IA Summit - Key Session - Project Touchstones (E)

(image: sticky room, infinity diagrams, Jesss McMullin)
Jess McMullin was talking during his presentation "Project Touchstones" at the IA Summit about efficient methods that focus on the value for both Business(Return on Investment) and Users(Return on Experience). To me his methods sounded very usefull to synchronise the different views of stakeholders of a project(client side and agency side). This particular points, if not solved correctly, can easily eat up a tremendous part of the project budget.

He recommends the following approach:

• Get the right people in the room, work together to create artifacts and models that let them articulate business needs.
• Peel Back the layers
• Start Small: Partner, Pilot, Publicize

From my point of view (To several of the situations that Jess mentions in his talk I find parallels to my daily teamwork again) I would say the following are well worth to consider to optimise your work relationships with clients and your inhouse teams:

• The opportunity we have as user experience practitioners to become a Peer with Business
  
• User Centered Designers Understand, Solve, Evaluate and Refine Things to get the right solution(Through Iteration) - great but not very sufficient.
  
• We have to understand what creates the Value in our projects!
  
• Value Centered Design: Business Goals and Context and Human Goals and Context
• Business Centered Design: 1. Using design methods and tools to understand business needs 2. Beyond the run-of-the-mill business discovery 3. One half of value-centered design 4. Beginning of becoming a business peer.
  
• 2 Ways to think about Deliverables: a) Deliverables That Define Solutions(Review & Approve) - always Prower Imbalance, b) Deliverables That Define Problems (Read: Arias and Fischer 2000: "Fundamental challenges facing communities of interest are found in building a shared understanding of the task at hand")...
• Delivelables that define Problems Together help us to become a Peer in Practice
• Building a bridge to overcome different viewpoints
• Deliverables that define problems together
  
• Define Problems together(e.g. Infinity diagramms from interview transscripts): One of the keys to becoming the Peer with Business
• Principles: 1. Codesign 2. Simple 3. Concrete 4. Flexible 5. Evidence-Based 6. Surface Agendas
• ...
• The whole speach will soon be in the IA Voice Podcast...

View his presentation here:

IA Voice - Podcast Interviews with Information Architects (E)

We are reading Books on Information Architecture since years now. The inspirations and ideas of authors like Peter Morville, Louis Rosenfeld, Jesse James Garrett or Christina Wodtke became probably even part of our own daily workflow and routine.
But who are these people, what are their own challenges, IA methods or where do they see the field of Information Architecture tending in the near fiuture?
IA Voice (www.iavoice.com) is an Interview Podcast Channel which exists since 2005 and allows you to listen to many interviews with IA Authors, interviews at the IA Summit or EURO IA conference and practicing IAs. Listeners have the options to listen through the browser, in iTunes or even download and listen to these interviews on an iPod or any other mp3-Player while being on the road. IA Voice also takes listeners feedback and comments as inspirations for new interviews. What do you think about IA Voice or in general podcast interviews with information architects?

Podcasts around IA (E)

There are not too many Podcasts for the IA community out there so far. Things will change in the near future though since the theme about and around IA will become more important. Who knows some more IA Podcasts?

Listen to some examples here:

- There are some interesting podcasts from the Ars Electronica(2005) in Linz(I recommend David Weinberger, Marco Susani, Derrick de Kerckhove and otheres which are very valuable)
- Silicon Valley, Technology, Media InfoTalk - interesting subjects around IA

Web 2.0 - Im Fahrwasser von IA (D)

Infografik Wolf H. Nöding, Spirit Link GmbH, Web 2.0, Podcasts, Blogs, Content Syndication, RSS


Dion Hinchcliffe prämierte gerade Web 2.0 Software des letzten Jahres in folgender Listung:
* Social Bookmarking (Gewinner: del.icio.us)
* Web 2.0 Start Pages (Netvibes)
* Online To Do Lists (Voo2do)
* Peer Production News (Digg)
* Image Storage and Sharing (Flickr)
* 3rd Party Online File Storage (Openomy)
* Blog Filters (Memeorandum)
* Grassroots Use of Web 2.0 (Katrina List Network)
* Web-Based Word Processing (Writeley)
* Online Calendars (Calendarhub)
* Project Management & Team Collaboration (Basecamp)

Hauptfokus bei IA ist die gemeinsame Betrachtung von Context, Content und User. Um das so genannte "Mental Model" einer IT-Lösung zu entwickeln, konzipiert(und analysiert) ein IA daher aus Business- und Anwendersicht gleichermaßen. Die Web 2.0 Entwicklung (weitere Stichworte: Social Software, Folksonomy, PICs - Personal Info Clouds, Content Syndication, etc.) geht "technisch" gesehen genau den selben Weg, denn sie stellt Nutzerorientierung und Context ebenfalls in den Vordergrund.
In den folgenden Jahren bieten sich daher sehr interessante Chancen für Informationsarchitekten, gute Konzepte für Web 2.0 Anwendungen zu entwickeln.