EuroIA 2017 Impressions

The even was a joy. A lot of interesting attendees, good and great speakers, good venue, great city.

Solid mix of practice, theory; content aimed at experienced practitioners and newbies too.

You could scrape the basics of IA, wireframing and design leadership and get all the way into philosophy and psychology of design, be challenged with a question of what AI truly is in this age.

Key themes — enabling users to impact the product, getting everyone to participate, practical hints and Liu Rosenfeld’s call to discuss the operational aspect of design, all formed a coherent program, resulting in a very fruitful, thought-provoking, energizing and mind-expanding event.

Attendees and speakers represented great businesses and startups, local market leaders, professors from the best schools, book authors and community celebrities.

Organizers made sure to create opportunities for networking, meet and greet, in-person discussions. Everyone’s been a charm and very approachable.

The few small areas to be improved in future events, per my impressions, are better control of time, clear demarkation of High-Mid-Entry level of talks & workshops, heads-up on what will be shared and what audience better take pictures of and record.

My observation with design events in general is that they need to include practitioners coming from very different backgrounds. Different countries, company sizes & cultures, design team sizes and roles, different baggage of knowledge, terminology, toolkits, pace of work etc. Multiply that by an ever increasing design toolbox, best practices, recent trends, rapidly evolving technology, growing complexity of the systems and settings we design for… Design events become an information architecture challenge of its own. Much like the industry itself. Much like the audiences for products we create.

Hope we’ll be able to make sense of it all. EuroIA 2017 sure helped become better equipped for challenges like that.