World IA Day

Mags Hanley and I organized and hosted Melbourne’s inaugural installment of World Information Architecture Day (WIAD).

The worldwide celebration of WIAD 2016 brought together a diverse community of people including information architects, user experience designers, content strategists, product managers, developers, scholars, and students. Because of the ubiquitous nature of information, we heard stories of information architecture not just practiced by specialists, but by people holding all sorts of titles, coming from all walks of life. 2016’s WIAD celebrated these type of stories.

In the spirit of the 2016 theme “Information Everywhere, Architects Everywhere”, our program looked at specialist information architecture topics (e-commerce, designing search, IA research methods) and dipped into a more fluid definition of how information is designed by designers and journalists to tell stories.

User Research Workshop

Davina Gifford, Alex Douglass-Bonner and I ran an introductory workshop for those new to UX or curious about UX research as part of the World IA Day celebration. Participants were introduced to and practiced:

Data Expedition

The School of Data is part of the extended Open Knowledge Foundation family which works to empower civil society organizations, journalists and citizens with the skills they need to use data effectively in their efforts to create more equitable and effective societies. In the spirit of building data skills to meet this end, the School of Data has developed a format called a data expedition.

Data expeditions give a playful and collaborative format to learning, working with and creating from real data; you could look at them as data visualization hackathons that focuses on developing creative thinking and storytelling skills that underpin data wrangling as opposed to arriving at a polished and visually rich data visualization. It welcomes all backgrounds and skill levels so that a post-it collage of a data story, for example, is an equally valid outcome as an interactive digital one.

Ri Lui and I ran a data expedition together and adapted the format to include data therapy (building data sculptures and data storybooks).

UX 101 Workshop

I ran an interactive workshop on introductory user experience design and accessibility for a Digital Humanities and Research Communication program at the University of Melbourne.