How Information Architecture can leverage efforts in the academia to target what the market needs: Promoting inter-disciplinary teams and tearing down the walls of traditional institutions

1. Information Architecture:
Helping academia target market needs
Alfredo Sánchez, PhD
Universidad de las Américas Puebla
http://ict.udlap.mx

2. The market wants…

3. The market wants…

4. “Despite the technocratic and materialistic bias of our culture,
it is ultimately experiences we are designing, not things”
Bill Buxton

6. College graduates want…
https://www.dispensaries.com

7. Two major roles of academia

8. Which competencies should a UX designer have?

9. Competencies of a UX designer
• Information architecture
– Interface structure, navigation scheme
• Interaction design
– Task fulfillment, flow, page-level layout
• Usability engineering
– Matching expected and actual user behavior
• Visual design
– Consistent, user-aware visual treatment of interface components
• Prototype engineering
– Construction of tangible composition of interactive components
[Steve Psomas, Workday, 2007]

11. ?

12. Multi-disciplinary teams
Education
Information
design
Software
engineering
Communication
Psychology

13. Main challenge: The old university organization
Disciplines, departments have built insurmountable walls

15. http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/p/keep-calm-and-tear-down-the-wall-5/

17. A few effective workarounds
• Elective courses
• Shared course codes
• Joint thesis projects
• Joint faculty projects
• <your ideas here>

18. https://blog.open-xchange.com/2015/06/09/zuckerberg/

19. Information Architecture:
Helping academia target market needs
Alfredo Sánchez, PhD
Universidad de las Américas Puebla
http://ict.udlap.mx