On February 9th, 2013, the IA Institute sponsored World IA Day, a 1 DAY 15 CITY event focusing on Information Architecture. Along with a team of global sponsors the local coordinators will assemble fifteen 1 DAY conferences all around the globe in 15 CITIES to build awareness and celebrate information architecture (IA).

What is Information Architecture?

Initial Talks

What initially started as a conversation and emails in early January between; Dan Klyn of The Understanding Group, Jeff Parks of DIGIA UX Inc., Andrea Resmini of FatDUX Group, and Laura Creekmore of Creek Content about how best to achieve a World IA Day 2013 webcast. By the end of the conversation the World IA Day 2013 Los Angeles Live Webcast from UCLA’s Charles E Young Research Library Conference Center had been birthed.

@albertatrebla Feed was excellent. Thank you to all involved. @trarthur @e3webcasting

— Ian Fenn (@ifenn) February 10, 2013

Planning Starts to Take Shape

At this point in the process, we started working with the very talented LA coordinator Alberta Soranzo as she served as liaison with the UXPA LA Board as they planned the WIAD 2013 in Los Angeles event.

LA’s live stream rocked! bit.ly/Yixhm4 @worldiaday @wiad_la @albertatrebla @undrstndng @iainstitute @uxpaofla @e3webcasting @danklyn

— LA UX Meetup (@LAUXmeetup) February 10, 2013

The Conference Webcast

February 9th dawned a beautiful day in Los Angeles, and a crowd gathered early at the UCLA’s Charles E Young Research Library Conference Center eager to expand their IA knowledge and practice. The opening speaker of the day was Aaron Irizarry from NASDAQ OMX helping us wrap our heads around “Understanding IA.” Pulling from this years theme of what we mean when we say “architecture” and when we say “design” in our research and practice. Next up was David Fiorito of Empathy Lab speaking on “Thinking Navigation.” Following David was Greg Nudelman of DesignCaffeine, Inc. who connected with us in LA via GoToMeeting remotely from San Francisco. Greg shared an amazing mobile navigation technique he and his team have been working on. To see it in action, watch the video below.

Following lunch, Chris Chandler from the The Walt Disney Company and Lynn Boyden from USC Web Services brought us back together for the afternoon and presented on “Other People’s Problems.” And simple steps we can take to implement mentoring and the impact it can have on people’s lives. After a short break, Eric Reiss from the FatDUX Group, reminded us that “Content is still king, but its the arrows – the links that create value for our clients,” closing out the day by pulling all the presentations together with the Plenary.

our gracious #WIAD sponsor @e3webcasting has done a *MARVELOUS* job encoding and editing these… ya’ll will see soon :)

— dan klyn (@danklyn) February 13, 2013

Webcast Audience Reach

World IA Day 2013 LA was a smashing success! The live stream video webcast was watched by viewers in London, Germany, Sweden and beyond. Hopefully next year we can get even more World IA Day cities streaming online. Until next year…

Thank you to @e3webcasting for providing the livestream for #WIADLA.

— Sara Mooney (@Sara_Mooney) February 9, 2013