archive.Joe Lamantia.com

“Beyond Findability: IA Practice & Strategy for the New Web” the full-day workshop that debuted at the 2009 IA Summit, is back for 2010.   Featuring an expanded lineup that includes Andrew Hinton, Matthew Milan, Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone, Cindy Chastain, and me, the workshop explores leading edge theory and practice to equip experience architects for the challenges of designing social experiences, the DIY Internet, engaging business strategically, and more.

Read the full description here, and then register here!

Bonus: All workshop attendees will receive a free copy of Social Mania – the social patterns design card game unveiled at IDEA09.

Last year’s rendition was positively invigorating, with participants from experience-based businesses like Zappos, and practitioners from leading firms like Adaptive Path.  But this one goes to eleven: we hope you’ll join us!

A quick rundown on my fall speaking schedule so far.

First up is BlogTalk 2009, in Jeju, Korea on September 15 and 16. There I’ll be talking about ‘The Architecture of Fun’ – sharing a new design language for emotion that’s been in use in the game design industry for quite a while.  [Disclosure: While it’s a privilege to be on the program with so many innovative and insightful social media figures, I’m also really looking forward to the food in Korea ]

Next up is EuroIA in Copenhagen, September 26 and 27.  For the latest edition of this largest gathering of the user experience community in Europe, I’ll reprise my Architecture of Fun talk.

Wrapping up the schedule so far is the Janus Boye conference in Aarhus, November 3 – 6.  Here  I’m presenting a half-day tutorial titled Designing Information Experiences.  This is an extensive, detailed tutorial that anyone working in information management will benefit from, as it combines two of my passions; designing for people, and using frameworks to enhance solution scope and effectiveness.

Here’s the description from the official program:

When designing for information retrieval experiences, the customer must always be right. This tutorial will give you the tools to uncover user needs and design the context for delivering information, whether that be through search, taxonomies or something entirely different.

What you will learn:
•    A broadly applicable method for understanding user needs in diverse information access contexts
•    A collection of information retrieval patterns relevant to multiple settings such as enterprise search and information access, service design, and product and platform management

We will also discuss the impact of organizational and cultural factors on design decisions and why it is essential, that you frame business and technology challenges in the right way.

The tutorial builds on lessons learned from a large customer project focusing on transforming user experience. The scope of this program included ~25 separate web-delivered products, a large document repository, integrated customer service and support processes, content management, taxonomy and ontology creation, and search and information retrieval solutions. Joe will share the innovate methods and surprising insight that emerged in the process.

Janus Boye gathers leading local and international practitioners, and is a new event for me, so I’m very much looking forward to it.

I hope to see some of you at one or more of these gatherings that altogether span half the world!

If you’re keen to help shape the way that the user experiences of the future are conceived and defined, join Andrew Hinton, Matthew Milan, Livia Labate, and yours truly in a full-day workshop / seminar titled “Beyond Findability: Reframing IA Practice & Strategy for Turbulent Times” at the 2009 IA Summit in Memphis.
We’ve got a lot of great material to share – and shape – on where this new[ish] discipline is headed, from four complementary but distinct professional perspectives (digital agency, in-house services group, management, design consultancy), shared by leading practitioners.

Here’s a quick description:
“Changes are happening fast in technology, the economy, and even the various User Experience professions. 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.
This full-day workshop will address such concerns with a boundary-pushing foray into IA craft and strategy. We’ll show how core IA skills are more relevant and strategically important than ever, and we’ll explore how we can extend IA to its full potential in 21st century UX design.”

Read more about Beyond Findability here.

Register here.

See you in Memphis!

Designers, product managers, and anyone who aims to create relevant and beautiful experiences would be wise to check out Indi Young’s upcoming webinar, Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy, on December 11th. Indi literally wrote the book on mental models for user experience – read it, if you haven’t yet – and this webinar is part of the Future Practice series produced by Smart Experience and Rosenfeld Media, so expect good things for your modest investment.

Even better, our friends at Smart Experience and Rosenfeld Media are offering a 25% discount on registrations, which is good for these tough times.

Use this discount code when registering: LAMANTIAWBNR

Enjoy!

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!

I’m post­ing the abstract for my clos­ing talk at the Ital­ian IA Sum­mit, as well as the slides, below.

Hope you enjoy!

Abstract:

Broad cul­tural, tech­no­log­i­cal, and eco­nomic shifts are rapidly eras­ing the dis­tinc­tions between those who cre­ate and those who use, con­sume, or par­tic­i­pate. This is true in dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences and infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ments of all types, as well as in the phys­i­cal and con­cep­tual realms. In all of these con­texts, sub­stan­tial exper­tise, costly tools, spe­cial­ized mate­ri­als, and large-scale chan­nels for dis­tri­b­u­tion are no longer required to exe­cute design.

The ero­sion of tra­di­tional bar­ri­ers to cre­ation marks the onset of the DIY Future, when every­one is a poten­tial designer (or archi­tect, or engi­neer, or author) of inte­grated expe­ri­ences — the hybrid con­structs that com­bine prod­ucts, ser­vices, con­cepts, net­works, and infor­ma­tion in sup­port of evolv­ing func­tional and emo­tional pur­suits.

The cul­tural and tech­no­log­i­cal shifts that com­prise the oncom­ing DIY Future promise sub­stan­tial changes to the envi­ron­ments and audi­ences that design pro­fes­sion­als cre­ate for, as well as the role of design­ers, and the ways that pro­fes­sion­als and ama­teurs alike will design. One inevitable aspect con­se­quence will be greater com­plex­ity for all involved in the design of inte­grated expe­ri­ences.

The poten­tial rise of new eco­nomic and pro­duc­tion mod­els is another.

The time is right to begin explor­ing aspects of the DIY Future, espe­cially its pro­found impli­ca­tions for infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and user expe­ri­ence design. Using the designer’s pow­er­ful fusion of ana­lyt­i­cal per­spec­tive and cre­ative vision, we can bal­ance spec­u­la­tive futur­ism with an under­stand­ing of con­crete prob­lems — such as grow­ing eth­i­cal chal­lenges and how to resolve them — from the present day.

Here’s the slides, avail­able from SlideShare:

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

I’m trying something new for the 2007 IA summit – a panel! I am one of four presenters for a panel titled Lessons from Failure: or How IAs Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs. We have a promising set of speakers: Christian Crumlish, Peter Jones, Lorelei Brown and myself.

My portion of the panel will focus on how states of mind, cultural outlooks, and unspoken assumptions about problems and their proper resolution shape responses to failure – on both small and large scales. Our goal is maximum audience participation and minimum talkingheaditis, so please don’t be shy about sharing examples and joining the discussion.

Of course, we’re one among many reasons to attend. Quite a few things look especially interesting on this year’s schedule, including several of the pre-conference sessions that touch on rapidly evolving areas of practice such as designing for social architectures and enterprise efforts.

Hope to see you in Vegas!