SILBERBAUER SAYS:

EUROIA 06 Day One  

Klaus Silberbauer / Tuesday, October 03, 2006

EUROIA2006

So. Finally home from Berlin and from EUROIA 06. It took some time to get home, though, as SAS had grotesquely overbooked our flight. I, one colleague and two other Danes had to rent a car to get home in time for meetings Monday morning.

Why is it that SAS feels that it's ok to sell more tickets than there are seats on the flight? And to overbook a small 72 seats De Havilland with (at least) 4 passengers is down right unethical gambling with my precious spare time. I'm expecting SAS Customer Service to refund my almost DKK 3.500 for a rental car, ferry and diesel very quickly and with an apology.

This is excactly why I deliberately never flies Ryan Air or any other discount airline. But I guess it doesn't matter - obviously they're all amateurs who can't count.

Anyway: The EUROIA 06 was great. The logistics super, the premises at Hotel Maritim ProArte very good (although Italian design and Berlin pop art do not blend beautifully :-) and Eric Reiss was as always a great host. Simply put: The geist of EUROIA 06 was high!

And how was the presentations? Well, one or two of the presenters could work on their English communication skills, and a single one of them simply should have stayed off stage. But that's minor stuff - EUROIA 06 was without a doubt a great succes and we all had a good time discussing our practice with fellow IA's from all over Europe.

We (I and 3 colleagues from Creuna) reached Berlin four o'clock friday and met with a group of conference attendees for happy hour at the Barist bar at the Hackescher Markt. Even though the beer flowed slowly at the start (the bar's fault, definately not the hosts'!) it was a happy couple of happy hours. Thanks to FatDUX and ÙI for hosting this event.

Later on most of us had dinner at a Vietnamese place across the street - nice folks, great talks.

Day One

Day one was the less great day of the EUROIA 06. Morville and Reiss did great but most of the other presentation was not above average.

Saturday started off with Peter Morville's key note. He talked about his new book on ambient findability and stressed that search will become even more important in the future and that too little effort is put into site search. Ambient findability is about finding what you need when you need it, no matter where you are. We are not there yet, but as tagging becomes more populare, more focus is put on meta data and as search engines continues to improve we're getting closer.

Eric Reiss told us about seven main trends in information architecture and that we must be careful that strategic IA and tactical IA do not loose touch. We don't want those strategic business IA guys to define our practice without having tried to do real, hands on IA. Is this a threat to our profession? Well, maybe. But as long as we have a hard time defining our own practice we can hardly blame people for taking the IA way of thinking to the strategic level can we? We have to be aware, though, that IA doesn't turn into yet another MBA kind of buzz word.

"The Strategic IA" was the title of Olly Wright's presentation. Mr. Wright is one of the IA's that've gone strategic, and maybe Mr. Reiss is right after all: It's dangerous to loose touch with the hands on IA. I felt that Mr. Wright didn't get down to business but simply stated all the right things to do as an IA strategist: IA's must understand how the client's business works, know the roles of all the stakeholders, do all the right analysis, say all the right words, do the ROI calculations and so on and so forth. The IA must be an economist, a designer, a leader, a consultant and on top of that a very decent human being. It's all true but it's too much - too vaguely defined.

Ariel Guersenzvaig talked about persuadability on commercial sites. Too me there was nothing new in this talk but I agree with Guersenzvaig that all websites should be thinking in terms of conversion. Not a bad presentation at all but maybe a bit shallow for a professional IA audience.

The first panel - "A Place for IA Deliverables" clearly showed that the chosen panel format did not work. Too much time was lost on the panellist presenting themselves and the panel never really got going. I think that the committee should reconsider this format. Larisa Warnke from Carlson Marketing did good but the panel as such ended up talking about proces models more than deliverables.

Digital UK - Re-engineering the Content Architecture to Communicate the UK's Move to Digital Television was just another case story. It was simply a presentation of your every day web design case with too much focus on average page layout. Maybe if Harvey Turner had talked more about the process and less about the very average page design it could have been more engaging.

In one of the more hard core presentations Luca Rosati, Emanuele Quintarelli and Andrea Resmini told us about their research project on combining facets and tags into a social tagging system. By using facets to enrich the one-dimensional tag clouds information can be retrieved more easily. To be honest, especially Luca Rosati was very hard to understand and I may have missed some important stuff. It's an interesting piece of work but I can't help thinking of systems like iBox from Interse that already uses facet schemes combined with automatic and manual tagging but in a more dynamic and customizable way that shown here. This has already been done and implemented but nevertheless: It's exciting stuff that - but the presentation needed coherence and clarity.

To round of day one came the guy that I think should've saved his plane fair and stayed home in the Netherlands. Almar van der Krogt proposed a "challenge" to the IA community: To build a "webmark" or piece of "virreal architecture". He feels that no websites are like the real skyscrabers and that we need sites that stands out in the same way as reality's land marks. Maybe we do - but not in the way Krogt thinks, because he is right in one thing: Websites are not sky scrabers and they never will be. EBay, Google, del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr, Yahoo, Amazon, and so one already do stand out. But their not pretty, Krogt says. Who are you to decide, Mr. Krogt?

I'm sorry but I have to be rude here: This was pure BS presented in a corny ninetiesish powerpoint design. It's great that anyone have the guts to get on stage and tell us and Peter Morville that we are no good, but this was done without any knowledge of the field, without any irony and without Krogt having the slightest clue of what he wanted to achieve besides hearing himself speak. Krogt - or anyone - may attack my work, my profession and my person at any time, but please do a bit of research before doing so.

And so day one was at an end. We joined the poster session (the presentation of Swipr was interesting, but it sure doesn't beat Axure) and then went for Indian food at Amrits. Ok food, questionable service.

My post about day two to follow soon.