Jorge Arango

The IA Institute will be hosting the fourth annual IDEA conference in Toronto from September 15-16. This year’s conference, which is being organized and chaired by Russ Unger, will focus on social and experience design, and will feature an outstanding roster of presenters, including:

• Stephen P. Anderson – product strategy and design consultant
• Christian Crumlish – Curator of the Yahoo! design pattern library, and co-author of the upcoming book Designing Social Interfaces
• Jeff Dachis – CEO, Dachis Group and cofounder of Razorfish
• Erin Malone – Principal, Tangible UX, and co-author of the upcoming book Designing Social Interfaces
• Leisa Reichelt – UX designer and researcher, currently working on the UX for Drupal 7
• Christina Wodtke – Principal Product Manager at LinkedIn, and co-author of the book Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web
• Luke Wroblewski – Director, Product Ideation and Design, Yahoo!
• … and many others!

There will also be a pre-conference workshop on September 14 led by Nathan Curtis of EightShapes; this promises to be an excellent opportunity to learn how to craft effective deliverables from one of the world’s top experts in the field.

Design for the social web is one of the hottest areas in UX today. I encourage you to register today to attend IDEA 2009! (BTW, you can take advantage of special Early Bird pricing if you register before August 15. Update: early bird pricing has been extended til August 22!)

Note: because of previous personal and professional commitments, I’m unfortunately not going to be able to travel to IDEA this year. However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go!

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The first issue of the Journal of Information Architecture has been published. This project, which is co-sponsored by the IA Institute and the Copenhagen Business School, is a major milestone in the development of our field. Congratulations to everyone involved!

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The 10th IA Summit is right around the corner! This year’s program looks very strong, and as always I’m looking forward to seeing everyone and participating in the conference activities. But I’m especially excited about this year’s IA Institute pre-conference seminar: Beyond Findability: Reframing IA Practice and Strategy for Turbulent Times. (Disclaimer: I’m on the IAI’s Board of Directors.)

This day-long workshop, which will be led by Andrew Hinton, Joe Lamantia, Livia Labate, and Matt Milan, will provide tools and techniques that will help UX designers grow as professionals in these trying times. According to Andrew, the workshop aims to…

… take your IA practice to a higher level of understanding, performance and impact. Learn about contextual models and scalable frameworks, design collaboration tactics, and how to wield more influence at the “strategy table.”

It sounds very exciting and incredibly relevant for our current context. I think it’s going to be terrific, and would sign up for it even if I weren’t part of the Institute’s leadership team.

The Summit will be held in Memphis, TN from March 20-22, and the workshop will be held on the 18th of March. Visit the workshop page for more info, and to register. I look forward to seeing you there!

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Update 2010-08-16: Deutsche Grammophon changed their online store infrastructure earlier this year. As part of the change, they limited the amount of countries they are selling to online. I am once again unable to purchase DG music from Panama. I wrote to the email address provided in their website inquiring about the situation, and their response was that they had made the change “for security reasons”. I have no idea what this means. So much for giving credit where credit is due.

File this one in the “giving credit where it’s due” dept… A few weeks ago I complained about the brain-dead policy of media companies that limit their online sales of digital media to a few “first world” countries (the US, UK, etc.) Now a major label—Deutsche Grammophon—has opened up its online store to 195 countries, including Panama. Last week I purchased a recording of two Bach cantatas, and while the site’s usability leaves a lot to be desired, I’m a very happy camper.

DG is owned by an even larger label (Universal), so there is hope for the broader industry still. (I suspect that the fact that DG focuses on classical music makes them less jittery about expanding the scope of their market; classical is less likely to be passed around than pop or rock, and probably less susceptible to long tail effects. An experiment, perhaps?)

Quality classical recordings are almost impossible to come by in Panama, and this has been an endless source of frustration to me since I moved back here in 2003. I plan to spend a lot of money in the DG store over the next few years.

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