Idea 2007 Conference: a brief report - Day1 part 1/2

On 4th and 5th October I have been in New York City, attending the interesting speakers talking at the Idea 2007 Conference, a conference on designing complex information spaces of all kinds.

First of all, before starting writing what I got from each speech, I have to say that it have been also an interesting social event and every single attendee has been really helpfull to the creafting of the discussion.

This post, is also, a manner to say “thank you” to all guys that have been volunteering to make this event happened. Among others: Greg, Cindy, Melissa and Eliash.

Day 1

Eric Reiss see some photos

The first day of the conference started with a cool Breakfast and, after some coffees, Eric Reiss welcome all of us to the IDEA Conference, beeing the European President of the Information Architecture Institute. He also said “I belive that there are no complex infospaces, instead there are a lot of bad implementations”.

Eric left the voice to Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path, that managed the whole 2-days discussions, introducing themes, speakers and creating a good field to enable discussions among partecipants.

Peter Merholz see some photos

In his short, starting speech Peter talked about the “ideas behind IDEA” speaking about also the evolution of the Information Architecture discipline (growth also thanks to explotion of the WorldWideWeb). During the times, Information Architecture has been defined in several way. It’s has often been associated to the activity of creating taxonomies and, instead, it express a borader range of activities.

Peter started also to offer some definitions give in the years to Information Architecture: from Wurman to Peter’s bext definition from David Fiorito.

Peter also spoke about the 3 different shared environments in which IA is able to act: Virtual, Physical, Procedural ( also has dscribed by the IAI business plan).

At the end of his speech, Peter also reminded that IDEA Conference was in a natural complex info-space: New York City.

Mike Wesch see some photos

Mike Wesh, the author of the amazing video The Machine is Us/ing Us, focused on the way how people are ready for the changes

He talked about the role and use of Media related to teaching and learning environments; he also used a clock to represents the human eras and the media evolution

Bearing of this historical “clock” the question was: “How do we prepare our students for te next 15 seconds ?” refering to the ability of giving to young people the right tools to learn and discover, in order to get ready for the changes and challenged in their lifes

Mike also talked to us using 2 videos (“A Vision of Students Today” and “Information R/evolution” ) (simple and really clear), also created together to his students. They were really inspiring and also rich in terms of contents and…statistical information

At the end of the speech, the question have been “Have we prepared our students for to create the world

Alex Wright see some photos

Alex Wright’s speech was really interesting in terms of the evolution of the information landscapes

The focus was about the evolution from the analog culture to the digital culture; He started talking about Giulio Camillo, a guy lived in Venice in the 16th century that had an new idea of Theatre (his book is also online), organized in a new way, where audience was in in the centre and where parts of the wooden structure was able to have “links” to other related contents/parts (some more info)

The second example has been Diderot, who created a new way of organizing knowledge in his Encyclopédie

The role of Diderot’s job was more relevant after his death: the contributors and the popular contents reflected the social aspects of such a cultural revolution

The third, and last example, was about Paul Otlet (an article by Alex is also available), that in the first years of the 1900 created “the book of the book”, an huge structure were information have been organized to ask to relevant question onDemand, posted by mail, phone and radio…A sort of “the Internet that could have been”

All the three examples indicated that infospaces:

• are related to a specific time-period
• have the technology as center of the change
• has a social reflection
• last for a limited and specific time

Sylvia Harris see some photos

Sylvia spoke about a complex, long-term project about the Information Architecture and the User Experience for the Presbiterian Hospital in NYC

Se illustrated, in a very clear manner, the issues related to such a complex projects, where problems emerged for every single, small aspects.

To me, the main good, key-point of the whole project were the analisys and the coordination phases, where any important aspects must be individuated and solved, talking to right people and to the right offices

In terms of design solutions and design approach, it seems that the project has been appreciated by another Hospital and the still-on-going process is now offering a better user experience to all the “users” of the Hospital, mainly in terms of WayFinding

Rachel Abrams see some photos

Rachel spoke about the Taxi07 project, where information architecture acts as large-domains cross discipline

The project was designed as a complex system where communication, brand, service, product and environmental needs merged stakeholders’s needs and inspirations

Frank Lanz see some photos

The speech by Frank Lanz, from area/code, was about Urban Games

He started reflecting on the role and the evolution of virtual games, that are now returing to cover an important social role

A lot of interesting Urban games have been showed, from Mogi, to ConQwest, from Plundr to Pac Manhattan

In all the examples I noted few things:

• User can create and prototype with very low-techonology very funny urban games
• Urban Games are not so different from the classical board-games on an high level of Information Architecture
• Games controls are not necessary located close (and visibile) to players
• Designing a game where Player1 is an expression of thousands different players is not easy…
• Urban games are interesting in terms of education and healty activities
• There are a lot of Urban games based on mobile-phone usage
• Mobile Phone and/or network companies like to sponsor such great events
• Urban Games help in giving a more social value the game practice
• One of the most complex aspect, is to let people be involved in taking part to the Game

Bradford Paley see some photos

Brad illustrated something about the role of information visualization and the visualization process could offer to information architects

He mainly showed some examples about text based contents visualizations: from books ( such as Shakespeare’s to “Alice” ) to code written by programmers.

At the end, he illustrated how to offer a rich and easy-to-use information landscape for real-time financial/trading services

Hasan Elahi

Hasan started speaking and we had to wait for about 30minutes in order to understand why he as there…His tale was amazing…

For the onces who where not listening to the incredible story, Hasan have been in trouble with the FBI after the 2001 and, from that time, he started to collect purchase cialis and share, on the wen, all the information about his travels, meals, toiltes, places, credit card purchases

His live-tracking experiment made me reflecting in the value of information and data. Having all the data about someone doesn’t mean we know him. Having a large amount of data about someone, it means to have very few information on him…He could be someone else…

Day 1 - Conclusions

As a first day, I have to say that I got more than I expected…A lot of interesting domains involved, very nice and well discussed projects and an interestd and partecipative audience