Meet the speakers

Peter Morville is president and founder of Semantic Studios, a leading information architecture, user experience, and findability consultancy. He is widely recognized as a father of the information architecture field, and he serves as a passionate advocate for the critical role that findability plays in defining the user experience.

Peter's latest book, Ambient Findability, explores search, wayfinding, marketing, information interaction, literacy, librarianship, authority, and culture at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet. Peter is also co-author (with Louis Rosenfeld) of the best-selling book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (over 100,000 copies), named "Best Internet Book of 1998" by Amazon and "The Most Useful Book on Web Design on the Market" by usability guru Jakob Nielsen.

As Chief Executive Officer of Argus Associates (1994-2001), Peter helped build one of the world's most respected information architecture firms, serving clients such as AT&T, Barron's, HP, IBM, L.L.Bean, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Vanguard and the Weather Channel. He has also worked with libraries, universities, nonprofits and foundations.

Peter is a founder and past president of the IA Institute and a member of ASIS&T and ALA. Peter served on the Advisory Group charged with revising the ANSI/NISO Z39.19 standard for monolingual controlled vocabularies, and he currently serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences and on the Strategic Advisory Board of Rosenfeld Media.
Peter's work has been featured in many publications including Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, MSNBC, and The Wall Street Journal. He blogs at findability.org.

Steven Pemberton is a senior researcher at the CWI, Amsterdam, the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science. He has been involved with the Web from the beginning, organising two workshops at the first WWW conference in 1994, and chairing the first Style Sheets Workshop in 1995. He is chair of the HTML and FormsWorking Groups, and co-author of amongst others HTML, CSS, XHTML and XForms. He is editor-in-chief of ACM/interactions.

Peter is male, 36, and lives in a warehouse in Amsterdam that was built in 1720 (but remodeled more recently). At his university he combined computer science with ergonomics and came up with information ergonomics, which he applied to workflow software. He has been working in the user experience (UX) field since 1995 (1995-2000: General Design, 2000-2002: Satama Interactive, 2002-2005: EzGov, 2005-2006: User Intelligence, 2006-: Info.nl) and has been an active contributor to CHI and IA conferences and mailinglists. Peter is currently the senior Experience Designer at long-standing web agency Info.nl. He served on the Board of Advisors of the IA Institute and organizes the Amsterdam IA Cocktail Hours since 2001. Peter maintains a blog called  "[BEEP]".

Jared Folkmann has been working as an information architect for 7 years, in Canada, the US and the UK. He has worked for a variety of agencies and after 2 years as a Senior information architect at Wheel he has now joined GoodTechnology the Head of User Experience. He has worked for a variety of clients in almost every sector. Most recently he has completed projects for Absolut, Allied Domeqc, BA, and Marks and Spencer.

Currently he is a partner at Claro Studio, one of Spain’s first IA firms. Since 1995, first in The Netherlands en then in Spain, he developed and led projects for a diverse range of clients including financial, commercial, cultural and academic institutions.
Ariel studied Information and Media Management. He has several years of experience as a lecturer in universities and design schools in Spain, The Netherlands and Argentina.
His work has appeared in ID Magazine and Interactions Magazine. He has recently been selected to be featured in Terminal B, a book containing work from relevant designers active in Barcelona, published by Spain´s Graphic Designers Association.

Dr. Haubitz is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at University College Dublin’s School of Informationand Library Studies where he teaches IA. Prior to joining UCD in 2006, he created and taught courses in Web Systems Development, IA, Usability Testing, and Information Technologies in the Information Architecture and Knowledge Management Program at KentStateUniversityin Ohioand at the Schoolof Informationat The University of Texas at Austin. There he earned his doctorate in Information Studies. His dissertation is titled The Use of Public Web Portals by Undergraduate Students. He also holds a MLIS from WayneStateUniversityin Detroit, Michiganwhere he studied under a Fulbright Scholarship, and a degree as Diplom-Bibliothekar from Humboldt University Berlin, Germany. His research interests include information behaviour, information architecture, and usability testing. He is a recipient of the 2002 Eugene Garfield Dissertation Fellowship and has given presentations and invited talks in the U.S and Germany.

Casper Honijk is a continuously smiling dutch guy of 34 years who works as a lead analyst for Macaw, a growing Dutch ICT company developing advanced web applications both based on - and integrated with - Microsoft technology.

Casper’s mission is to integrate a more ’user centered analysis & design’ process in the technology driven, and RUP based, Macaw development process methodology. He joined Macaw in 2000 as a senior Analyst and works with a small group of analysts ("amateur process engineers") trying to focus the development of complex web applications more on the user experience & stakeholder functionality instead of the technology and software involved. The new methodology uses customized elements of UCD, RUP, XP, Agile and "Microsoft Solution Framework (MSF)" elements.

Casper is currently living with a girl and two kittens in Amsterdam. He likes to listen to music, crashing on festivals, driving his old Citroën bus, drinking Belgian beer, discussing the weather and generally be merry.

Warren has 10 years experience working in the interaction, service and product design industry - working primarily in the Telco, Media & Technology sector.
A keen advocate of tight collaboration between teams, Warren has led a wealth of projects for a number of leading companies and is always seeking to create user experiences that best leverage the equities of a brand. He firmly advocates that the emotional experiences that people have with products and services is rooted in delivering a 'behaviour' appropriate to the brand and does not believe in waterfall approach between architect, designers and developers.

As a subset of the Experience Architect discipline, Warren is a specialist in social media, search and location based services as well as user centred design practices, inclusive design and accessibility.
Warren has brought this approach to clients such as Orange, Vodafone, BT, Yell, NHS, BBC, ITV, NTL, Allen & Overy and British Airways.
Prior to Framfab, Warren worked within a user experience group at PA Consulting and led the In House Design team at Yell.com for 5 years.

Almar van der Krogt has been working as an e-business consultant for the past 8 years. He has advised large (inter)national companies on their online strategies, devised innovative website concepts and managed several implementations.
He presented posters on specific projects (as consultant for Multimedia Skills) at both the 2005 IA and EuroIA and the 2006 IA summits.
He has his own company, VIRVIE, which explores the new field of virreal architecture. His ambition is to become the architect of a ‘skyscraper of the virtual world’.

Andreas leads the Spirit Link concept unit and works in projects as a business analyst. As a unit leader, Andreas constantly optimizes methods and processes to create concepts. To design efficiently and create innovative solutions, his team shares experiences and best-practice methods, and uses proven deliverables in the Spirit Link project process.

In his projects, Andreas analyzes business and user requirements to find the most suitable solution for a customer's challenge. Using IA methods in the concept team comprised of a project manager, designer, IA, IT-people and others, his goal is to maximize the user's benefit of an application. To get there, the process and documents have to be understood by the customer, users and the design team.

Andreas is fascinated by human learning processes, in elearnings, at knowledge management processes, and especially with his daughter - a human beeing learning a language, for example, without beeing able to translate!

Dr. Madsen has a MA in International Business Communication and a PhD in translation and specialist communication. She is Associate Professor in Communication Studies and Information Management at the Copenhagen Business School where she is also the Programme Director and main architect of a brand new international bachelor’s programme in Information Management. For a number of years, Dorte was an information officer in a Danish government agency with responsibility for information and counselling on rare diseases and disorders. She has also been an information architect of a large-scale web portal which includes all information available in the Scandinavian languages on rare diseases and disorders. The portal is funded by The Nordic Council of Ministers. Dorte’s research interests and experience include: management of information, communication and knowledge, and communication between experts and laypeople.

She pursues a goal of bringing perspectives together from communication, and from knowledge and information management, to support information architecture design and sense-making. She has given numerous presentations and invited talks.

Jason Mesut has been working in the fields of User Experience and Digital Design for over 7 years. Jason's background is in Industrial Design and has used this experience to influence his and others' design processes in the digital world.

Jason has worked in-house as an Interaction Designer at Yell.com; worked as a management consultant and set up the User Experience service with PA Consulting; been a User Experience Consultant at Flow Interactive; and now leads Experience Architecture teams at Framfab UK. Throughout his experience, Jason has worked in areas of strategic consulting, interaction design, business process design, information architecture, graphic design and user research.

Jason has been leading the User Experience Design of the Map of Medicine product for the past year. The Map of Medicine is designed to offer clinicians the most up-to-date evidence-based guidelines in a simple visual form. The product is live in some regions of the UK's National Health Service (NHS) and will be rolled out across other regions throughout the UK next year.

On the side, Jason likes to sweat over about what makes a good user experience consultant (e.g, "Creating the Perfect EA" poster last year's Euro IA), and likes to push progressive thinking on design process.

Prof. Müller has a Diploma in Graphic Design from the Hochschule für Künste Bremen(College of Artand Design Bremen, Germany) and a MA in Computer Related Design from the Royal College of Art London. He has worked for a number of international clients and companies like MetaDesign San Francisco, the Science Museum London and the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Communication in Bonn. After being a visiting Professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, he became a Professor for Interaction Design at the newly founded Interface Design course at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. His design work has received several awards like the Excellence Award from the Media Arts Festival in Tokyo, a Certificate of Typographic Excellence from the Type Directors Club New York, or, the first prize in the student’s category of the EuroPrix Multimedia. He has given numerous presentations and invited talks.

Jacco Nieuwland (1970) studied Information Science in The Hague and started work as a developer of 4GL client-server applications. After a number of years he realized that he found working directly with the client much more interesting than just coding. He worked his way from developer to web developer to web designer, and read about the field of Information Architecture. With EzGov, Jacco started work as Visual Designer, but the job description quickly changed to Information Architect. In this role, Jacco has worked on very large projects for the UK government. EzGov’s main focus was to create online form applications, such as Inland Revenue’s “Self Assessment” and “Pay As You Earn” and the Department of Work and Pension’s “Child Benefit” and “Carer’s Allowance”.

Recently, Jacco has started working for User Intelligence, a user experience design and evaluation collective based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. As a User Experience Consultant, Jacco works on evaluation existing sites and applications and designs new ones for a very diverse group of clients.

Fredy D. Oré has over 7 years experience working within Information Architecture, User Experience and Interaction Design both in Australia, UK, France and The Netherlands and holds a Masters degree in Interactive Multimedia. At Grand Union, he has been responsible for developing a user-centered approach and methodology for client projects including DrKW, Digital UK, The British Army, the Electoral Commission & the Energy Savings Trust.

Prior to Grand Union he has worked for Sapient Corporation, Oyster Partners, Framfab UK, George Patterson Bates, Tourism NSW Australia, TWI Interactive, IMG & News Corporation engaging the User Experience within Web and Mobile for clients such as BT, Orange, BP and Telstra Corporation.

Emanuele Quintarelli is an IT consultant, customer experience expert and information architect in Accenture. After graduating in Computer Sciences, he completed a master in Multichannel User Experience and leaded a number of projects for content management, document management and portal systems with a specific focus on user centered processes and methodologies. Since 2005 he is working on the evolution of collaborative tagging platform through his blog, papers and talks.

This year Emanuele organized the first italian IA Summit and his website is Infospaces.

Eric Reiss has been actively involved in the creation of menu-based programs, hypertext games, multimedia, and web projects for over 25 years. Following a long career as a copywriter for one of Europe’s leading business-to-business advertising agencies, he founded E-Reiss & Associates in January, 2001. In mid-2006, he co-founded FatDUX, a user-experience design company in Copenhagen. More info at www.fatdux.com.

Eric has lectured on a range of multimedia issues for colleagues, clients, and teaching institutions, including the Copenhagen Business School and the National School of Journalism. He has also addressed numerous professional organizations and is a top-rated keynote speaker. In November, 2000, his book, Practical Information Architecture was published by Addison-Wesley. In 2002, it also became available in Japanese and Korean. He is co-instigator of the IA Slam and author of Web Dogma ’06.

Eric currently serves on the Board of the Information Architecture Institute. He is also Chairman for the EuroIA Summit committee and is on the steering committee for the 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas.

Andrea Resmini is an architect and information architect. An IT professional since 1989, he's been a teaching assistant of generative
design at the Politecnico di Milano, Faculty of Architecture and he's now a partner at exea, a small IT consulting firm in Italy. He's also a
Ph.D. candidate in History and Informatics at the Department of History, University of Bologna and a visiting researcher at JIBS in Jönköping,
Sweden.

Andrea specializes in Free and Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) and his website can be found at resmini.net.

Luca is a free lance Information Architect and assistant professor in Informatics for Humanistic Science (i.e. Information Architecture and Human Computer Interaction) at University for Foreigners of Perugia (Università per Stranieri di Perugia), in Italy. In 2003 he founded Architecta, the first Italian mailing list in IA, and run Trovabile (http://trovabile.org) an IA magazine (Trovabile is a neologism and linguistic calque on the English Findable). Luca is co-author of the book "Organizing Knowledge. From Lybraries to Information Architecture for the Web" (Milan, 2006). His website is http://lucarosati.it.

Prof. Dr. Bernhard Thull holds a Doctorate in Natural Science and a Diploma in Computer Science, both from the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) Aachen. For 12 years, he has been with the "Ergonomics in Medicine" workgroup of the Helmholtz-Institute for Biomedical Engineering at the RWTH Aachen; almost 8 years thereof as Head of the department. His applied research with industry partners focused on human factors and design of clinical information and decision support systems. He has been Professor for Information Design at the Faculty of Information and Knowledge Management of the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt since 1999. He teaches Programming, Interface Design, and Information Visualization within a broader component of a study programme named Information and Knowledge Management (from winter term 2006/07 onwards: Information Science and Engineering) which can be interpreted as applied Information Architecture. He has published more than 50 papers, mostly on the design of clinical information systems, and has given numerous presentations and invited talks.

Harvey Turner has over 11 years experience working in new media and digital communications. After achieving a 1st class honours degree in computing and management science he started his career with IBM. He was a founding partner and Technical Director at Tanka where he worked on digital projects for clients including PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Burberry, Diageo, Granda Media, Unilever and Pfizer. Harvey's experience has developed across a wide range of digital marketing campaigns and application development projects spanning the full range of digital channels.

As Head Of Development at Grand Union Harvey manages the development process and output while providing technical, IA, and project management guidance on solutions, strategies and implementations. With Grand Union he has worked across the entire range of clients, including Abbey, Army, BMI Baby, Britvic, Deutsche Bank, Digital UK, Energy Saving Trust, Electoral Commission, DRKW, Home Office, Nestlé, The Link, Unilever.

Bogo Vatovec has more than 15 years of experience in change management, user experience, project management, software engineering and knowledge engineering.
He is a well known speaker and presenter at conferences in Europe, USA, Israel, England and New Zealand, a senior member of the Society for Technical Communication (STC), a recipient of the STC Distinguished Chapter Award and a manager of the STC Information Design and Architecture Special Interest Group (SIG.)

Larisa Warnke is a Sr. User Experience Architect at Carlson Marketing Worldwide (CMW) and Associate Director of Experience Design for the Minnesota Chapter of AIGA. In her day-to-day duties she is responsible for advocating good user experiences throughout the companies. In addition to her IA and UX duties she participates in the strategic planning of some of the companies' durable assets and client web sites.

Recently, Larisa has worked extensively within her company to enhance and implement IconProcess, the UI process from IconMedialab. This customizable, scaleable UI process is used successfully with RUP for application and web site development. CMW also uses a version of it as a stand-alone UI development processes on sites that do not require the depth of the RUP process, or have no IT component.

Carlson Companies, Inc. is a global leader in corporate solutions and consumer services in the marketing, travel and hospitality industries.

Olly Wright has been Head of Information Architecture at Media Catalyst Amsterdam, since the company started in 2001. He works on global internet strategy for Sony Ericsson and Speedo, among others. He has been designing for the web since the mid 90s, with a wide range of clients, including British Telecom and The London Science Museum, and holds a British Interactive Media Award (Grand Prix) for the UK’s leading real estate agent site: Foxtons.co.uk. He spoke at the 2005 summit on information architecture for mobile devices and the mobile internet.