My salute to the Italian Information Architecture Summit

I was sadly unable to attend the Italian IA Summit again this year, but I agreed to make some introductory remarks via Skype. This was done at midnight my time last week, as Thursday turned into Friday. In Pisa, it was 8 am (more or less) and the conference was just getting started. I could feel the excitement and energy behind the scenes as we got the technology sorted out.

Andrea Resmini, an organizer of the conference and a fellow board member of the Information Architecture Institute managed to “bootleg” the talk in an oblique black and white format. It’s cut off a little at the beginning and seems to run into a glitch around the 5:12 mark, but until some better recording materializes, this murky artifact is the only surviving record of my talk, which I called “Why I Am an Information Architect”:

In the talk, I discussed my personal history and relationship with the concept of IA and the role of the information architect and celebrated what I view as a maturation process and reintegration of various strains of information architecture thinking (the relationship between built architecture and information, the mapping of information systems and relationship, visual thinking, information design, and of course the IA aspects of user experience design) into a coherent disciplinary whole.

Perhaps I need to write my thoughts down and publish them here or somewhere else suitable, such as in the Journal of Information Architecture?