Design Matters

The American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) held the first European Information Architecture Summit, Building Communities, at the Tulip Inn, Brussels, Belgium, 15-16 October 2005.

The objective of the Summit was to build the IA community in Europe by bringing together a number of disciplines and practitioner communities in a stimulating environment for debate with opportunities to establish cooperation. This community is not limited by language or region, and encompasses specialisations including designing for mobile devices and multilingual solutions.

Examples of activities of community members include, but are not limited to, developing the IA practice in an organisation or country by documenting methods, applying IA principles to European-focused platforms, providing multilingual solutions and designing devices like interactive TV or mobile devices. The goal was to explore work concerning new features, design elements, methods or processes, controversial topics, and work in progress. The call for papers was posted in June, 2005 by the ID-IA SIG.

The Interaction Design Group (IxDG)–an association that serves the needs of the international community of practitioners, teachers, and students of interaction design–launched the IxDG Resource Library in May, 2005 at http://resources.ixdg.org.

The IxDG Resource Library is a repository of information about interaction design (IxD) that the IxDG community has created. It includes documents, compilations of discussions from the Ixd Discussion mailing list, and descriptions of and links to many interaction design resources on the Web. IxDG members may also comment on resources and contribute items to the Library. This notice was originally posted in 2005.

In April, 2005 a new book, visuosT by Clemens Lango, was  published. This work will be of interest to developers and designers of interactive systems, user interfaces, hypermedia systems, system architects, and people dealing with knowledge work systems: http://visuos.com (originally posted in 2005).

LAP — the Language-Action Perspective on Communication Modeling— is a theoretical orientation toward solving these design challenges that has been taken up by an international, multi-disciplinary community of researchers and practitioners. A conference was held June 19 to 20, 2005, in Kiruna, Lapland, Sweden. This notice was originally posted in 2005.

LAP emphasizes the importance of interaction and communication in designing useable, useful, and legitimate information systems. LAP recognizes that language is not only used for exchanging information, as in reports or statements, but that language is used to perform actions, as in promises, orders, requests, and declarations. Such actions are the foundation of communities and organisations and must be understood to create effective systems. This insight has profound implications for the theory and practice of designing systems to support organisational and community processes.

So far, 9 successful gatherings of scholars and practitioners interested in the Language-Action Perspective (LAP) have been held in the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Canada and USA. For more information, visit http://www.vits.org/LAP2005