Result of IA Summit: 22 pages of notes, 400 friends

The IA Summit 2005 just ended and I feel great!

Andrew Dillon gave the closing plenary and boy, was I looking forward to it! The title was "Who's afraid of Big IA" and you know how I feel about Big IA. Andrew sees a place for Big IA, or macro IA as he calls it, as a profession that builds on craft knowledge, needs academic institutions to provide the necessary education at the highest level, that builds on user research, and is values based (not just value based).
Central to his talk was the notion that our work, our designs, will turn into experiences that have human consequences.
Other statements from his talk that I found interesting were:

• IA is a craft profession and craft knowledge means there's room for customization in each project
• we need academic research to be transformed into applicable models (Andrew said this is the role of academics but I think it's a co-ordinated effort by academics and practitioners)
• "I didn't come here to navigate"

Several times Andrew referred to our ethics, and I think there's a role for the IA Institute to pick this up, just like ACM did with their Code of Ethics for its members.

My notes on the closing plenary were just 1 page out of the 22 pages that I filled in my notepad. I am not sure if writing them all up and creating a trip report will be very useful, but I am certain that I will refer to things that I've heard here in my postings in the coming months. Some highlights:

• I stil have to find a place in my head for BJ Fogg's keynote about persuasive technologies.
• I loved the attention that the business aspects of design got, and I have to update my t-model (see update below) after the IAI Advisory Board meeting.
• It was also great to see that a team at Yahoo! had implemented a working pattern library, pretty much following the model that I proposed for Nokia in a previous life.
  

What was really great about this Summit (and remember this was just my second one!) is the number of people I actually knew, either from the previous summit or simply from online conversation. And the funny things is: many of them came to me to shake my hand and I felt honoured, recognized somehow. It was all I needed in return for co-organizing the thing.
Thank you my friends, all 400 of you!

Update (march 21, 2005): meanwhile, the t-model has been updated.