Yes, it has been almost a week since the IA Summit finished and I am only now posting my wrap up (the long back-story combines a long flight, my birthday, a server rebuild, an office reorganisation and waitressing - you don’t want to know).

I attend a lot of conferences and the IA Summit is by far my favourite. It has to be - I wouldn’t offer to be program chair for something I didn’t care deeply about.

My IA Summit experiences fall into three categories (yes, I am an IA): content, personal and life/business:

My favourite content experiences were:

• Joshua Prince-Ramus’ keynote which showed how function contributes to form, how end-to-end design process works and great visualisations
• Again doing the IA Slam, and again spending more time watching how teams work together than producing the deliverable
• Andrew Hinton’s presentation was great - he did an excellent job talking about communities of practice, how to design for them and wrapped up the discussion about whether IA is a community of practice or a discipline. This was particularly neat as I think the three elements met the needs of a large proportion of the audience
• Remembering that much of the world is not like me, in Jason Hobbs’ Communal computing and shared spaces of usage: a study of Internet Cafes in developing contexts
• Seeing Grant Campbell combine a research paper with observations from the conference (this was amazing)

Personal:

• Hanging out with Lynn, Mags, Eric, Chris, Matthew & Dan (I have this niggling bad feeling about mentioning just a few people out of everyone I like, but I have hung out with these guys for 3-4 conferences and they are fab!)
• Standing on the edge of the grand canyon
• Being introduced to Escargot & Thai tea (in separate meals!)
• Talking about name dropping with name-dropees
• Looking around at lunch on the first day and seeing 500 people in animated discussion
• Being amazed at how many people went out of their way to stop and say thanks for the work I did
• Talking to my family every day for as long as we liked (and knowing it wasn’t costing much)
• Doing the ‘Star Trek Experience’ with skeptical, grown-up Trekkies (and squealing & jumping out of my seat)
• Meeting Andrew Hinton face-to-face (we had previously met only in Second Life)
• Having a couple of people ask about my Fair Trade T-shirt

For the life/business category, the IA Summit always feels like the start to my work year. It is a chance to stop barelling along, think about what I do, what I like and what it means. I have made the most significant career decisions at this conference - in 2004 I realised how connected I was to this community; in 2005 I realised I wasn’t doing what I wanted and quit my consulting job; in 2006 I realised that university study wasn’t giving me what I needed and quit in order to study what I wanted. This year’s decision was not so profound, but solid (I’ll elaborate further tomorrow but would like to say thanks to Jared, Dan, Lou, & Ant for kicking me in the pants).

See you next year!

Technorati tag: IASummit2007

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