It’s official, AIfIA is now the The Information Architecture Institute. Dig the new logo and design courtesy James Spahr, designer extraordinaire.
Category: AIfIA
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IA Leadership Seminar
The early registration deadline for the Information Architecture Institute’s Leadership Seminar is January 28th. If you sign up now you’ll get a significant discount for this star-studded event, 1 ½ days including:
- “Managing Up: The Business Strategy of Information Architecture†– Christina Wodtke and Scott Hirsch
- “The Enterprise IA Roadmap†– Louis Rosenfeld
- â€Homeland Security and IA†– Lee S. Strickland, JD
- “Practical Application of the Semantic Web†– Paul Ford
- “The State of Global IA†– Livia Labate, Peter Van Dijck, Jorge Arango
- “Hands-On Scenario Planning: Looking to the Future to Shape Decisions Today†– Jess McMullin
For more information about the seminar, please check the Institute’s website at http://www.aifia.org/news/ or to register for both the Seminar and the IA Summit, go to http://www.iasummit.org.
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Get paid for your great IA ideas
We just rolled out the AIfIA Information Architecture Progress Grants:
Two grants will be awarded in February, 2005… Each grant is for US$1000… Applications should propose work that has the potential to benefit information architecture practioners in a practical way. This includes, for example, original research, a new synthesis of important existing research, or development of an innovative new technique. The resulting reports will be published on the aifia.org website.
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Another Banner Year for IA
More tools, more translations, more learning resources, more jobs, more features, more seminars, and more hanging out with good, smart people. All this at cheaper prices than last year, in some cases it’s even free. It’s the second year of the Asilomar Institute. Yay for us!
We’re also holding elections for the Board of Directors, and to continue the goodness we need to the best leaders we can find. Is that you?
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AIfIA, WSJ, and the PDB
In today’s Wall Street Journal the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture achieved something we wished for from the beginning, notice in the mainstream press. The story, Redesiging the PDB, quotes Wodtke and Morville among others in discussing how IA could influence attention paid to the infamous Presidential Daily Brief on Bin Laden.
Unfortunately, the design community can’t agree on something as simple as Greg Storey’s one-page PDB redesign versus the undesigned original. One would think any attention paid to this document would be a good thing, but Edward Tufte disagrees, stating, ‘I think the design’s irrelevant.’ I hope that’s just the reporter screwing up his words.
Perhaps the most cogent statement came from Janice Fraser who pointed to the intentions of the document’s originators: ‘[Mr. Storey’s redesign] shifts responsibility — and, moreover, accountability — for interpretation to the analyst or advisor who prepares the brief.‘
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CMS Seminar at IA Summit 2004
The Content Management for Information Architects seminar promises to be the best one day line up of CMS knowledge anywhere. Where else can you see Boiko, Rockley, Byrne, and Busch all on one stage, all laying it down with IA as their focus? CMS is the future, girls and boys, I really don’t believe we’ll be manually editing presentation code and content forever, let’s get together and conquer this bad boy.
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IA Goings On, Jan 2003
Here’s a heaping tablespoon of IA links for you and Google:
The IA Summit website is up. Come to Portland, OR and hear the honorable Stewart Brand March 21-23. A few of us from AIfIA will be teaching an Information Architecture Leadership Seminar featuring Morville on strategy, me on CMS, Sinha on research, and McGrane and Rosenfeld on selling IA.
Rusty Foster talks to journalists about IA and AIfIA in the Online Journalism Review.
Peter Morville gathered opinions on the Big Questions facing information architecture today.
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Day 2
11:46pm: The Institute launched today and the reaction was unexpectedly great. A fair amount of positive comments, links, and new members. The skeptics, rather than simply bashing, asked smart, pointed questions, the same questions we’ve been asking ourselves for the past several months. We have good reasons for starting the venture, we have a vision and ways to make it work. We have a structure to lend stability and incentives to attract resources. As a place-less organization we can be nimble and distributed. As an organization without employees there’s less power-hoarding and ego-stroking. We’re all a little idealist and yet practical enough to make it work.
But to the question ‘What are you going to do?‘ we don’t have any hard answers. And that’s part of the beauty. With only a skeleton of top-down oversight we allow lots of ideas to spring up from the bottom and possibly flower. More sustainable than pure volunteer efforts, less stifling than previous notions of what this kind of group could be. I myself am still learning to step back, yield control, and let the experiments run, while still offering guidance or assistance.
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Launch: AIfIA
November 4, 2002 – Information architects from across the world today announced the launch of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture (AIfIA). The leadership of AIfIA includes expert practitioners, teachers, and authors from organizations including Yahoo!, AOL/TimeWarner, IBM, Lucent Technologies, MasterCard International, Wells Fargo, Wachovia Corporation, Razorfish, Adaptive Path, the Transportation Security Administration, the University of North Carolina and the University of Texas.
AIfIA is a non-profit volunteer organization that serves as a resource for organizations and individuals seeking to learn more about information architecture and its benefits, and assists information architects who wish to promote the field. Information architecture, the art and science of structuring and classifying information on web sites and intranets, is a growing field that is becoming increasingly important in the modern information age.
“Information architecture leads to increased revenue, decreased development costs, more effective communication and successful web sites,” said Christina Wodtke, AIfIA President and author of the book Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web. “AIfIA will be a resource for those wishing to learn more about information architecture, whether they’re exploring its benefits for the first time or they’re experienced professionals sharing tricks of the trade with their peers.”
More information about AIfIA and information architecture is available at www.aifia.org.