What's happening

 

Download the conference schedule »

9:00-9:30	MORNING COFFEE
9:30-9:45	Welcome Eric Reiss, FatDux, DK
9:45-10:45	Keynote: Scott Thomas (aka SimpleScott) Design Director, Obama Presidential Campaign
11:00-11:45	The Future of Wayfinding Cennydd Bowles, Clearleft, UK
	Patterns that Connect: Creating Overview Maps of Complex Data Networks Paul Kahn, Julia Moisand, Kahn+Associates, FR
12:00-13:00	PANEL: The Promise of e- Moderator: Filip Borloo, Lancre-Woods, BE
	Bridging Media Information Architecture for Ubiquitous Ecologies Andrea Resmini, Luca Rosatti, IT "Users Do Not Like Any Changes" The Task Analysis of a Virtua OPAC Interface Stanislaw Skorka, Pedagogical University of Cracow, PL
13:00-14:30	LUNCH
14:30-15:15	Evolution of the Sitemap Chris Pierson, Jacco Nieuwland, User Intelligence, NL
	Effective Ethnography Techniques for Low Budget Projects Sabrina Mach, James Page, FeraLabs, UK
15:30-16:15	From Shelves to Mobile Devices, the Structure Changes Cristina Lavazza, Invitalia, IT
	In the Field: IA Survival Guide in A Hostile Context Sylvie Daumal, Duke, a Razorfish company, FR
16:15-16:45	AFTERNOON COFFEE
16:45-17:30	Human Factors in Innovation James Kalbach, LexisNexis, DE
	Combining methods: User Research and Web Analytics Adam Cox, Martijn Klompenhouwer, User Intelligence, NL
17:45-18:30	PANEL: The IA Shuffle Moderator: Eric Reiss, FatDUX, DK
18:30-20:00	IA Jam Session

9:45-10:30	How Accessibility Issues Affect Information Architecture Olga Revilla, Itakora, ES
	From Enterprise IA to Enterprise UX: Creating a User Experience Framework for a (Big) Bank Jason Hobbs, Reynhardt Uys, JH-01, SA
10:30-11:00	COFFEE BREAK
11:00-12:00	PANEL: IA Professional Practice in Europe Moderator: Andrea Resmini, IT
	Cheap and Efficient Tools: How to Engage Users in IA Design When There is No Budget and There is No Time Belén Barros Pena, Colin Bentley, iQ Content, IE Big Hat, Small Herd: How to Produce Professional Deliverables on a Limited Budget Søren Muus, FatDUX, DK
12:15-13:00	Designing for the Scattered Structures of the Exploding Website Iskander Smit, Peter Boersma, Info.nl, NL
	The Architecture of Fun: Emotion, Interaction & Design For Massively Social Games Reinoud Bosman, Joe Lamantia, Philips, Media Catalyst, NL
13:00-14:30	LUNCH
14:30-15:15	Doing the Right Thing: Google and Privacy Jonathan Arnowitz, Gregor Hochmuth, Google, US
	Bare Naked Design: Reflections on Designing with an Open Source Community Leisa Reichelt, UK
15:30-16:30	Closing Keynote: Marianne Sweeney Director of Search Services, Ascentium, USA
16:30-17:30	5-minute Madness

Eric Reiss, FatDUX, DK

There are lots of great thinkers in our industry. You’ll meet a lot of them at EuroIA. But not all of them submit papers, so their ideas and opinions don’t make it to the formal programme. But we do want to get them involved, so this year, we’re going to wrap up our first day with a brand new kind of panel discussion: the IA Shuffle. Here’s how it works.

First, we need to find a panel topic. So, during the morning we invite anyone to make a suggestion for a topic by writing it down and putting it into a big hat. Eric will sort through the topics and announce the two or three most popular topics at lunch. He will then announce the winning topic based on the cheers of the crowd. If you like a topic, clap, yell, and stamp your feet.

Once the topic has been announced, anyone who would like to be on a panel to talk about it is invited to put their name on a piece of paper and put it into a hat. (In the interest of recycling, we will be using the same hat we used before.)

When the time comes to start the panel – around 17:45 on day one – four names will be picked from the hat. And they will form our panel! No, there won’t be a lot of time for preparation – that’s the idea. We want a spontaneous and lively debate between folks who don’t usually have an opportunity to speak at a conference.

Filip Borloo, Lancre-Woods, B

In this panel discussion we will explore the promise of e-business, e-government, e-banking and other e-'s.

Futurists have been painting a picture of a world of ubiquitous computing, everywhere we go our brain is extended by the power of the network, the thousands of sources of knowledge and information that should be able to solve our every problem with the click of the mouse or should I say the tap of a screen? Now, several decades later, already well into the 21st century it may be time to evaluate this vision.

We will be discussing the real world restrictions and hurdles e- projects have to live with and rather than looking at it from the point of view of the user in his flying, talking car we want to look at the fundamental changes organisations will have to go trough to finally realise this dream of being a truly online businesses. When exploring this topic we quickly realise the problem has little to do with technology but everything to do with people and their reluctance to change on one side and information and it's lack of openness and transparency on the other side.

An other issue we need to address is the lack of insight with management. As much as they can believe this vision of the "always on" internet and it's impact on their business in the long term, they are very reluctant to stick out their neck and make the short and middle term changes needed to enable this vision. So how can we motivate them to take the first steps now and not see it as science fiction that will not happen "in their lifetime".

So how can we, as IA's have any influence on this? Managing the streams of information is our bread and butter - that's obvious - but what about the people? Should or could we get involved in changing the processes and procedures defining the people's behaviour. Or in other words, should we get involved in change management?

The goal of this discussion is to take a step back and look at our work from a little more distance. Typically the task of the information architect is to look at the needs of the user, the business objectives and the technological context and then to zoom in on all issues dealing with the information, it's organisation and the different paths trough it. But maybe, in order to do a good job we need to take a step back and look at the larger context ...

The panel will consist of someone with a background in technology, one in e-governement and one in e-banking and co-ordinated by an experienced IA.

Andrea Resmini, IT

The panel will try to gather factual information and stimulate discussion on the current state of professional UX practice all over Europe, giving voice, talk-show-like, to the daily success stories and frustrations of professionals coming from the North, South, East, and West.

The panel will try to address basic questions in the various local markets, such as how is the profession perceived, its degree of establishment, the nature and size of clients, the national do's and dont's, and challenge the speakers into discussing their high moments, their frustrations, their best cases, and of course their most spectacular worst cases.

The goal is to provide a better view of what is happening in the UX professional arena all over Europe to assess if we are already going beyond the structures imposed by language, local cultures, and national borders. And if we aren't, should we? And how?

A final 15-minutes torture tour will be expressly devoted to questions and challenges coming from the audience.

Leisa Reichelt, Disambiguity.com, UK

For the past 12 months I have been working, with Mark Boulton on a series of projects with the Drupal community – firstly to redesign Drupal.org, and then following the success of that project, to work with the Drupal community to try to address some significant user experience issues in the interface of Drupal itself.

It seemed to us at the outset that the only way to successfully have our work accepted and implemented was to work openly and collaboratively with the Drupal community on this project – and so began the most terrifying and also the most rewarding projects I've been involved with to date.

As the projects evolved, the true nature of the challenge we had taken on revealed itself and we became embroiled not only in trying to understand the best way to design within the Drupal community, but in asking some fundamental questions about the nature of design in open source and whether it was possible for good design practice to flourish in these communities.

I'll be sharing with you some war wounds and learnings from our work with the Drupal community as well as some questions and challenges for both designers and open source communities, as we examine what it is like to design openly with communities and whether good design can ever flourish in a meritocracy like the Drupal community.

Søren Muus, FatDUX, DK

This presentation will show you how the development of a quick-and-dirty prototype became a very concentrated process with concise deliverables. This method has since proven to be suitable for other complex projects with limited resources.

In many European countries, both human and financiel resources to design and develop websites and applications are often limited. Even so, user demands and expectations are the same as with big or international solutions. This presents an apparently unsolvable challange to the assignment; to produce deliverables of the same high quality but with fewer resources.

This case story is about the development of a prototype for a reporting system to a Danish state institution under the Ministry of Defence. We were able to turn the project’s financial limitations into advantages and into an agile process that gave a set of lean deliverables.

I will provide a unique insight into the working environment surrounding small or limited projects with big or great ambitions; from client contact to working close with the developer.

I will show how it is possible to turn limited ressources into an advantage. Moreover, I will try and inspire you to give more for less, without compromising the quality of your work or discounting your prices.

In other words, learn how to wear a big hat, no matter the size of your herd.

Andrea Resmini, Luca Rosati, IT

Information is going everywhere, bleeding out of cyberspace and back into the real world: Internet access has moved into cellphones and hand­held devices; social networks are now mobile and constantly connect physically separated users; shopping remixes web sites, brick and mortar stores, and user­generated content in novelty ways. Media converge, spimes emerge. Many tasks we perform daily not only constantly require us to move between different media, but actually have us move from the digital to physical environment and back. Not surprisingly, a recent study on online advertising shows a strong correlation between tv broadcasting, the press, and the Internet. 65% of visitors to a search engine were looking for further information concerning a product or service they saw in a tv or newspaper advertisement. “What shows up in one medium is looked up on another. This is the reason why communication is starting to become cross­medial”.
Convergence and cross-­mediality are opening up new landscapes and require a change in perspective, a new view on the architecture of information that goes beyond current contexts and disciplines. It is necessary to rethink design holistically, as every artifact, be it a product, piece of information, or a service is now an ecosystem or part of an ecosystem and as such has to be approached. “The new Internet reconciles not only the gap between what is real and what is virtual, but that between what is technological and what is biological as well”.
But most most of the pieces of the puzzle are still not designed to fit yet. Even worse, they are not thought to be pieces at all. Of course, every medium developed a specific language and specific rules through the years, and difficulties in envisioning a global approach across domains were to be expected. But as the shift towards convergence and cross­mediality gains momentum, this deficiency begins to affect the whole process. When multiple interactions are designed as single encompassing experiences but are in fact but one, structural gaps and behavioral inconsistencies are common, and even the continuous movement from one medium to the other increases the cognitive load and definitively hampers the final user experience.
Cross­-media architectures can be compared to a game of the goose where the track spans multiple heterogeneous environments and the board is laid out across different dimensions. As in every racing table game, users have to move through spaces, bridges, and gaps to get to the goal and win the game. How easily and satisfactorily they get there constitutes their user experience.
This presentation will introduce, through brief entertaining case studies, a 7-point manifesto highlighting the effects of cross­-media architectures on design, and specifically on information architecture as it moves from being web-bound to being part of a pervasive process

Belén Barros Pena, Colin Bentley, iQ Content, IRE

Client work is always carried out under huge budget and time pressures: there is never money for user research, and there is never time. Information architects and interaction designers working for design consultancies not only understand the need for engaging users in the design process: they feel the urge to do so. Making design decisions without understanding your users’ goals and behaviour puts the overall quality and success of your project at risk. Unsuccessful projects put your relationship with clients (and your agency’s viability and solvency) at risk.

Over time, and as a result of project constraints, we have developed some techniques and tools for user research that can be run in very little time, and with very little money. We create prototypes that require minimum development effort while still providing enough interactivity to run valid user tests. Our usability testing lab consists of a laptop computer and a USB mouse. We recruit users and run tests in our clients’ branches. And we exploit the power of event tracking in web analytics to obtain data about users’ behaviour.

All our user research activities are of course of a qualitative nature (our clients don’t have budget to run studies that will provide them with statistically significant data). But they are, nonetheless, useful. We believe they are at the core of our success and our solid market position.

During this case study session, we would like to introduce our prototyping, user testing and event tracking techniques, and how they have been applied to our project work.

Adam Cox, Martijn Klompenhouwer, User Intelligence, NL

Web Analytics is a method that is quantitative in nature. By analyzing traffic on a website you get a lot of data, but interpretation is still needed to transform this data into usable insights. On the other hand, most User Research methods are qualitative; you get a 'why', but you miss the big numbers to back-up the findings.

Our presentation will explain why it makes sense to combine these two different methods. We will argue that Web Analytics should not belong to the IT or Marketing department, but to the User Experience team. A web analyst’s expertise and tools should be applied within the structure of the User Experience design process. Web Analytics should be combined with other User Research methods that are traditionally used in web design. The combination creates a powerful new approach!

The aim of the presentation is not only to explain how and why you should combine methods, but also to show examples to highlight this approach. Instead of having a lengthy dissemination on the differences of the two methods we want to focus on practical examples. These examples will clearly show how both methods were used to complement and strengthen each other in the User Experience process. Furthermore, the presentation will make clear how the User Researcher and the Web Analyst work together as a team.

The combination of Web Analytics and User Research is a valuable new method for User Experience design. It will provide you with more powerful results and stronger evidence to validate existing assumptions or findings. Our main message is that if you are a User experience professionals and are not doing Web Analytics yet, you should be starting now. If you are already doing Web Analytics then you should be combining it with other User Research methods.

Iskander Smit, Peter Boersma, Info.nl, NL

In the past information was limited to the boundaries of the own website. Now the information is scattered over multiple online channels and websites. By the growing use of mobile devices, widgets and API’s, we have to change the way we look at structures. New design methods are necessary.

We translate this development in our model of the Exploding Website. The model describes how services now are revealed in several contexts, and what steps you need to take to define the right part of service in the right context. We also redefined our methodology for user experience design based on the vision of the Exploding Website. Dynamic personas, scenes and rule-based structures are key elements.

In the presentation we use two client cases to demonstrate the model and describe the new design approach to structure information round new contexts. At the end of the presentation we will discuss a list of do’s and don’ts usable for everyone working on online media for the future.

Jonathan Arnowitz, Stroomt Information Management, US
Gregor Hochmuth, Google, US

Google strives to keep both its idealism and its business savvy. To this day a major design and company guideline is “Do no evil.” This is easy when the lines are black and white but a challenge when the shades are more light and dark gray. In this age of sophisticated on-line advertising this is becoming more and more difficult. The case in point is a project that would allow Google to customize ads shown on partnering websites (such as newspapers or blogs) based on a user's previous web activity. Although the data used for this customization would be both anonymous and non-identifying, this new technology caused concern and many discussions within the company over whether this was the best implementation and right step forward for both Google and Google’s end users.

Of particular concern to Google was both how end-users would feel this new functionality would be desirable or undesirable and also what effect would this have on increasing privacy concerns of the US Government and the European Union. Google also had a mandate from a prior legal agreement to let each user see the information kept in their advertising profile. Besides fulfilling this mandate, the company decided early on that the resulting tool would be of value to end users and reflect the best practices in privacy protection for end users.

The ensuing project furthered a practice becoming more and more common: the inclusion of non-design and non-engineer members to the design team. This team had some unique members including legal and privacy advocates; and also included specific users that went beyond user centred design including government, bloggers and non-governmental agencies. This shows the ever expanding and flexible design team and project structures needed to release successful products.

The resulting project also included a novel reliance on prototyping to clarify functionality and reduce emotionally charged situations. It also illustrated the emotional power navigational concepts independent of functionality have on this subject. Also included in the design process was participatory design techniques allowing legal, privacy advocates, bloggers, etc, to directly participate in the design process. This allowed participants to feel they were being seriously listened to and allay emotional fears over privacy abuses.

We will present iterative designs along with how they fit into the narrative written above. The current version of the developed tool can be found at http://www.google.com/ads/preferences.

Sabrina Mach, Feralabs, UK
James Page, Feralabs, UK

This paper shares how the authors used a combination of traditional and digital ethnography to help understand the needs of the users of a new system developed by a start-up. The talk describes how to carry out research cheaply and maximise the impact of findings for the information architecture of a system.

While ethnographic studies provide a deep understanding of human behaviour, the challenge is that they are both time consuming and expensive.

Digital ethnography on the other hand improves the speed, quality and relevance of ethnographic data. It studies human behaviour embracing the whole spectrum of hi-tech tools to record, reproduce and transmit information. As Michael Welsch showed in his famous video "the web is using us" -- the web is not just a tool that is using us, we are creating the web, "the web is us", "the web is linking people" and it is linking people and information.

The paper has two main parts:

1. First, it will describe the method. It will highlight the importance of the participant observer, how to increase empathy of the whole team for the user population, and how to research your target audience when it is not located in one place but dispersed across the whole world.

2. The paper will then explain the findings and how they helped to shape the system that was developed. A reflection upon the usefulness of the method will be offered. This will provide insight into the quality of findings, the usefulness of applying the findings to the application being developed, as well as the cost benefit.

Chris Pierson, Jacco Nieuwland, User Intelligence, NL

The presentation we propose discusses the usefulness of the traditional sitemap as a form of deliverable / documentation with a focus on emerging trends and where this might go in the future. As User Experience Designers we have always needed a way to communicate the overall structure and pages of a website or application. For many years this has been the traditional, hierarchical sitemap or something close to it. In some cases this is still the right thing to do, however, the more we have tried to document increasingly varied, complex and loose structures of the experiences we are designing it becomes clear that we are trying to communicate more than the traditional sitemap allows. Also, one deliverable often has to communicate different levels of information to a number of different audiences. Through our experience and from looking at what others are producing we notice a trend towards alternative ways of showing changing structures, relationships and transitions. We wish to investigate where we are and, more importantly, our ideas on where this could be going. The presentation will touch on, but not be limited to:

• The emerging variations on site / system maps, including examples from our work at and from other professionals in our field.
• Analyze what these emerging variations are, why and how effective they are (with examples).
• Discuss alternative ways of documenting these concepts and how "sitemaps" and UX documentation could be more effective now and in the future.
• How new ways of visualizing could help communicate to multiple audiences.
• Applying our User Experience expertise to the navigation of interactive documentation (from a site map entry point of view).
• Using the "Sitemap" as the primary element for navigating and understanding a UX deliverable.
• Ways of visualizing the differing states of screens / content and their interdependencies.

Jason Hobbs, Reynhardt Uys, JH-01, SA

The Standard Bank of South Africa is the oldest bank in South Africa with over 1100 branches Internationally, numerous incoming and outgoing call centres, a full array of self service channels and some 50 000 staff globally. Unsurprisingly, over 23 primary systems can be found across staff assisted channels alone.

The first iteration of a Bank wide user experience framework ("The User Interface Design Framework") was completed in March 2009. The purpose: create a unified set of design artifacts to govern, standardise and optimise user experience and interface design across multiple channels to impact some 9 million customers.

We will share the genesis of the project, the process we followed, techniques employed and the deliverables, including: contextual enquiry; user and customer profiles and personas, multi-channel UX design principle creation; customer goal and user task sets; scenario and journey design; multi channel task flows; information architecture design; usability testing; wireframe design; graphical interface design and design standards creation.

The following key themes will be addressed to help illuminate the challenges to be found executing user experience design projects at an enterprise level:

• Designing an experiential and journey based information architecture across multiple channels
• The role of UX design principles at a framework level
• Enterprise legacy and activities required to evangelise and educate user experience design
• The dependency of a UX Framework on a clearly defined customer experience vision and direction
• Interdependencies between multiple enterprise frameworks and architectures and challenges emerging from their differing levels of maturity
• The benefits of a framework (macro level strategic, analytical, design and validation artifacts) for future micro-level, channel bound projects
• Challenges to sustaining an enterprise wide UX Framework

Cristina Lavazza, Invitalia, IT

Is it still possible to project a single device without taking care of complex digital ecosystem? The paper focuses on the challenges of interoperability among physical, digital and mobile worlds in repetitive shopping. Grocery represents a good scope in designing bridge-experiences: it generates powerful physical structures, experimental web architectures, but, most of all, it uses innovative mobile devices.

The paper examines: why e-commerce in grocery isn't still so popular why pushing on mobile tools in customer oriented services.
The supply will customized and the customer will cross through contexts, provided that new systems, able to speak each others, are applied.

In order to build bridge-experiences in grocery sector, there are broad-based tools among the biggest dealers, even if to facilitate life customer, to create fidelity and to beat the competition are their common targets. SPIME objects, RFID, products' geo-localization, conversational interaction, mobile and biometric payment and 3D visualization are the tools that are changing our shopping and are changing the way of exploring/navigating the products. From the shelve to the mobile, the structure changes, tests and models itself on new customer's needs. The common denominator of these services is the smartphone, that bypasses the channel function and turns into catalyst of physical and digital instruments, with the aim to improve our life, overcoming space and time.

The study focus on 3 shopping phases of purchase: a.Before b.During c.After and explores integrated services provided by the different sale channels, from the user experience point of view. We are going to discover increasingly structured models, specifically cut on customers, who actively share contents and multiply the manifold applications, thus strengthening private advantages, visibility and product's distribution.

In the bull's eye there is the consumer, all around a digital complex ecosystem made by new frameworks that are slowly making up.

Olga Revilla, Itakora, ES

When designing complex systems, applications, websites, etc. , accessibility issues must be considered before any single line on the paper. This will allow us to save time, money and gain sustainability in our projects.

People with disabilities requirements and legislation involve restrictions and commitments, not only for us as information architects.

WCAG 2 and WAI-ARIA are open doors for using multimedia components that in WCAG 1 were simply suspected and we must learn how to take advantage of the new capabilities and features.

James Kalbach, Lexis Nexus, D

“Innovation” is a trendy word that gets a lot of attention in the business world these days. Jared Spool has even said, “Innovation is the new black.” Indeed, the buzzability of the term is fairly high, and self-proclaimed innovators abound.

So what does it really mean to be innovative?

This talk first briefly looks at the field of innovation in general. I’ll then focus most of the presentation on human factors involved in the innovation process—namely, how innovations get adopted and why user-centered design is crucial for innovations to succeed.

Adoption of an innovation is a common goal of inventors. That is, we want people in our target groups to actually take notice and use the novel products and tools we create. But having a novel idea is not enough, and there are many reasons for non-adoption, even if financial backing is there.

This presentation will take a detailed look at how user perception of an innovation is as critical in the adoption of an innovation—if not more—than the technology, marketing, or financial support an invention receives. Related advantage, compatibility, and complexity are three such human factors that are critical in the adoption of innovations.

In this light, information architects and user experience researchers play a critical role in the overall innovation process. However, from a business perspective the focus is often on the technical and financial end of innovation. As a result, organisations may be setting themselves up to fail by not considering the human factors that are involved—unnecessarily so.

This talk will look at some practical ways to address the user issues related to innovation.

Sylvie Daumal, Duke, a Razorfish company, FR

How to practice IA when nobody around knows about it? How to work with professionals who have been making websites successfully for years but never heard about UCD? What to do when IA working time on a project is limited from some hours to some days, but is never as long as several weeks? That's some issues you can be facing when you're the first IA in a company. That's some I faced and addressed. To be efficient, you need to be flexible, open-minded, and pragmatic; you have to adapt somehow your methodology and your deliverables; you must focus quickly on the most important points. However, hostile context is not a bad thing. It can be a good pressure to evolve. Furthermore, some induced mutations could become an advantage for the discipline, in particular during crisis times... Re-think team co-operation is also a sane concern - UX hegemony is not a good thing, as well as any other profession's hegemony. It is worthy to let enough space to all in order to create together better products, interfaces, experiences. This presentation aims at sharing some solutions, tracks or tips, and show how IA can be practiced in a different way from what we can learn in theoretical books.

Core IA related issues: methodology, deliverables and co-operation with team. Target audience: junior IAs and IAs practicing in countries/companies where UCD is not widespread. Reflecting the theme: 'beyond structure'- challenging and changing usual structures (of methodology, team organization, deliverables) is a way to make the discipline evolved and to keep the practice living.

Reinoud Bosman, Joe Lamantia, Philips, Media Catalyst, NL

How can digital designers create architectures for emotions, the most powerful part of human experience?

One example of an experience architecture that creates an emotional environment by combining game elements and complex social interactions is the cross-media hybrid formed by the popular Killzone games and their companion site Killzone.com.

The Killzone environment allows active game players and community members to move back and forth between game and web experiences, with simultaneous awareness of and connection to people and events in both settings. The game console and web site experiences work in concert to enhance gameplay with sophisticated social dynamics, and provide an active community destination that is 'synchronized' with events in the game in real time.

Leading games researcher and designer Nicole Lazzaro calls these hybrid experiences 'Massively Social On-line Games'. In these types of interactive experiences, players build meaningful histories for individual characters and groups of all sizes through competitive and cooperative interactions that take place in the linked game and community contexts. Game mechanisms and social architecture elements are designed to encourage the accumulation of shared experiences, group identities, and collective histories. Over time, designers hope shared experiences will serve as the basis for a body of social memory.

This case study examines the design and architecture of Killzone and Killzone.com. , revisiting major business and design decisions in context, examining the changing nature of the community, and considering the lessons learned at each stage of the development of this early example of the next generation of massively social on-line game.

Cennydd Bowles, Clearleft , UK

We've got pretty good at helping people find their way through today's digital world. Information architecture, taking cues from physical architecture, has built a toolkit of wayfinding aids including menus, breadcrumbs, signage. But things are about to get a lot more interesting.

The boundaries between the abstract digital world and the real physical world are becoming blurred. GPS has made the A-Z map redundant. RFID chips will soon enable a world of "spimes", where our environment can tell us all about itself and how we should interact with it. Geolocation offers an immersive augmented reality where data combines with space in revolutionary ways. Our landmarks are now both physical and digital. One day, a church spire; the next, a WiFi cloud. Our old wayfinding methods will soon be as outdated as the sextant.

Even now, people are beginning to use new technology to annotate and enrich their surroundings. Location-driven technology is most powerful in the hands of local users, and it is our responsibility as designers to ensure that these systems are accessible, collaborative and safe.

Given this quantum leap, we need new approaches to wayfinding, information scent and navigation. This session will explore how we can we use information architecture to shape the chaos. How can we design systems for both the digital and physical world that allow users to orientate themselves, understand the choices available, and feel at home?

Participants will take away a new understanding of the exciting challenges ahead of us, including the role of mobile devices, the ubiquitous information age, and the privacy implications of our new location-critical lives.