A little more detail

Adam Greenfield is an internationally-recognized writer, user experience consultant and critical futurist, having worked for clients ranging from global concerns like Toyota, Capgemini, and Sony to local nonprofits.

Before starting his current practice, Studies and Observations, Adam was lead information architect for the Tokyo office of well-known Web consultancy Razorfish; prior to that, he worked as senior information architect for marchFIRST, also in Tokyo. He's also been, at various points in his career, a rock critic for SPIN Magazine, a medic at the Berkeley Free Clinic, a coffeehouse owner in West Philadelphia, and a PSYOP sergeant in the US Army's Special Operations Command.

His 2006 Everyware, the first work on ubiquitous computing suitable for general audiences, has been acclaimed "groundbreaking," "elegant" and "soulful" by Bruce Sterling, and as "gracefully written, fascinating, and deeply wise" by Wired's Steve Silberman.

Adam lives and works with his wife, artist Nurri Kim, in New York City.

Jacqueline is a biologist (neurobiology and ethology, dipl.phil.II University of Zurich) and political scientist (lic.rer.publ.HSG University of St. Gallen). In 2000, she co-founded Zeix AG, the Agency for Usability and User Education, and is now its CEO and responsible for the development of methods, social research, quality mangement, legals, finance, and strategic partnerships. Jacqueline has a large range of experience with User-Centered Design projects, from telecommunications to the public sector, from banks to industry.

Jacqueline is member of the board of «Access for All», a Swiss foundation promoting accessible web sites, and a representative in the council of the city of Zurich.

Martin Belam is an independent Internet Consultant and Information Architect, currently based on the island of Crete. Originally from London in the UK, Martin has nearly a decade of experiencing working with global brands like Sony, Vodafone, The Guardian and the BBC. Martin specialises in advising traditional media companies about search, widgets, RSS, email broadcast and user-centred design principles. He blogs prolifically at currybet.net, and is a contributing editor for FUMSI.

Filip is an internet entrepreneur and experienced consultant working in a wide variety of companies and countries. He started his career managing Apple's Northern European call centres. In 1997 he joined Mediasurface, an early player in the content management market. He was involved in all aspects of the development of the company in the UK and used this experience to launch their international operations in the US, The Netherlands, France, Germany and Scandinavia. After the dot com crash he returned to Belgium in 2002 where he worked as a senior consultant working on large online projects covering all aspects of the user experience from process design to ia from writing tenders to training webmasters. Currently he is involved in launching several start ups and still active as a consultant focussing on IA and strategy.

Filip is active in the IA community, organises the BIABH (Brussels IA Beer Hour http://ia.meetup.com/46 ) and a member of the Euro IA committee.

Dr. Katriina Byström is an associate professor in the Swedish School of Library and Information Science at the University College of Borås & Goteborg University, Sweden. She is one of initiators/designers of an IA bachelor’s programme at SSLIS, and she is a chair for the programme with teaching involvement broadly across the curricula. Katriina’s degree is in information studies, and her research focus on task-based information seeking, information retrieval and information architecture. She is currently involved in a large scale web development project at the University College of Borås.

David is one of the founders of Internet Architects, an consulting company focused on designing user friendly websites and online applications. Before starting Internet Architects he was a project manager and user experience consultant with companies like Telenet (Belgians biggest cable company) and Real Software. He has been involved in any number of projects for government departments, banks and multinationals such as Agfa, Fortis, The Belgian prime ministers office, ...

By combining his background in communication with an in-depth technical knowledge, David is able to understand both the business and communication requirements and the underlying technological issues in a project. He is focussed on the end-user while supporting his customers expectations. He is able to cross the chasm between communication and technology people.

Christopher Fahey is a founding partner and the IA practice lead at Behavior, an award-winning New York web design consultancy focused on building compelling and elegant user experiences.

At Behavior, Chris has led the IA and UXD strategies for clients in many industries, including HBO, BusinessWeek, The Smithsonian, McGraw-Hill, JPMorgan Chase, XM Radio, The National Geographic Channel, AARP, the AIGA, and The Onion.

Chris speaks at many design conferences and will teach at the School of Visual Arts’ new interaction design MFA program in 2009. He also blogs about design, technology, culture, and whatever else he's interested in at http://www.graphpaper.com.

John has worked in information architecture for 9 years, designing interfaces for websites, desktop applications, and web-based video games. He currently serves as the lead user behavior specialist in his role as a senior IA with Vanguard.

Before entering the professional world, John earned bachelor's and master's degrees in communications. His graduate school was paid in part through a fellowship coaching speech & debate, so he'll welcome contrary arguments from anyone attending his presentation.

John’s professional loves include search engines and quantitative log file analysis, but his heart belongs to his wife Amanda. He blogs at worldwideintertubes.com.

Chiara Fox is a senior information architect for Adaptive Path. Chiara has crafted successful information architectures and user experiences for intranets, informational websites, and e-commerce sites. She's worked with a wide variety of companies, like Fortune 100 and 500 companies PeopleSoft, and AT&T, as well as organizations in a variety of industries including Business Objects, Target, L.L. Bean, Hewlett-Packard, Second Life, Citysearch and UCSF Medical Center. Because of her background as a librarian, Chiara specializes in content analysis, metadata and taxonomy development, and building architectures from the bottom up.

Laurent Goffin is Strategy & User Experience director at Emakina interactive agency in Brussels, Belgium where he manage of a team of 20 experts in user experience design, Information Architecture & web strategy.

He is working since 12 years in digital experience conception and has been practicing usability and information architecture since 1998. He worked on some of the biggest Belgian customer in almost all sectors & markets including Audi, Volkswagen, Porsche, Fortis, Proximus, Belgacom, Electrabel, Total , Brussel Airlines, Thalys, Dexia, etc.. He is currently helping many companies planning and redesigning their User Experience. He likes to push companies to take all potentialities of social media and web2.0 and has already developed 5 social web initiatives He is passionate about 2 things: web & cooking. In order to mix both, he initiated a cooking website and a web2.0 food community for all frenches speaking bloggers. You can follow his blog on http://www.gwix.net.

James Kalbach holds a degree in library and information science from Rutgers University, as well as a master’s in music theory and composition. He is currently a Human Factors Engineer with LexisNexis and previously served as head of information architecture with Razorfish Germany. James is an active speaker and author on information architecture and usability in Germany, where he has cofounded an IA community.

James is the author of Designing Web Navigation (O'Reilly, 2007) and he blogs at www.experiencinginformation.com.

Floris Ketel works for an online full service internet company called Mirabeau and is based in the Netherlands. He was responsible for the creative department for 3 years and worked for several different clients like KLM, Vodafone, ABN AMRO, etc. Now working as a Creative Director for Mirabeau he is responsible for the quality and creativity of all creative work form Mirabeau. Floris has a Master degree in Interaction Design from the Utrecht School of the Arts.

Joe Lamantia has combined deep insight and elegant design to create meaningful experiences for people in a wide variety of industries and settings since 1996. His clients range from Fortune 100 enterprises to startups, non-profits, digital product companies, and social media.

Joe is a frequent contributor to BoxesandArrows and UXMatters, and speaks regularly on the intersection of business, culture, design, and technology. He enjoys creating tools to share with the user experience community.

Joe is currently based in Amsterdam, working as a strategy consultant for interactive agency Media Catalyst. He blogs regularly at www.joelamantia.com.

Victor works as a product and service development consultant, teaches at the Pratt Institute, and heads up Smart Experience, a school offering Internet, mobile, and software education. He helped found and served as President of the Information Architecture Institute. You can learn more about him at http://victorlombardi.com/

Dorte Madsen is an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School, where she has developed, and is a Programme Director of, an undergraduate programme in Information Management which has attracted a lot of students, and she is now wrestling with a graduate programme to be launched in 2009. She is teaching IA, participatory IT design, and organizational communication. Her perspective is founded on her background in communication studies and on her practical experience as an information architect of a couple of large-scale web portals within the public sector. One of her main research interests these years is building a theoretical foundation for information architecture in academia. Dorte thinks that “Nothing is as practical as a good theory”.

She has been professionally linked to the world of e-learning for around a decade. From a graphic design orientation in the beginnings, she has evolved towards the more global concept of User Centred Design. She has designed virtual learning environments for all kinds of public and private institutions. Currently she forms part of the User Experience within the Department of Learning Technologies at the Open University of Catalonia (Spain), an entirely virtual university.

Deanna is an Information Architect at the BBC, focusing on Audio and Music products. She is currently working with semantic web afficionados on the music section of the BBC website. Deanna was educated in New Zealand, with a degree in Music History and diplomas in Librarianship and Business Computing. Her professional career has moved from librarian to database trainer to helpdesk analyst to data wrangler to project manager, before settling on information architect.

Søren Muus began his career in advertising in the late eighties. After several years as Art Director in various agencies, including Ted Bates, Søren became a graphic designer working with visual identity and communication.

In the mid-nineties Søren went online, specializing in the creation of visual design for user interfaces and the strategies behind them. He has since worked for many leading companies in Germany and Scandinavia.

In the summer 2006, Søren co-founded FatDUX along with Thomas Snitker and old friend Eric Reiss, now working entirely with user experience design, development and deployment, for clients in Europe and North-America.

Silver is an Information Architect at the BBC spending most of his time working with metadata and taxonomies. He trained as a librarian, and has worked with information architecture and metadata for a number of large government organisations (DirectGov) and the British Library before settling at the BBC.

Tim Ostler is Senior Information Architect at Tribal DDB London, where most recently he was one of those responsible for designing Volkswagen's new UK site. Trained in architecture in the 1970s, he went on to make a living teaching and writing about it (and also doing a bit of it). His view of computing remained somewhat jaundiced until he was seduced by the home computer revolution of the 1980s. Discovering Macs in 1984, Michael Benedikt in 1991 and Wired in 1993 he was eventually inspired to ditch building design for good and run away to become a Cyberspace Architect. He never expected to end up in advertising.

Dr. Nils Pharo is an associate professor at the Oslo University College in Oslo, Norway, where he teaches IA at the Master and Bachelor levels. His main research interests are interactive information retrieval and information behaviour studies and his perspective is founded in Library and Information Science. Nils specialises in the theory of knowledge organisation, including faceted classification, thesaurus construction and ontology development using topic maps.

Davide Potente has an High School specialisation in Computer Science. In March of 2006 he took his degree in International Communication at University for Foreigners of Perugia, Italy, discussing a thesis about the information classification model for a web-software interface, focusing on the information scent and the berrypicking process.

During his studies he started to get interested in Information Architecture: how users operate with different types of interface and classification models, so he decided the topic of his thesis, from which an article was published on <http://trovabile.org/articoli/itunes-profumo-informazione >.

He attended a master in Web Communication and Design at European Institute of Design where he specialised himself in User Experience Design.

He is an Information Architect consultant and he would like to focus on Bridge Experiences and their relationships with wayfinding strategies.

Eric Reiss has held a wide range of eclectic jobs including: piano player (in a house of ill-repute), senior copywriter (in an ad-house of ill-repute), player-piano repairman, jukebox restorer, pinball wizard, pool hustler, playwrite, composer, school-bus driver, cartoonist, magician, adventure-game creator, starving student (Washington University in St. Louis) showboat actor (Goldenrod Showboat), and stage director (Danish Royal Theatre). The breadth and depth of his experience have served him admirably as an information architect, although he is generally unable to explain exactly how.

Andrea is an information architect, a PhD candidate in Legal Informatics at the University of Bologna, Italy, and a guest researcher at the Department of Informatics at JIBS in Jonkoping, Sweden. His academic research field is IA,UX and content management for historical and juridical digital libraries, with a focus on medieval manuscript sources. He is Board Coordinator for the Italian IA Summit, an active speaker at IA and UX conferences and leads the Higher Education in IA Working Group. Andrea is a Linux buff.

Luca is a freelance Information architect and assistant professor in Informatics for Humanistic Science (i.e. Information Architecture and Human Computer Interaction) at University for Foreigners of Perugia, in Italy. He is co-author of the book "Organizing Knowledge: From Libraries to Information Architecture for the Web" (Milan, 2006) and author of the book "Information Architecture: From Everyday things to the Web" (Milan, 2007). Luca supports a holistic approach to IA, and the application of IA to everyday environments.

Andrea was trained as an historian (lic.phil.I University of Zurich) and worked for several years as a project manager for the Swiss Federal Archives in the area of archival information systems, digital archiving, and exhibitions. In 2004, she joined Zeix, where she is a senior consultant specializing in information architecture of complex web sites and applications for e-government, public transport, economics, and others. Andrea blogs at informationaccess.ch.

In 1986 Ruud Ruissaard started his professional career as a technical communicator at the engineering and standardization department for Fokker Aircraft in the Netherlands. In his role as information manager he initiated and guided the restructuring of the Fokker 50, 70 and 100 manufacturing manuals and helped to professionalize the content creation and publication processes. Since 1996, he has been working as an information architect at Informaat. He has advised large (inter)national companies and organizations on their content management strategies and devised site concepts with respect to structuring, organizing and labeling content-rich internet and intranet applications. Recently, he started working as an information management consultant for Informaat content design & creation.

In 2005 she took her degree in Linguistics and Multimedia Communication at University of Florence, Italy, discussing a thesis about the study of cinema’s aesthetics.

She is taking the degree in Advertising Communication and Strategic Design at University for Foreigners of Perugia. During her studies she focused on Human-Computer Interaction, Information Architecture and their relationships with Communication and Marketing.

Stanislaw Skorka works at the Library and Information Science Institute at Akademia Pedagogiczna (Pedagogical University in Krakow, Poland). He is a freelance information architect, university lecturer, and researcher in information science. He is the author of a book (in Polish) devoted to information seeking behaviour in educational web site (Users of Hypertext Systems. Krakow 2006). Stanislaw is currently researching the usability of libraries and educational web pages, users’ search strategy. He also teaches IA and the design of web pages. He is programme manager of the postgraduate IA Study in his institute. Stanislaw has a dream: to live to see IA as a scientific discipline.

Claudia Urschbach has been working as Senior IA for the BBC since early 2007. She is leading the user experience team in the BBC’s central content management group and has worked on an intranet redesign, metadata and personalisation strategies and knowledge share initiatives for the BBC’s UX staff. Claudia got interested in IA and developing products following a user-centred design process while studying for a communications degree at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität and working as web editor. After taking on a freelance role to advice the university on usability issues she became the user experience lead in the university’s internet department.

Peter Van Dijck is an independent information architecture consultant, and author of the book "Information architecture for designers". He has developed information architectures for clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to internet startups. Peter is passionate about things that have been known to put angry adult african elephants to sleep, like the internationalization of information architecture and the co-construction of users and technology. Peter's website is at http://petervandijck.com.

Bogo Vatovec has over 15 years of experience in user experience design, information architecture, project management, software engineering and knowledge engineering.

He is a popular 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.)

Erik has a masters degree in business engineering and a strong background in economics. He has been a full time internet professional for over ten years. He was involved in wide variety of projects fulfilling a range of roles including webmaster, information architect, strategic consultant, team leader and management consultant.

Erik’s experience includes anything from the operational to the strategic aspects of projects for medium to international organisations, in government and private sector including customers such as Agfa Gevaert, Sony Europe, SmalS-MvM (portal of the social security in Belgium), Tractebel, VDAB, The prime ministers office, The employment agency of the Federal government and the province of Antwerp.
He founded Internet Architects with David De Block in early 2006.

Scott Weiss is the Executive Director for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, working from Human Factors International's London office. Currently, he leads projects that span desktop, mobile, medical, consumer electronics, and enterprise business needs with regard to design, research, and usability institutionalisation. Prior to joining HFI, he led teams of researchers and designers for eleven years as the Principal of Usable Products Company, which he formed in New York in 1996. While running Usable Products Company, Scott led usability and design projects for Dun & Bradstreet, GlaxoSmithKline, Intel, JP Morgan Chase, Samsung, Sprint, and Vodafone, among many other well-known global companies. Scott's team produced annual benchmarks of mobile user interface technologies, including Media Downloads, Music & Video, and Mobile Search. Scott's book, "Handheld Usability," was the pioneering design, prototyping, and usability text for the mobile industry. Prior to forming Usable Products Company, Scott held career roles at Apple, Microsoft, Sybase, and Autodesk. He speaks frequently and globally on the topic of usability, with special interests in mobile design and quantitative usability benchmarking.