It’s already been more than a month since the IA Summit in Chicago and the various themes from the event are still swirling around in my head. This was Summit #19, (my 16th, Niles’ 8th!) and as it happens it will be the last conference called the “IA Summit” as ASIST is not going to be continuing to sponsor the event. Going forward a newly created foundation will host and next year’s event — which is sort of #20 and sort of #1 — will be held in Orlando. (I think that means we’ll be doing this afterwards!) So far there is primarily just a Twitter presence for the new event: https://twitter.com/theiaconf
- A pretty robust event recap: http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/ia-summit-2018-recap-convergence-reflections/?t=0\
- Dan Brown’s reflections: https://greenonions.com/reflections-on-the-ia-summit-2018-27f93831587b
- The talks I attended that had the biggest impact on me:
- I haven’t found Jared Spool’s talk online anywhere yet, will post it when I do–it’s an important talk. The gist of it is that we’ve become effective at figuring out how to do decent UX work for individual apps, for organizations–even complex, distributed ones, but the new horizon where we now need to figure out how to do effective work is to solve problems that require multiple/disparate organizations to work together. The talk starts with unpacking the example of the false missile alert that happened in Hawaii in January, which was caused at least in part by a misunderstanding that occurred when a standard test was started at the end of a shift and then misunderstood as the real thing by the employee who issued the alert. As people worked to unpack how the error happened one of the things that became clear is that there are multiple agencies/organizations involved in something like this, from the people who would first detect such missile activity, to people making a call as to how to respond, to people responsible for communicating and helping responders. There is a lot of opportunity for misunderstandings, human error, and things falling through the cracks where everyone assumes someone else is responsible and in reality no one is.
- Peter Morville’s talk on his new book Planning for Everything
- Dan Brown’s introduction of his IA lenses framing concept, now available as a set of cards
- The biggest disappointment of the summit was missing Karl’s talk due to Niles and I taking a tour that turned out to be rather interminable. I haven’t seen Karl give a talk since Niles was born!