IA Summit 2005
Summit Organizer Biographies
David Ballantine is currently finishing his MLIS degree at the University of Washington Information School. While attending the iSchool Dave worked as a research assistant for the Gateway to Educational Materials metadata project and as a consultant on various IA jobs in the Seattle area. Dave will be joining the Lux Group, a Seattle based creative consultancy, as Senior Information Architect upon completion of his degree.
Peter Boersma is the senior information architect for EzGov, a worldwide leader in innovative software that transforms the business of government. His formal and continuously updated training in Human Computer Interaction is combined with 9 years of planning, analysis, navigation design, functional design, UI design, and usability evaluation of (mostly online) interactive applications. He has several years of experience with project management, department management and consulting. Peter is an active member of international usability, information architecture and user experience networks, and he organizes IA Cocktail Hours in his hometown, Amsterdam.
Richard Dalton manages one of the Information Architecture teams at Vanguard. He and his team work closely with business units to determine the functionality and organization of Vanguard's websites. Richard has been in the United States with Vanguard for 6 years, before that he lived in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North of England where he was a co-owner of a leading UK Web Consultancy.
Andrew Dillon is Dean and Professor in the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin. Educated as a social and cognitive psychologist in Ireland and the UK, he has consulted widely in the software industry both in the US and Europe, published extensively on IA and HCI and served on the editorial boards of several leading journals. He writes a regular column on IA for the ASIST Bulletin and recently authored the second edition of his book, Designing Usable Electronic Text.
Margaret Hanley is the Executive Producer of Core Products as the BBC, with responsibility for the creation and management of search and navigation products. She is an information architect by profession, originally from Melbourne, Australia.
David Heller is currently the Principal Designer of a rapidly growing Internet-based on-demand service provider for the financial and pharmaceutical communities' IntraLinks, Inc. (www.intralinks.com) -- based out of New York, NY, USA. He came to this position with 10 years experience in designing and implementing web-based applications for companies like Documentum, AT&T, Sony, EMI, National Discount Brokers, and Prudential.
Dave is also one of 3 founding steering committee members of The Interaction Design Group (IxDG) where his primary duty is the running of the groups public discussion list http://discuss.ixdg.org/. For more about Dave you can go to http://synapticburn.com/ where besides photos of his travels around the world, you can find out what he thinks about organizing the User Experience community, and his latest critique on the wonderful interaction design of Apple.
In other previous lives Dave has been a Middle East activist, English teacher, and farm hand (kibbutz in Israel). He misses his deadhead days of play guitar and devil sticks on the street to make money, and playing in his band back in Israel.
Scott Hirsch's passion is helping companies realize their creative potential by building product development processes that value innovation and lead to successful project execution. His design philosophy is based on empowering people – experience he acquired during six years as a social entrepreneur designing innovative youth service programs. Immediately prior to founding MIG, Scott was Business Strategist for Adaptive Path. His past clients include PlanetOut, Network Appliance, Blogger, Hitachi Data Systems, and Dow Corning.
An avid inquisitive, Scott was lead researcher and principal author of "Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience," an in-depth study of how five global companies financially value their design investments. He has an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and has been a featured speaker at Bay CHI, the IA Summit, AIGA's DUX, WebVisions, and Adaptive Path's User Experience Week.
Keith Instone is an information architect on the ibm.com User Experience Design Team. He works on a wide range of projects including user interface standards, user experience strategy, taxonomies, and information architecture methodology. Keith is known professionally for UsableWeb.com, SIGCHI volunteer work, as one of the early employees of Argus Associates, and an IA Summit old-timer. Today Keith concentrates his professional activities on UXnet, a group of individuals encouraging collaboration across a wide range of user experience fields. See http://user-experience.org for more about Keith.
Livia currently serves on the AIfIA Board of Directors and is active in the field. She led the AIfIA initiative to translate many seminar documents into other languages and make them freely available. She has performed IA in Brazil, and currently works as a design manager at Comcast in Philadelphia.
Jeff Lash is a User Experience Architect for Elsevier, working on the design of electronic products for Health Sciences consumers. He has written for Boxes and Arrows and Digital Web Magazine, and is a co-founder and member of the Board of Advisors of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture (AIfIA). Jeff lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
Mike Lee is Acting Director of Client Services in the Web Strategy and Operations group at AARP Services, Inc., the for-profit subsidiary of AARP. He is responsible for the client-facing team that manages the web site content, message boards and e-mail newsletters of AARP.org. Mike is also actively engaged in projects with AARP innovation partners such as the MIT Media Lab's Simplicity Consortium and Stanford's Media X Program. Prior to joining AARP, Mike was the first information architect in the Corporate eBusiness group at AIG, one of the world's largest insurance companies. Mike was also an accomplished instructor in graphic design and production at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore where he taught classes in graphic design and web production for 10 years.
Brett Lider is an User Experience Designer, where he deals with the daily grind of integrating user needs, technical constraints, and business needs into requirement documents for subsequent de-scoping. He has been the lead Designer for sites such as Cisco Systems, Chemdex, and Eveo.com. On the Cisco.com project, Brett dabbled in data modeling and functional analysis while double-majoring in metadata and sitewide navigation systems. Brett studied Cognitive Science at the University of Virginia, worked for Razorfish for good spell, and has just started at Google. His current passions revolve around e-commerce and the integration of new technologies to make user experiences better and to empower users with more choice.
Brett is a regular speaker at industry events, is a member of several industry associations, and has authored an article on metadata-based website construction. Websites he has contributed to have been nominated for industry awards, including The Webby's, and received attention from industry analysts.
Donna Maurer is a senior member of the Step Two Designs consulting team, and a specialist in usability and IA techniques. Step Two Designs is an Australian consultancy specialising in information architecture, usability, intranets and content management. Donna is very active in the IA and UX communities – she is in her second year on the IA Summit planning committee, co-leads the AIfIA mentoring initiative, is a local ambassador for UXNet, a local representative for CHISIG, and organiser of her local Intranet-Peers group.
James Melzer has worked in information architecture since 2000. He has helped customers in government, education, and non-profit with experience design, CV development, application design, navigation design, page layout, and usability. He has taught classes at AARP and the University of Maryland, where he received his MLS and MA. James has presented at the American Association for History and Computing Conference, won a web award from the National Council on Public History, and gave a poster at the Society of American Archivists Conference. In a previous life, James was a professional historian. James is an active member of ASIST, DC-IA and AIFIA.
Peter Merholz is a founding partner of Adaptive Path, a premier user experience consulting company. He is an experienced information architect, writer, speaker, and leader in the field of user experience design.
Peter is a regular speaker at Web design and information architecture conferences, such as ASIS&T’s Information Architecture Summits (years 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004). He keynoted both the Institute of Design’s 2003 About With and For conference, and 2004 SIGCHI.NL, the premiere Dutch HCI conference.
Louis Rosenfeld is an independent information architecture consultant who has helped numerous Fortune 500s and other large, messy, political enterprises address their information architecture headaches. He is co-author of "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web". Lou is co-founder of AIfIA and UXnet, and was program chair for the first two IA Summits. He blogs at www.louisrosenfeld.com
Allen Rotz is a technical writer in Washington, DC. Having a congenital lack of patience, he readily empathizes with people trying to accomplish a task but who don’t have the necessary tools or information. His motto is better and easier not more junk and complexity.
Stacy Surla is an information architect with over 20 years experience in web development, multimedia production, and project planning. She is a major fan of ASIST and accepted the chair of the 2005 Summit Planning Committee out of devotion, not hubris. She is a founding member of the Washington, D.C. area IA group, DCIA. A former performance artist, Stacy is interested in the thresholds between participation and observation, or how to coax the audience into crossing the fourth wall and then getting them to go back again.
Thomas has a broad background in information management, which encompasses information architecture, interaction design, and information design. Thomas has spoken on information architecture, interaction design, accessibility, web standards, and user-centered design at IA Summit, STC, SXSW, Design Engaged, and various workshops. Thomas was part of the group that founded Boxes and Arrows, Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture, and is currently on the Steering Committee for the Web Standards Project.
Javier works as Information Architecture Consultant across the US, he started working as IA practitioner in Chile for a variety of large-scale website and intranet projects. He's also affiliated with the Center for Web Research at Universidad de Chile and has taught at the University of Maine. Besides his practitioner and academic roles, he has been an active participant in all types projects to grow the field, including the IA Institute and its Advisory Board, the Technical Committee for the ASIS&T IA Summit, and especially, leading the local community of IAs in Chile and Latin America. Before becoming a full-time IA, Javier studied Social Communication and specialized in Graphic Design. In his late school years, he chose to focus on the web as an emerging media that could change the way we live. He then learned web development, and practiced as Graphic Designer and Web Developer for some years before using the same tools from his education into the new field of Information Architecture.
updated: 03/02/05