First up, we’ve had wonderful support from publishers who’ve sponsored the event. Kudos to Rosenfeld Media, O’Reilly, Peachpit, and A Book Apart who have all come forward and put something special into the conference goody bags. We promise you’ll go away with more books than you came with.

We’ve also got a great conference book store and books to give away during the event itself. If you’re looking for something outside of IA, we recommend our friends at AtomicBooks.com for comics, pulp fiction and superior genre novels.

The IA Summit always plays host to leading authors. But there are also plenty of people who come to The IA Summit who’d like to know how to write their own book. In the Writers’ and Bloggers’ Room on Saturday (11:15AM – 12:00PM) you’ll get a chance to talk to a handful of authors about how to write a book and get it published. They’re looking forward to meeting you. And if you prefer to write something shorter than the Writers’ and Bloggers’ Room will be hosting some famous bloggers on Friday (11:30AM – 12:15PM).

With so many great presentations, keynotes, discussions, authors and books we hope you’ll leave buzzing with ideas.

We felt that something was missing from the cycle. The step where we openly share what we learn, build, and measure with the rest of our communities of practice. So we added (or modified) a step. And we liked it so much, we decided to put it on a fantastically designed, high quality t-shirt.

The t-shirt of the 2013 IA Summit was graciously designed by our final evening keynote Scott Thomas, AKA “Simple Scott.” Scott’s no stranger to beautiful design. Scott is best known for his work as the Design Director on the 2008 Barack Obama Presidential Campaign, as well his highly successful book Designing Obama (check out our interview). Recently, Scott has earned recognition as one of the co-creators behind the Noun Project, an ambitious project aimed at establishing a shared visual language for every human being on the planet.

Printed by United Pixelworkers

The t-shirt is being printed by United Pixelworkers. Known for producing beautiful t-shirts for and about the people that make the web, United Pixelworkers is in one of our favorite rust belt cities, Pittsburgh. United Pixelworkers provides a shopping experience that is as enjoyable and elegant as the shirts they have for sale. We’re thrilled to work with them, and we encourage you to check them out and sport any one of their many fantastic designs.

We’re beyond excited to add this beautiful shirt to 2013 conference experience. Volunteers will be wearing the special red edition. The black edition will only be for sale at the Summit in limited supply. Grab yours while we have them!

Have you found yourself wanting to attend the IA Summit this year, but doubting that your boss or employer would be on board? Many of us have been in this situation, and despite the benefits of attending conferences, it’s not always easy to convince your boss, or even bring the subject up. After all, budgets are often tight, resources can be scarce, and employers can be skeptical of conferences they’ve never heard of or attended.

We spoke with two UX managers and long-time IA Summit attendees about this very subject: Priyanka Kakar, Manager of Information Architecture at The Walt Disney Company, and Richard Dalton, Assistant Vice President, User Experience Design at USAA. They share their thoughts on the value of the IA Summit, and how you can convey that value to your employer and convince him or her to send you along.

Richard & Priyanka’s Experience Attending the Summit

Gathering a Wealth of Ideas

Richard says the most valuable benefits of attending the summit are the ideas he gets for his own work. “From the sessions, conversations, and posters, the place is full of ideas. They’re all fascinating and interesting. Sometimes I feel like a gold prospector finding the wonderful nuggets I can take back to work.”

Learning New Techniques

“A few years ago, one of the conference attendees showed me a demo of Balsamiq and some examples of how he applied it to a project,” says Priyanka. “He sent me additional information on Balsamiq, which was great, since I was already interested in doing more rapid interactive prototyping at work (we also geeked out by exchanging Visio stencils!). Not only did I learn about Balsamiq and its application, but I had also found a contact that I could leverage in the future for rapid interactive prototyping.”

Sharing Techniques with Colleagues

“The best part is that I was able show my colleagues these particular techniques [learned at the Summit]. The techniques caught on at my last work place, and several peers, including those that did not attend the Summit that year, started using them.”

At the 2008 IA Summit in Miami, Priyanka attended a session by Leah Buley on How to be a UX team of one.

“As part of that session, Leah had shared a really powerful set of ideation and design brainstorming methods called generative design tools,” Priyanka recalled. “Through open design sessions, I learned various conceptual frameworks for generating a large volume of possible solutions for user experience problems. I’ve had a lot of success using these frameworks on projects where I’ve needed to rapidly generate several approaches to solve a complex problem with the help of design and non-design partners. The best part is that I was able show my colleagues these particular techniques. The techniques caught on at my last work place, and several peers, including those that did not attend the Summit that year, started using them.”

Why They Send Their Employees to the Summit

Richard and Priyanka make every effort to send their employees to the IA Summit each year. Here’s why.

Employees Build New Relationships, Broaden Perspectives

Richard sends his employees to the IA Summit because he values the relationships they build with colleagues around the country and around the world. “As a manager, I like to send people just as much to make connections with others in the field as the sessions themselves. I like team members who participate in the UX community at large because interacting with others outside the organization broadens their experience and perspective.”

Conferences Reinvigorate Passion

Priyanka says “The best digital user experiences are built by passionate and motivated people. My experience with the IA Summit is that employees come back to work super inspired to create great user experiences. They are often charged up to try a new technique, idea, or approach that the company benefits from.”

Employees Meet Potential Hires

If you’re hiring, or thinking about hiring in the future, Priyanka brings up a great point. “Given that the IA Summit attracts some of the best talent in the Information Architecture and User Experience fields, if you are hiring, it truly is a great way for employees to find leads for other awesome people that you can recruit into the team.”

Tips on Convincing Your Employer

Understand Your Employer’s Perspective

Priyanka says it’s very important to understand where your employer is coming from. Despite wanting to invest in you and the rest of your team, there could be many reasons why they are reluctant to send you.

• Are they trying to cut costs?
• Are they hesitant about the applicability of the information learned?
• Do they believe they already offer a lot of in-house training?

“Use that to think about what might motivate them to send you to the conference. What would they get out of it? Would this conference cost less than in-house training? Are they hiring, and could you help find talent while attending the conference?”

Show What You Will Learn

Send your employer a list of sessions that directly apply to your work. Perhaps you lack a clear mobile strategy, and there are several presentations on mobile strategy at the conference. If so, send him or her links to these sessions along with what you hope to learn from them.

You can also look to past conferences for actual sessions. “Seed your management with past IA Summit presentations that may be relevant to them to highlight the quality of the content and learning opportunities at the conference,” says Priyanka. Many sessions have write-ups or podcasts (audio recordings of the sessions).

Make it Hard for Them to Say No

“Be creative in making it hard for your employer to say no,” Priyanka says. “For example, proactively offer to find a roommate to split hotel costs if budgets are a concern.”

Sharing the Wealth Makes It Worth Every Penny

“Tell your manager that you’ll share the most valuable ideas and techniques with your colleagues when you get back. If you share with 10 people, that makes the cost $200-$300 per head; 20 or 30 people and you’re at $100 per head. That’s ridiculously cheap.”

Richard says “Tell your manager that you’ll share the most valuable ideas and techniques with your colleagues when you get back. If you share with 10 people, that makes the cost $200-$300 per head; 20 or 30 people and you’re at $100 per head. That’s ridiculously cheap.”

Show How the Summit Has Helped You

Even if you apply what you learn at the Summit, your boss may not know it unless you make it absolutely clear. Priyanka suggests noting each and every tip you apply at work. “If you do convince your employer to send you, when you return, call out how and where you are applying what you learned from the conference (and share resources), so you get to go again.”

Attend Local UX Events as Well

Going to local UX events as well as conferences demonstrates that you have the initiative to learn. “Attend local user experience events available to you, so your employer knows you are committed to all learning opportunities,” says Priyanka.

When all Else Fails, DIY

Priyanka says that investing her own money has never let her down. “The one last thing I would personally offer is that there have been times when past employers have not agreed to send me to the IA Summit (especially every year); but given the quality and value of the conference, I have often chosen to make the investment in myself by paying my own way, and I have never once regretted it!”

Have Any Tips or Stories of Your Own?

Have you managed to convince your employer to send you to a conference? Or do you have any other ideas of your own? If so, we’d love to hear them. Please share in the comments below.

A few of our workshops are already starting to sell out, and we’re on course to match last year’s record breaking attendance of over 600 people. So take advantage of our extension, get into the workshops that you want, and join us in Baltimore for what is going to be the most engaging, participatory, and fun IA Summit ever.

Anyone who registered before the new deadline will be charged the early bird rate.

Scott is the founder of the design powerhouse Simple Honest Work, and known for his work as the Design Director on the 2008 Barack Obama Presidential Campaign. This work was beautifully documented in Scott‘s highly successful crowdsourced book Designing Obama. In addition to fundamentally changing the relationship between design and American politics, Scott is more recently recognized being one of the co-creators behind the Noun Project, which for the past two years has pursued the not so simple goal of establishing a shared visual language for every human being on the planet.

We spoke with Scott about his work on the Noun Project, which he will be covering in depth during his Evening Keynote on Saturday, April 6.

IAS: What is the historical context of the Noun Project?

ST: The noun project started as, and remains, an incredibly lofty ambition. We are talking about 17,000 years of history in communication; it‘s the foundation for everything. As tribes have come together over history, if they didn‘t speak the same language they would communicate using visual symbols. In terms of the way in which we communicate now, technology insures that our world continues to get smaller in a sense. For that reason it‘s becoming more and more important that we have ways to communicate without relying on the spoken word of one particular “tribe.”

IAS: Why did you and your collaborators set out to build the Noun Project?

ST: As the owner of a design firm, I always want support people exploring their own passion projects. But for me, there needs to be greater purpose to the work we‘re doing. There are lots of opportunities for people to get backed by venture capitalists to build another damn photo sharing application. And that‘s fine, because those applications have value, but in the sense that the Noun Project is a startup, it also has a purpose related to the social good that is more than just acquiring users or some other such metric. It‘s longer term planned execution path that reflects that greater purpose.

IAS: How has the Noun Project itself progressed over it‘s life?

ST: It‘s been going on for a couple of years now. It‘s very new to some people, but it‘s gone through three large iterations. In the way that we are building it, we are taking a lean startup approach and self-supporting this as much as we can. I run Simple Honest Work as a consultancy while also allocating design and development resources in house and spending the time and effort to eventually roll out the Noun Project as it‘s own company.

In the beginning we were designing on the fly; this whole thing started out as a four hour hackathon! When we stepped back and looked at it holistically, we realized we hadn‘t approached it as cohesively as we might have. We would design a feature, every few weeks. We wanted to get features out the door, listen to what users were talking about, and then fold those ideas into our plan. We‘ve definitely taken Eric Reis(link)‘ gospel to be lean, to listen to users, and not spend a year or two just building the thing.

IAS: What‘s happening with the Noun Project right now?

We were just in touch with National Geographic. They are developing a timeline for pictorial language throughout the history of human beings, and the Noun Project is going to be represented on that timeline. It‘s a huge honor to be recognized this way.

Learn about the Noun Project

Made on (mt) – Episode 19 – The Noun Project from (mt) Media Temple on Vimeo.

You don‘t want to miss Scott‘s discussion of the fascinating past, present, and future of the Noun Project and what it means to pursue your passion projects while designing with purpose. Register for the IA Summit today.

Dr. Hagar’s research focuses on information needs and information seeking in crises, disaster health information, and roles for librarians and information professionals in crisis preparedness and response. In 2012, she published Crisis Information Management: Communication and Technologies, a collection of perspectives from international professionals tackling issues of crisis preparedness, response, and recovery.

We recently spoke with Chris to learn more about crisis informatics and some of the challenges and tools she may share with us at the IA Summit.

IAS: You coined the term “crisis informatics” a few years back. What is crisis informatics?

CH: Yes, the term was coined by me in 2006 at the ALISE conference in San Antonio. And I broadly define it as the interconnectedness of people, organizations, information and technology during crises and disasters. Crisis informatics examines the intersecting trajectories of social, technical and information perspectives during the full lifecycle of a crisis — crisis preparation, response, and recovery. It’s a growing field of inquiry that it requires integrative and collaborative efforts from many disciplines to achieve effective and efficient disaster preparedness and response.

One of the exciting things about this area is that it is not only of interest to a variety of practitioners, researchers, and academics in information science, knowledge management, and information systems, but also other fields such as government; state and local emergency management and planning; non-government organizations; risk management; communications; community and urban planners; public health; psychologists, sociologists, and more.

IAS: You recently wrote a short article about the thirst people have for information in times of crisis and the misinformation that can perpetuate as people look everywhere they can for more details and direction.

CH: Well, a crisis usually presents a very complex information environment and precipitates an increase in communication. I think this is one of the challenges at the moment because of the rise of social media and its increased use. You have information coming from informal channels, for example, “citizen-generated” content and also from the formal channels like government agencies, sharing the same platforms like Twitter to disseminate information.

One of the hot topics at the moment is around finding ways to verify information during times of crises and disasters. Information forensics is concerned in part with verifying information like this. In times of crisis there’s a lot of rumors. For example, during Hurricane Sandy there were many rumors — text-based and photographic — circulating on Twitter. FEMA’s rumor control initiative and the Twitter hashtag #FakeSandy were set up to fight the rumors and misinformation.

IAS: It sounds like some of these formal channels of information are using social media not only to share accurate information but also to try and control or debunk the rumors.

Yes, there are various tools being set up to do this. Like, #FakeSandy, the hashtag #mythbuster was used to address rumors and misinformation circulating on Twitter about the flooding in Queensland, Australia. Digital volunteers are increasingly being used by many organizations like the Red Cross Digital Operations Center. There are also a lot of open source tools and organizations involved in managing information during crises that I hope to mention in the talk.

IAS: What is a digital volunteer? What role do they play in the control of rumors?

CH: Digital volunteers don’t specifically focus on misinformation. They are primarily used to collect information. For example, if I signed up to be a volunteer with an organization during a crisis, I could be assigned to collect tweets by citizens who might be looking for water or other provisions and I can direct these tweets to a central source where they are aggregated and plotted on a map, using crowdsourcing and crowdmapping tools. Crowdmapping can be useful in times of crisis to help determine where the information needs are and how to address them.

IAS: What are you most interested in under the topic of crisis informatics?

CH: I’m most interested in information needs and information seeking, particularly the socio-cultural uses of technologies. Although I’m not particularly involved in designing systems, I am involved in identifying how people go about seeking information that would be useful to the design of systems. This rumor element is something I’ve been interested in for a while. I became interested in it when I did my work with the foot and mouth crisis in the UK and a group of farmers. Rumor and establishing credibility of information was an important issue then, before this recent interest with social media.

I recently came across an interesting report from Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University that talked about how you may verify tweets and how to design a system to establish credibility of information. It was called, “Tweeting is Believing? Understanding Microblog Credibility Perceptions”. How do you decide if a tweet is true or not? The report mentions a few metrics that could help lend credibility to the tweet like, bio of the user and if the tweet is a retweet.

Building a system that will help establish credibility to information found in social media is just one way to help improve disaster preparedness and response. There are other opportunities for information architects and user experience professionals to get involved that I hope to share.

Want to learn more about crisis informatics? Register to attend the IA Summit.

My name is Alla Zollers, and I’m thrilled to be organizing the IA Summit Poster Session. The Poster Session will feature posters and interactive exhibits provided by YOU. It’s a great chance to take a break from the conference and share your best ideas with the guests along with a little food, a glass of wine or a bottle of beer (or juice if you prefer).

Submissions for the Poster Session are now open, and we want to invite everyone to submit their most surprising, provocative, and interactive work. We want you to be the life of this party.

Deadline for Submissions is 2/18 (End of day)

Past poster presenters have used the Poster Session as a way to get feedback on new ideas that eventually turned into talks, or just to find their way into the IA Summit community. Valeska O’Leary, who has presented several posters, said “The posters are a great way for me to share my ideas and get people’s reactions in a less formal setting than a presentation”.

You’ll meet more people and have more fun if you present a poster at IA Summit.

Tips for Posters

• Start with large (and we mean REALLY large) headlines that can be read at a glance 20 feet away. Create headlines that are provocative so that people will want to find out more.
• Draw them in with strong imagery and data so that people can ask you questions without having to put their noses to your poster.
• Highlight details and leave space for questions and for the guests to add their own ideas and interpretations. They’ll love it if you let them share something with you. Consider including a way for them to add ideas or thoughts – could be as simple as sticky notes or a blank space.

Finally, a party would not be complete without games. We will be running the first ever Poster Contest. Guests will vote for a winner who’ll take away a brand new iPad courtesy of Generous Coach.

The best ideas are often found in conference poster sessions – like this poster from Hypertext ’91 by a chap called Tim Berners-Lee with an idea for a new hypertext system.

IAS: So what would you like to talk about when we get together in Baltimore for the IA Summit?

KM: For starters, two things. First, and I’m borrowing from Jared Spool here, it is a great time to be an information architect. I talk to lots of companies that need help from people who practice information architecture. They don’t always call it “information architecture,” but they know it is exactly the kind of work that they need.

Challenges that organizations are facing with mobile content strategy, content management infrastructure, publishing to social channels, and all these other trends in the digital marketplace have not always filtered down to the way that organizations get work done. As a result, the world needs information architecture more than ever right now. I’m not just saying this to make information architects feel good; this is a real, serious problem.

That leads to the second concept: all of the work that we do is change management. You can look around our industry and see so many people doing work that in the past was done by management consultants. You might be someone that says “I’ve been an information architect for awhile, and I’m still doing tactical work, like taxonomies, functional specifications, wireframes, and prototypes. What’s next?” We need to embrace our roles as an agents of change. We must recognize that our ideas have a huge impact—not just on the interfaces that users see, but on organizational structure: on how people do the work that they do, and how that work is valued.

One of the biggest drawbacks of working in digital design is the rapid pace of technological change. There are new things all the time! As a result, there is a lot of digital fatigue in organizations. “We are sick of having to adapt to new things: first social, then mobile, and now more new interfaces, platforms, and the like.” But if you want to advance in information architecture, you should be prepared to understand and change the culture of organizations. Information architects are more effectively positioned for this than a traditional management consultant, because our core value is empathy: the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of the users of interfaces and products.

IAS: Organizations that don’t know what to do with digital design projects look to information architects, user experience designers, and other design fields for screen-based solutions. But more often than not, we spend as much time on the design of an organization or a process as we do the design of the website or app.

KM: The dysfunction of internal corporate structures is often reflected by the poor quality of internal interfaces that people use to do their jobs. You can see how screwed up a company is by looking at their CMS. Another way to put it is that you’ll never deliver a good end user experience if you don’t have a good employee experience. One of the biggest challenges we face in the digital space is that organizations evolve really slowly, and no one can figure out where digital should live. Baked into organizations at the highest level is the idea that you have a marketing side and an engineering side, and those are two completely different things. You have a chief marketing officer and and chief information officer, and those people have two different organizations, with separate cultures, motivations, incentives, etc. But people that do the work that we do? We have to do both. By definition we have to straddle both camps.

For us this is a generational issue, and it’s our life’s work to help contribute to organizations’ learning how digital design (and information architecture) should fit into their organization. If we are going to be successful, we may not fix it for ourselves, but for the next generation of digital designers, I want to leave those organizations better off. There will also be some social darwinism, where the organizations that successfully navigate this transition are the ones that are going to survive.

IAS: We can’t wait to hear your talk. Have you had a chance to look at the rest of the program? What do you think?

I’m really, really excited. I thought Scott Jenson was a fabulous and inspired choice as a keynote speaker. I’m always impressed by how many first time speakers there are at the IA Summit, and I can’t wait to see some of them. The workshops look great. Having Leslie Jensen-Inman is fantastic, and I’m delighted Paul Annett will be there. I’m really excited about the Lisa Welchman and Peter Morville session. That’s worth the price of admission right there.

Want to catch Karen’s plenary? Register to attend the IA Summit.

Online thermostats and lightbulbs are just the beginning. This decade, our mission will be helping people make sense of online experiences outside of the screen.

Our keynote, Scott Jenson, prototyped Apple’s Newton, lead product design at Symbian, and managed Google’s Mobile UX group. Today, he’s turned his attention to the Internet of Things. And he brings us a warning.

IAS: What kind of experiences do you think Internet of Things (IoT) will let us create? How will they be different from what we have today?

SJ: I honestly think it’s impossible to tell. If you look at the history of technology, you see over and over that anything new is first applied to the old way of doing things: film was initially used to record stage plays, telephones were meant to broadcast operas. We’ll never get to the new stuff if we don’t understand what’s holding us back.

My rant over the last year has been about making sure we aren’t shackled by our past. Too many people make assumptions about IoT that are just extensions of our desktop paradigm of paying for apps.

Just as the Internet overturned long entrenched business and technical models, so too with IoT. But you’ll have to let go of the past to find them.

The protocols that the technologists ‘sorted out’ make it nearly impossible for my friend to play a song on my car stereo… Designers need to work with technologists to make sure the core scenarios around setup and security are done properly and simply.

IAS: People are waking up to Internet of Things, but it feels niche — like mobile web before iPhone. What is going to happen to ignite this area?

SJ: One thing that is happening now is inexpensive, low-power ‘system on a chip’ processors that give you computation and network connectivity.

Cheap chips like that start to make it practical to build computation into nearly anything with a power supply (things without power supplies are coming as well but that’s a bit harder).

This gets you the raw horse power but immediately runs into a problem: there is now a tower of babble where every ‘smart device’ in your home or office has trouble talking to the others.

Our real challenge is to realize this isn’t a 1990s ‘software lock in’ business model. The focus of the market is going to swing back to hardware. The software should hold things together and we must not let it become a source of proprietary control.

This is why the early Internet grew. Any protocol that starts to build a communication standard will get all sorts of devices flocking to it. Don’t get me wrong, it’ll be hard and companies like Apple and Sony will try to make it all about their proprietary system, but if we don’t push for this, the alternative is pure chaos.

IAS: Shouldn’t we just wait for the technologists to sort it out so we can start designing?

SJ: [Laughs] Now you’re just trying to wind me, up aren’t you? For me, Bluetooth was the first product that made it painfully clear that a technology that isn’t designed with the user in mind cripples you forever.

The protocols that the technologists ‘sorted out’ make it nearly impossible for my friend to play a song on my car stereo. Technically, he can. But practically, it’s not worth the trouble.

Designers need to work with technologists to make sure the core scenarios around setup and security are done properly and simply.

More than likely the technology will need to change, deeply, in order to accommodate these requirements. Issues like this need to be addressed early on before the standard is set in stone. Once the API is fixed, all designers have left is to carefully word a hopelessly useless error dialog box. We must build a better future than that.

Want to learn more? Read about Scott’s Keynote, Beyond Mobile, Beyond Web, or register to attend the IA Summit.

We won’t be able to include all the talks, but we will do our best to keep you informed as to what talks we do and don’t accept, and why. You can expect updates on our pre-conference workshop program in December, and expect our conference program in January, with some surprises sprinkled through out that time.

In the meantime, we wanted to share with you some record breaking numbers on how many proposals were submitted.

Total Proposals

• 451 proposals submitted
• 386 talks/panels
• 65 pre-conference workshops

Interesting Numbers

• More than a third of talks submitted were from first-time speakers. Expect to see many of them in the program.
• The IA Summit consistently provides fantastic representation of fantastic men and women speakers. This year is no exception, with just under half of all proposals being from women.
• One of our goals was to increase the number of non-U.S submissions, and we’re happy to report that more than a quarter of all proposals came from countries outside of the United States.

Thank you so much for participating in this wonderful community. Expect more news from us soon.