Board of Advisors Biographies
2008-2009 Board of Advisors
Paul Ford
Brooklyn, NY, USA
Paul Ford is an editor at Harper's Magazine, where he edits, designs, and programs the Harper's website and occasionally edits for the print magazine. In 2007 he launched a new version of Harpers.org featuring every issue of the magazine published since 1850--a quarter-million pages scanned, searchable, and published to the web using a custom, Semantic Web-based content management system. His weblog Ftrain.com goes back to 1997.
For more on Paul, visit http://ftrain.org.
Whitney Hess
New York, NY, USA
Whitney is an independent user experience designer. She makes websites, software, mobile applications, and gadgets easier to use by figuring out what people really need and how they really think. She got started as a computer scientist, but ended up graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing from Carnegie Mellon University, and soon after received a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction. For the capstone project for my MHCI, she was one of five Masters students to develop Roadcasting, a system that allows drivers to create and share their music playlists with other cars on the road. The project has received press from Wired, MIT Tech Review, Slashdot, BoingBoing and more.
For more on Whitney, visit http://whitneyhess.com
Rick Johnston
Richmond, VA, USA
Rick Johnston, CAE, is a Senior Web Strategist and Association Practice Lead for Ironworks Consulting in Richmond, Virginia. With more than 25 years of management experience in nonprofit organizations, he has worked for the American Lung Association, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and the Natural Resources Council of Maine. Rick was with the American Diabetes Association for fourteen years where, as VP Constituent Relations, he had overall responsibility for the Association's web development (diabetes.org) and call center (1-800-DIABETES) operations. The American Society of Association Executives has awarded him the prestigious Certified Association Executive (CAE) certification. He has also served in volunteer leadership roles with several charitable organizations including President of the Board of Directors for the following: New England Health Education Association, Bangor-Brewer TB & Health Association, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Kennebec Valley and the Old Bridge Estates Community Association. He resides in Glen Allen, Virginia with his wife and has a daughter at Christopher Newport University and a son who recently graduated from George Mason University.
Read more about Rick at http://rjohnston.org.
Laura Lessa
North London, United Kingdom
Laura has been working as an IA since 2000. During this time, she has mentored and managed people, acquired a good knowledge of Usability methods and CMS and, most important, learned a lot from her peers with all kinds of backgrounds.
Laura is a passionate practitioner who enjoys creating high-quality user experiences and truly believes in team work. Last year, She left my job and her country (Brazil) and came to London to take a MA course. She is currently finishing the MA Design for Interactive Media, at Middlesex University.
Read more about Laura at http://lauralessa.net.
Victor Lombardi
New York, NY, USA
Victor works as a product development consultant and is a visiting professor at the Pratt Institute, a leading design school in the United States.
Victor started his career in information technology, building systems at the Boston Consulting Group, DDB Needham and others. He went on to work as a user interface designer, contributing to over 40 software and Internet products. As a manager at Razorfish and a co-founder of the Management Innovation Group he consulted with companies such as General Electric, Cisco, and J.P. Morgan. His design work with the Southern Poverty Law Center has won several awards.
Victor received his masters degree in music technology from New York University and his bachelors degree in journalism from Rutgers University. With a love for bringing curious people together, he co-founded and served as president of the Information Architecture Institute and co-founded the Overlap business & design event. Victor also directs Smart Experience, an independent school based in New York City offering classes on state-of-the-art topics to working professionals in the Internet, mobile, and software industries.
Read more about Victor at http://noisebetweenstations.com/.
Matthew Milan
Toronto, ON, Canada
Matt has been involved with the web for 10 years and the Information Architecture community for the last 5 years, working in both practitioner and management roles. He has worked for companies large and small, has been an Innie and an Outie, and has led teams of 20+ people as well as worked as the lone IA.
Matt is a co-founder of the UX Irregulars, a Toronto area user experience group with over 200 members. He's been a mentor and an instigator, and love both roles. He presents and speaks at conferences and workshops on the subject of Information Architecture and has a strong set of opinions as to what the future of the Information Architecture field ought to be.
Matt joined the Institute during graduate school and immediately fell in love with the strength of the community. He was one of the first IA Institute Progress Grant recipients; if you've been to one of his Backcasting presentations or workshops at the IA Summit over the last couple of years, you've seen the results of this investment by the Institute.
Read more about Matt at http://www.linkedin.com/in/mmilan.
Eric Reiss
Copenhagen, Denmark
Born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1954, and raised in St. Louis and Chicago, Eric holds degrees in Political Science and Performing Arts from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1976, He moved to Denmark to accept a position as a stage director at the Danish Royal Theatre in Copenhagen.
Eric has been a full-time writer and business strategist since 1984. The past decade, he has conducted workshops and lectured on a range of web issues for colleagues, client companies, and at teaching institutions, including the Copenhagen Business School and the National School of Journalism. He is also one of the instigators of the IA Slam and author of Web Dogma ’06.
In November, 2000, Eric's book, Practical Information Architecture was published by Pearson Education. In 2002, it became available in Japanese and Korean. In 2004, it became available on eBay. Today, Eric heads FatDUX in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Read more about Eric at www.fatdux.com.
Andrea Resmini
Bologna, Italia
Andrea has been working in the ICT field since 1989 and has been into professional information design since 1999.
Andrea is currently a freelance IA and a PhD candidate in Legal Informatics at the University of Bologna, Italy, although in recent years he has spent quite a lot of time guest researching at JIBS in Jonkoping, Sweden. His academic research field is IA, UX and content management for historical and juridical online libraries and for digital libraries in general, with a focus on medieval manuscript sources.
Andrea is the Board Coordinator for the Italian IA Summit, happen to lead the Higher Education in IA Working Group, and one of the founders of the European IA Network Group.
Read more about Andrea at http://www.resmini.net.
Sarah Rice
Sunnyvale, California, USA
Sarah has 11 years experience in the field of Information Architecture, practicing IA before there was an agreed-upon name for it, and before there were organizations that assisted us in our field. She has a master's degree in Library and Information Science and her own consulting firm, Seneb Consulting (www.seneb.com). In the past, She has helped to organize events sponsored by the IA Institute, including the 2005 IAI-sponsored pre-conference workshop at the IA Summit, an IA retreat held at Asilomar in California, and the IDEA 2006 conference in Seattle, WA. She has also participated in the mentorship program and contributed to the collection of tools available to other IAs.
For more about Sarah, please visit www.seneb.com.
Donna Spencer
Canberra, ACT, Australia
Donna is a freelance interaction designer and information architect who specializes in making complex systems simple for people to use. She has more than 6 years experience in senior consulting and in-house roles. She has designed huge intranets & websites, e-commerce & search systems, business applications and a content management system. She continually surprises her colleagues by talking to people rather than computers and designing the old-fashioned way with pencil, markers and reams of coloured paper.
Donna keeps starting then stopping Masters programs, preferring to follow her own path through an increasingly large pile of books. She is an experienced speaker http://maadmob.com.au/maadmob_id/speaking.html who has presented sessions and workshops at many local and international conferences. She spends her spare time playing in her orchard, spending (not enough) time with her family, working as program chair for next year's Information Architecture Summit http://iasummit.org/, and writing a book on card sorting http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/cardsorting/ to be published by Rosenfeld Media in early 2007.
For more on Donna, visit http://maadmob.com.au/maadmob_id/.
This page was last modified on November 16, 2008 09:08 PM.