Boxes and Arrows Podcast

Samantha Bailey, the 2009 IA Summit Chair, tells Chris Baum about how she approached creating this year’s IA Summit program, the how the Summit community has morphed over time, and what it means to be a part of this community of practice.

Part 1 of the series focuses on the web based form where the user experience is critical before the user enters the application. The various aspects include a good entry point into a form which determines if users stay or leave.

Based on theories of meaningful learning and education, Co-Founder and Associate Director at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), Alberto Canas presents a software tool that allows users to collaborate in the construction of shared knowledge models based on concept maps, which are used worldwide by users of all disciplines and ages, from elementary school students to NASA scientists.

Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of digging through nested menus buried inside subpanes of dialogs, we could just talk to our computers in plain language? Sure it would, but computer scientists have long since proven that such “natural language processing” can’t be done.

We are interacting with technology in an exploding number of forms. “Traditional” computers, cell phones, pocket PDAs, game systems, gesture-based input, store kiosks and checkouts, and much more. How do people learn new technology? By subconsciously learning the language of interaction and applying that language when learning something new.

Jason Fried is the co-founder and President of 37signals, a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based tools possible with the least number of features necessary. 37signals’ products include Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire, Ta-da List, and Writeboard.

Jesse talks about the technology trends that will shape the future Web, outlines the challenges of designing a future product, and takes the audience for a behind the scenes look at the creation of the Aurora concept video.

When we look through the lenses of society (how we connect), mobility (how to move) and sustainability (how we consume), we realize that the world has changed dramatically in the last couple of years.

The book as a form factor has been around for about 2,000 years, since Julius Caesar first decided to fold up a scroll, accordion-style, and mark the pages for later reference. In 1455, Aldus Manutius was the first to publish the portable paperback, and it has remained relatively unchanged since.

Context. It’s everywhere. No, really, you can’t move without bumping into the stuff. But it used to be that we at least had a grasp of what context we were in at any given time. We were either here, or there. But technology has radically changed what it means to be “here” or “there,” and has brought some challenging design problems along with it.