UXIdeas blog

EuroIA 2008 kicked off with a keynote speech from Adam Greenfield of the Nokia Service User Interface Design (SUID) team. In his speech he outlined his perceptions of Information Architecture as a practice and community and how it has missed some key opportunities to move away from endlessly designing for the Internet and branch out further into ubiquiteous media projects.

This appealed to me greatly as I have only been working in User Experience for just under a year and already find working on endless web projects frustrating.

However. I felt that his talk failed to offer any conclusions to the problem he outlined. Of course it is up to the whole community to make things happen but I would have liked to hear his ideas on how the practice should move forward, instead of merely stating that it isn’t. Otherwise, this talk got me thinking as I’m sure it did others.

Last weekend the DLKW User Experience department flew out to Amsterdam to attend this year’s EuroIA conference. It all went down at the Tuschinski theatre in the centre of town, which was is a strange, haunting place and a damn nice place to spend 2 days.

Amsterdam its self is a fantastic place. Everybody is really laid back and the girls are amazing. We stayed on a house boat on the Amstel, where we held a lil’ drinks party for some of the other IAs at the conference. Met some really interesting people at the conference and really got a feel for the IA community (Hello to all of you).

All in all a brilliant few days. Next year is in Copenhagen so keep your eyes out for that. I will be putting up some notes on some of the speakers soon so watch this space.