The cluster of practices and professions we’ve come to think of as supporting User-Experience Design is still a new, strange territory for many of us. How does a person’s discipline define that person’s work? What skills, methods and tools should be the purview of a given role? It turns out that these are age-old issues among communities of “learning and doing,” i.e., “communities of practice.”

The communities of practice model gives us a better language for discussing our roles, our work and the future of our respective practices and disciplines. It also gives us a useful way of thinking about how to design for particular kinds of collaboration, especially emergent, collective work in support of improving a practice.

In this session, you will:

* Explore the meaning and importance of a “community of practice.”

* Discover ways in which the community of practice model is more relevant now than ever before.

* Learn how a working understanding of a community of practice can improve the ways in which user-experience practitioners work together.

About Andrew Hinton

Andrew has been designing for digital environments of one kind or another since 1991. Currently he is a senior information architect in the User Experience Group of Vanguard, and he’s also a co-founding member of the Information Architecture Institute. In the past, he has done IA-related work for companies such as American Express, Sealy, Wachovia, Shaw and Kimberly-Clark.

Andrew regularly speaks and writes about user-experience design, and he also blogs about information architecture, design and more at Inkblurt.