Core77

Last Thursday and Friday's NYC-themed IDEA Conference marked a two-day dose of, well, ideas--some mighty thought-provoking ones at that. Although this was only the second iteration of IDEA, it became crystal clear that any designer, information architect, user experience designer--really any creative problem solver in general--would benefit from an event such as this. "Designing complex information spaces of all kinds" applies to a whole slew of us, especially those who believe that good design can span multiple disciplines with clear, continuous function and style.

A truly diverse group of speakers shared their compelling experiences and concepts involving the "design" of information. Anthropologist, educator, and Technorati chart-topper (The Machine is Us/ing Us) Michael Wesch's kick-off presentation set the bar sky high with a bold and intelligent presentation concerning the need to properly prepare our youth for a fast-paced, exponentially developing digital world. David Rose of Ambient technologies and Mike Kuniavsky of ThingM discussed digital information architecture applied to the physical world--more specifically product design. Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, of IBM's research lab, presented Many Eyes, a public, open-source visualization tool that brings compelling info-graphics to anyone's fingertips, as long as they've got a data set. Rachel Abrams thoroughly reviewed the TAXI 07 project, Chenda Fruchter gave us a backstage pass to New York's 311 service, Sylvia Harris schooled us on the challenges in wayfinding, and Jake Barton of Local Projects discussed the soon-to-be-realized 9-11 Memorial and Museum.

A nice wrap-up involved all speakers up on stage with an open dialog with the audience. Peter Merholz, who hosted the event, has a sweet snapshot, literally, of communal concluding thoughts. In the end, everyone left with a brain-full of rich information, and yes, certainly some new ideas for sure.

IDEA 2007 photos by Bryan Haggerty