Impressions from the 7th Summit of Information Architecture

The 7th Summit of Information Architecture has just ended, what can I say?

My first IA Summit was in the far 2010, I was professionally young, a “eager to learn” first year freshmen in the industry and the role of the information architect wasn’t really clear to anyone.

A bunch of years later, after 2 more summits and an EuroIA event, I can tell you without any doubt, this IA Summit was the biggest, the fanciest, the richest IA Summit ever.

This year the hosting city was the beautiful Bologna, I finally played at home.

The venue was good, not so far from the center of Bologna and with many car parking lots available. The conference room was just perfect in size, a tad small when divided into the three room canonical setup for the workshops.

The conference lasted two days, the first day was the “workshops day”, from a plenty of choices, people had to choose one in the morning and one in the afternoon, the second day, instead, was fully dedicated to talks.

I really enjoyed the variety of workshops: even if you didn’t have a clue about what to attend, You could always move freely in every room and freely decide in which workshop you preferred to stay.

The funny thing is that the whole process was totally improvised, since they didn’t expected so many people, they trashed all the workshops reservations lists and let the people flow.

It was genius.

How did it go?

I attended the workshop of Luca Rosati about “keeping the complexity of choices low”. The subject was interesting and appropriate, however the workshop was lacking of a proper closure: there were no clear takeaways or insights to take home and, unfortunately, it quickly degraded into a frontal lesson.

The second workshop I attended, the one from Pietro Polsinelli, had a misleading title: I expected some storytelling activity, but I ended up in a Game design lesson and storming.

It was a blast! Juicy, full of information and very funny.

The second day there were no tracks, only one session in the conference room, with talks and question times. The worst thing was the scheduled time, totally useless since there was no one keeping the speaker’s time.

There were a lot of interesting talks, from the TV and the second screen experiences, to service design tools, from the big open data gathered on Italian Parliament, to Semantics and Linguistics with machine learning capable engines.

Different subjects with a very barely visible leit motive: the human dimension in a ever evolving multi channel context.

I enjoyed myself very much: I met lots of people with different skills and job, I got along with many old friends and I learned lot of things.

As I said before, this edition was bigger, colorful, charming and overwhelmingly different from what I was expecting.

Was It for good?

I can’t say for sure: things change and even conferences grow up.

This year IASummit was definitely a 8 in my opinion, a very good conference about the digital, the future, the service design and the experience. A “Wired” one…

Unfortunately I left still looking for findability, categorization, taxonomies and information strategies… all the things I was told were about Information Architectures…

Hoang Huynh

Experience Strategist at PRSD

I'm an ill fated romantic technonerd with a passion for anything that makes lights and sounds, I live in the future and I have a very clear point of view on the definition of “experience” , “design” and “innovation”, but I use to talk about it only during coffee breaks.
I often lose myself into infinite activities where I can live, work, teach, learn on how people interact with the future.