Kainos Experience Design goes to Euro IA 2018
Why go to EuroIA?
EuroIA is a European Information Architecture conference that is held in a different European city every year. Now in its 14th year and held in Dublin, it’s a conference I’ve had my eye on for some time and is one of the most well-respected events with regards to Information Architecture in Europe, if not the world. It attracts many experienced and knowledgeable designers to present and attend, and I was looking forward to everything I would learn there.
Humanogy?
This year’s topic was Humanogy, not Humanology we were corrected, although few could pronounce Humanogy correctly. It focuses on the merging of the physical and digital worlds, the idea of using technology to support and enhance the human experience.
Themes from the conference
EuroIA is a multi-track conference, so while this means that sometimes there are difficult decisions to be made when choosing between two talks that are on at the same time, it also means there is rarely a time where I wasn’t interested in any of the talks.
The over-arching theme of the talks that I attended was that of making your company, or on the project your working on, become more user centered.
Some of the speakers approached this by talking about looking at conceptual and service models to communicate and plan projects. Some spoke about leveraging language and communication to encourage thinking about the people who will use the system, while others gave how-to presentations of how they actually achieved it in their company.
It was interesting to see how they all pointed to getting the whole company or project focused on the human as the centre of the service.
To infinity and beyond
An excellent talk on the first day was from Amy Ross who designs space suits for astronauts at NASA. She spoke about the process for designing space suits, the myriad of human elements that they need to consider that wouldn’t be on most of our radars, and the rigorous testing that they need to go through. She also spoke candidly, and with a fair amount of dark humour, about the importance of this design and testing process. “Our job is to keep astronauts alive, if we do this wrong, people die”, that put a lot of other work into perspective.
Being a sci-fi fan, I particularly enjoyed this talk and was one of my highlights of the conference.
Don’t tell me, show me
I’ve been to a few conferences before, but this is the first one that had workshops with an equal weighting to talks. While I found the talks informative, useful, and entertaining, I got so much more I could use from the workshops. There is definitely a lot of truth in the phrase “Don’t tell me, show me”.
The workshop that I go the most from was “Mapping Service Ecosystems” which involved looking at the bigger, holistic ecosystem that your service sits within, and how to apply different lenses in order to focus on, and identify, different connections.
Leaving the room for lunch, I could see how I could immediately apply that to areas of the project that I was currently working on, and how it could help with other project if used from the beginning.
Government representatives
Something that surprised me from talking to many of the attendees, was how many where involved in working in some way with government. I met representatives from the Irish and Norwegian governments, as well as overhearing others talking about working with the Australian government and listening to a talk from a speaker who had worked with the Swedish government. It’s wonderful to see that governments all over the world are taking the design of their systems so seriously and putting their citizens at the centre of their services.
Will I be back?
I would definitely return to EuroIA and will be recommending attending to the rest of the Kainos design team as well. I think it would be even more beneficial for the wider team for multiple members to attend so that they could take part in multiple workshops and talks that are on at the same time.
Pictures, videos and slides from the conference are available at the EuroIA 2018 Medium page.
In Kainos Experience Design we’re encouraged to do our best work, continually learn and share our experiences. If this sounds like your kind of team, check out our career opportunities.
