Conferences and Events

This year’s IA Summit, themed “Breaking New Ground,” seemed to have the right mix of new and returning folks, a nice variety of interesting and well-attended pre-conference workshops and several tracks of presentations to suit the IA of every flavor.

The second day of the IA Summit dawned with rain and storm clouds. But the weather cleared, the presentations were inspiring and by the end of the day, each of us returned back to our lives recharged and eager to build on what we had learned.

What is Dublin Core? And why would you need a whole conference about it? The end of September and beginning of October brought representatives from various countries around the world to a sunny and warm Seattle, Washington, host of the 2003 Dublin Core Conference.

While most technology conferences are an immersion in the nitty-gritty of the technology with little thought about how that technology will ultimately be used, Bob Baxley notes that the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference was refreshingly concerned with the uses of new technology.

Spring is in the air and 400 +/- IAs are gathered together for networking, knowledge sharing, drinking, schmoozing, eating and drinking. It must be the annual ASIST IA Summit. Held in Portland, Oregon this year, the summit was well attended and seemed to be just what the doctor ordered. Check out the events from Friday night and Saturday, March 22.

Despite the beginning of a war and major roads shut down by war protesters, folks managed to gather from around the world to rub elbows with their own kind—just the thing for a conference with the theme “Making Connections”. Check out the events from Sunday, March 23.

The Usability Professionals Association (UPA) 2002 Annual Conference was held July 8-12 in Orlando, Florida. Three attendees from the UPA-MN chapter in the Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota area cover some of the sessions they found most notable during the 5-day conference.

Meeting last weekend in Las Vegas, the city of designed experiences, the AIGA Experience Design group came together to discuss how Experience Design can be better integrated into business and how the practice has evolved and adapted over the last year.

The first-ever CHI-AIGA Experience Design Forum was greeted with a real Minnesota welcome. Snow. Several inches of it. But inside the Minneapolis Convention Center there was a warm sense of camaraderie among the Forum attendees, who came in from both the CHI and AIGA communities, a hopeful sign for future collaboration among the two groups, as well as the practitioners they represent.