London IA on Innovation

London IA supported by Zebra People and Lab49 is very pleased to present London IA on Innovation at The Team on 30 March.

Below are full details of the evening’s activities, how to sign up for a free ticket and the presentation deck for the evening:

The Future of Web Typography

Richard Rutter

For too long typography on the web has been stuck in the dark ages, but web type is now undergoing a renaissance. Richard will take us through recent innovations, revealing the highs and lows of font linking with its minefield of design, technology, ethics and business models. He’ll tell the story of Fontdeck, a proposed solution to these issues, and wax lyrical on the shiny future of fonts and web type.

Richard is production director at web consultancy Clearleft. User experience designer by day, he’s a web typography evangelist by night and runs the much-cited Webtypography.net. Seeking to provide a webfonts solution that works for type foundries and professional web designers alike, Richard co-founded Fontdeck in 2009.

Re-using data people have left around the web

Glenn Jones

Without much conscious thought, most of us have built identities across the web. We fill in profiles, upload photos, videos, reviews and bookmarks.

This session will explore the practical reuse of social media data and how it can create better user experience. How to exact social graphs and profiles information from open data sources like RSS and Microformats to provide a wealth information about your users.

Glenn Jones is the Creative Director and a founder of Madgex. Equally as passionate about interaction design and coding, he is currently addicted to exploring ideas of the semantic web and data portability. His latest project Ident Engine allows front-end developers to create new user experiences from a blend of identity and profile data. Glenn has given talks about data portability at many events and has written for sites such as ALA.

Innovation requires creativity

Claire Rowland

A lot of hot air and expensive business consultancy time is sold in pursuit of facilitating creativity but the creative process is still thought of as a mysterious black box, often the preserve of certain people and not others. But what’s the actual science behind it? Are some of us more creative than others, and if so, why? What can all of us do to help ourselves have more and better ideas?

Claire Rowland is a service design lead at Fjord, where she heads up UX research activities. She’s been working in UX since 1997, when a duff recruiter put a psychology/philosophy and interactive media graduate forward for a software developer role at the Press Association despite her only having 20 minutes of the required 2 years’ Unix experience. Thankfully, a curious manager decided she might be useful to have around anyway, and let her figure out how for herself. The answer quickly turned out to be IA, IXD and UX research, and since then she’s been working on web, mobile, PC and multi-channel services for companies such as Razorfish, Flow Interactive and Seren.

She has conducted hundreds of user research sessions with participants from 8 year old Lego fans to the directors of BP, and these days mainly focuses on finding ways to help her awesome creative design colleagues get inside users’ heads.

The Innovation Trap!

Andy Budd

Businesses constantly strive to gain competitive advantage through “innovation”. However, is innovation a legitimate business strategy or a misguided and often misunderstood buzz-word?

Is it really possible to innovate within a large organisation to a budget and deadline, or is corporate innovation a myth. Can innovation be planned or is it something that grows organically from a particular mind set and way of working?

The myth of innovation is seductive. However, it can often take effort and resources away from the less sexy but more productive task of finessing existing ideas. As industries strive to create new products, are we forgetting that some of the best selling and most iconic designs are actually incremental improvements to existing products?

In this session Andy will argue that innovations isn’t just a bad strategy; it’s no strategy at all. Instead of crossing our fingers and betting the farm on a sudden and uncontrollable burst of luck, we need to be sensitive to the world around us and focus on solving immediate problems in a more intelligent way.

Andy Budd is one of the founding partners at User Experience Design Consultancy, Clearleft. As an interaction design and usability specialist, Andy is a regular speaker at international conferences like The Web 2.0 Expo, SXSW and An Event Apart. Andy curates dConstruct, one of the most popular design conferences in the UK. He’s also responsible for UX London, The UK’s first dedicated Usability, Information Architecture and User Experience Design event.

Get a free ticket

Slides