Skip to main content

Greetings! We're happy to see you're interested in learning about Ann Arbor World IA Day! Our celebration of a "connected world" will be talking place on Saturday, March 12th. 

We decided to hold a completely virtual event this year. Hopefully that means you'll be able to join! 

Please register for the event at the following link: https://forms.gle/4nvDAUdvogRXxcHi8

Registered attendees with receive a link a week before the event.

Event date
Sat, 12 March 2022

Venue, parking and transit

This is a completely virtual event!

Program/Schedule

9:00am - 9:15am

Welcome, SOCHI Introduction, Announcements/Future events - WIAD team

9:30am - 10:15am

A Million Gorgeous Messes: Our Broken Digital Ecosystem and How to Fix It - Daniel O'Neil

While the world is increasingly connected, the friction and confusion in the use of that world has exploded as well. Digital products are harder to use, less consistent, and of poorer overall user experience, despite the massive improvements in hardware, networking, and software development capabilities. 

There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the key ones is our ability to MAKE things, in terms of the tools and resources available, has far outstripped our ability to ARCHITECT or DESIGN them. A million different ideas have proliferated, somewhat similar in plan and intent, but qualitatively different enough that each discrepancy creates a snowballing mass of friction and confusion. 

This talk explores the consequences of our current state of affairs and how Information Architecture can help us address it by creating common standards of CULTURE and UNDERSTANDING. We will introduce three simple concepts that can be applied to these standards:

  • Storytelling as a precursor to planning
  • Modeling to gain alignment
  • Solving real problems (instead of copying someone else's)
10:30am - 11:30am

Shared Visions: Values of Visual Design System - Shannon Li

The talk about Visual Design Systems emphasizes the values of connectedness and facilitating connectedness particularly between designers and other cross functional teams. While this isn't focused primarily about information architecture, it is a shared idea about connectedness as designers and establishing a shared language across teams for efficiency and for scaling designs. I wanted to highlight another aspect of connectedness as a designer with reusable components, libraries, and documentations of those components on libraries. I hope to cover what a visual design system is, its value and importance within design teams and projects, and go over how to create an interactive component or a starting point to creating visual design libraries. 

11:15am - 11:45am

Long Live Information Architecture (The Connected World Version) - Darren Hood

Among the current trends in UX design, one of the most critical and foundational elements is being overlooked — information architecture (IA). Serving as the key to findability and task execution, IA maintains its relevance and importance. This talk will review the evolution of UX, revisiting the core factors associated with IA and rediscovering the values and benefits driven by its application and how it impacts us in our global and personal interaction economy.

12:00pm - 1:00pm

Final Remarks and Open Networking Session