Board of Directors Biographies
Andrea Resmini, President
Jönköping, Sweden: Andrea is an information architect with FatDUX, a UX firm withheadquarters in Copenhagen, and a researcher at the University of Borås, Sweden. An ICT professional since 1989 and a practising information architect since 1999, Andrea holds a PhD in Legal Informatics and a MA in Architecture and Industrial Design. He pretends to play the piano, reads far too many books, chairs the Italian IA Summit, and co-founded the Journal of Information Architecture.
Read about Andrea at http://andrearesmini.com.
Dan Klyn, Treasurer
Ann Arbor, MI, USA: Dan Klyn is a student, teacher and practitioner of information architecture: his ongoing research focus is to understand and interpret the work of IA-pioneer Richard Saul Wurman, and he teaches the IA course at the University of Michigan School of Information. Dan's academic background is in librarianship and creative writing, and his practice has spanned the course of twelve years in a variety of agency, "innie" and "outie" contexts. He currently works as an independent IA consultant and online commerce strategist.
Jeff Parks, Secretary
Ottawa, Canada: I am an Information Architect and User Experience professional with a background in Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology. Over my 15 year career, I have worked with public, private, and non-profit organizations.
In addition to user experience, I have an extensive background in the field of e-learning. I successfully wrote a Microsoft Certified Training (MCT) program that taught the concepts of adult learning theory, planning, communication, motivation, and training delivery. The program was adopted by Microsoft as a benchmark against which all other MCT programs were measured.
I presented at the 2011 Information Architecture Summit in Denver and was the Closing Keynote at the Polish IA Summit in Warsaw Poland in 2012. I continue to guest lecture at universities and colleges in Canada and through Follow The UX Leader, which I co-created with Kris Mausser.
Over the past five years, I have interviewed leading thinkers and authors in web and mobile design from companies like Google, Adaptive Path, Rosenfeld Media, Morgan Kaufmann and New Riders on podcasts for popular design conferences and industry webzines like Johnny Holland and Boxes and Arrows. I graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in Psychology and a minor in Social Work, and hold a post-grad diploma in Information Technology.
Chris Baum
San Francisco, CA, USA: My 14-year career in IA and UX Design would not be half of what it is without the IA community and the IAI. While I am not the most active participant in the online space, I am an active member of the community as a long-time mentor and the Editor-in-Chief of Boxes & Arrows.
I am currently a freelance design consultant, after many years as Designer and Product Manager for companies large and small. My projects ask me to act in several capacities, from Senior UX Designer to Creative Lead to Mentor of internal teams. In my work, I promote the wise use of technology through the thoughtful design of systems and questioning the impetus to adopt ever more tools.
Laura Creekmore
Nashville, TN, USA: Laura Creekmore is president of Creek Content [http://creekcontent.com], a consultancy focused on content strategy and information architecture for organizations in highly regulated fields like health care and financial services. She speaks both tech and marketing but lives in the no-man's-land between the two. Recent Creek Content projects include the development and implementation of the content strategy for a private personal health improvement site, and the content development and community engagement strategy for a software company’s customer support community. Creekmore blogs about content strategy and way more than you'd care to know about copyright law at http://lauracreekmore.com.
Dorian Taylor
Vancouver, Canada: Hi there, you probably haven't heard of me and I can all but guarantee you we haven't met.
That's because I've never written a book and never been to the typical conferences (yet, in both cases). And that is because up until very recently my business card has read "developer" at a bunch of companies that are defunct or close to it. Specifically I wrote hosted, enterprise and infrastructure software, the most dismal, plodding and paranoid kind.
What prompted my change in career was noticing a set of common characteristics in the kind of software I wrote. First, it was of critical value to the business. Second, the non-redundant nugget of original functionality was actually surprisingly small. Third, to achieve that nugget, an absurd amount of resources get spent. Fourth and finally, it is equally likely that an absurd amount of resources will be spent anyway, with very little to show for it.
I reasoned that if we made clarity a priority and had better methods of achieving it, we wouldn't fumble as much, or at the very least the fumbling we did wouldn't be so expensive. Any software is a long and precise incantation of a business process, either one that came before it or one made possible because of it. It is language with behaviour.
Software is capable of directly impacting peoples' lives for better or for worse, and its influence will only increase. It has become my professional mission to unmuddy software, both in the process of its acquisition and its results, and enable people to make it work effectively for them.
Shari Thurow
Greater Chicago Area: Shari Thurow has been a practitioner of effective information architecture (IA) and user-centered design (UCD) since 1995.
Since 1999, Shari has been a world-renowned speaker on the topics of search-friendly design, successful site architecture, and SEO & usability. Shari is currently pursuing her doctorate degree in Library and Information Sciences with a specialty in human/computer interfaces.
Shari is the founder of Omni Marketing Interactive, a full-service search engine optimization (SEO), website usability, information architecture, and web design firm. She is the author of Search Engine Visibility, which has been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Polish. The book teaches site owners how to build/optimize a website for people who use search engines.
She is also the co-author of When Search Meets Web Usability, which teaches how to bridge the gap between search results and your website. Guess what that gap is? An effective information architecture.
This page was last modified on April 26, 2011 09:10 PM.