is “Effective IA For Enterprise Portals: The Building Blocks Design Framework”. If you’ve been reading the series of articles on the building block in Boxes and Arrows, the talk will tie in nicely. If you’re new to the building blocks or they’re outside your problem space, consider this a great look at a design framework in action.

Here’s an excerpt of the description:

Portal design efforts often quickly come to a point where their initial information architecture is unable to effectively accommodate change and growth in types of users, content, or functionality, thereby lowering the quality of the overall user experience. This case study style presentation will demonstrate how a framework of standardized information architecture building blocks solved these recurring problems of growth and change for a series of business intelligence and enterprise application portals.

Full details for the session are available from the IA Summit website.

Both conferences look good. Make sure to say hello in the hallway!

All (well, almost all) of the EuroIA Summit presentations and proceedings are available online now. If you couldn’t make the conference, then definitely take advantage of this great material.

View the presentations here.

Download the proceedings here.

I’m excited to be speaking at the Italian IA Summit 2007, in Trento Italy, November 16th and 17th. Organized by Alberto Mucignat, Emanuele Quintarelli, Andrea Resmini, Luca Rosati and many others, this is the second Italian IA Summit. It’s great that so many events like the German IA conference, the EuroIA Summit, and OZ-IA related to design, information architecture, and user experience, are happening around the world.

The program is posted (in Italian). My closing keynote is Saturday, right before five-minute-madness, which allows plenty of time for a long and leisurely afternoon lunch following the conference.

Hope to see you there!

Thanks to all who made the 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas this year both worthwhile and memorable, by organizing, presenting, volunteering, or attending. Thanks especially to everyone who participated in our panel Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs, and brought with them a willingness to share, laugh, and think differently about a normally taboo subejct.

We limited our presentations to 10 minutes to encourage audience involvement, and reduce the talking-head with a microphone quotient typical of panel formats. This worked well, but meant setting aside quite a bit of material that’s worth bringing out: the abbreviated version of my talk on how states of mind affect failure is available directly from the conference site.

The full version of my slides on state of mind, self-definition, and parallels between individual and societal responses to failure is available from Slideshare here, and appears below.

The full version includes:

• additional discussion of societies in crisis
• President Bush
• a major figure in Buddhist philosophy
• a personal tale of business venture gone wrong
• Captain Kirk
• systems theory
• leverage points potentially useful for averting failure

Stay tuned for a possible written treatment, in Boxes and Arrows soon.

Should I see irony, serendipity, or both in the fact that while I was sharing my tale of not succeeding as an entrepreneur, the room down the hall was hosting Start-up case studies: how five of us started our own businesses – featuring Victor Lombardi, Lane Becker, Frank Ramirez, Lou Rosenfeld, Gene Smith, and Christina Wodtke? If you’re thinking of starting something as you read this, I’ll bet my advice on what *not* to do is better

There were many, many good sessions this year; a few that I considered highlights include:

Olly Wright’s Information architecture and ethical design
Emmanuele Quintarelli’s FaceTag: integrating bottom-up and top-down classification in a social tagging system
James Robertson’s Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier

Prov­ing that it’s good to get out of the house — even if you’ve just moved in — my sched­ule for Octo­ber includes three con­fer­ences, cov­er­ing both coasts.

In order, you can find me at BarCampNYC2, UI11 in Cam­bridge, and IDEA in Seat­tle.

I’m not pre­sent­ing, so I’m hop­ing to relax and enjoy the ses­sions, speak­ers, and inevitable hall­way con­ver­sa­tions with other mem­bers of the IA / UX / design com­mu­ni­ties. If you’re there and you have a minute, say hello!

ps. Did I men­tion that Bruce Ster­ling is speak­ing at IDEA? How cool is that! Seri­ously, I think this is a good exam­ple of con­ver­gence bring­ing fun­da­men­tally related ideas and ways of think­ing into prox­im­ity. It’s also evi­dence that the IA com­mu­nity is in active search of ground­ing to help us build a point of view on what the future holds — for every­one who inhab­its the infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ments we help cre­ate, not just ourselves.