Jorge Arango

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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Have you wondered how the global economy got into the crapper? This is an issue that affects everyone, and the mainstream newscasts don’t do a good enough job of explaining how it happened (it isn’t easy to explain the nuances behind sub-prime mortgages, CDOs, etc. in the regular TV news format).

Last week’s episode of the amazing This American Life radio show explored exactly this issue. By interviewing people involved in the different parts of the system that led to the meltdown, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson put a human face on the financial disaster, and make it much more understandable.

Please do yourself a favor and listen to this show.

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During the 2008 IA Summit in Las Vegas, I recorded a series of short video interviews with some of my colleagues for Boxes and Arrows. The resulting story — Meet Your Peers — has been published, just in time for this year’s IA Summit.

The article has a very unique structure: in order to give the impression of meeting all these people at the same event (as happens in the Summits), all the interviews are grouped together in the same page. I’m excited about the effect this creates, but somewhat concerned about the impact on the user experience when loading the page. (It takes a bit more time to load than is usual.)

Anyways, I hope you enjoy the interviews, and look forward to seeing you at the Summit!

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• The Design Constitution
  A document that lays out the basics of interaction between Creative (designer, copywriter, photographer, illustrator, and so on) and Client.
  (tags: design inspiration management)
• FlexLib component list
  Open source Flex components from Google Code.
  (tags: flex opensource components)

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• IA Web Design Links
  Not really focussed on IA, but different facets of web design. Lots of links.
  (tags: resources webdesign agencies fonts inspiration)

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