Summer is in full swing!

Welcome to another edition of the DIA Newsletter. This month’s cover image uses a picture of a beach photographed by Johnny Chau to help us all feel a little cooler.

In this issue, we compiled all the news from June and July and looked forward to lazy summer themes. Let’s get started!

#1: DIA Read-aloud Book Club

We started the UX Read-along Book Club this month and you’re all still welcome to join.

Every other week, Julia DeBari and whomever joins take turns to read sections of the book aloud. This is great! Don’t have to buy the book, have company to read and discuss along the way.

Sure, it’ll take a while to finish the book, but if you’re ever in that situation where you don’t have time to read on your own, the Read-aloud Book Club is a great alternative to meet some people and read a book together.

• Book: Changemakers by Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland
• Biweekly meetings: Thursday, Aug 10. 4pm Pacific / 7pm Eastern
• Register below 👇 for free

#2: Game Club Updates

The Game Club’s been chugging along as always!

In June, they learned GB Studio and made games based on the theme of “suffering”... A really serious topic but one they embraced regardless. You can see how they discussed suffering in their retrospective post 👇

For July, they learned Inform 7 to make parser interactive fiction games like Colossal Cave Adventure. Read the retrospective 👇 to see how they made games in this classic format.

Local and community announcements:

DIA Design Guild hosts our own local events in the Los Angeles area as well as supports a number of communities in hosting and producing events. Here are a few we’re fond of:

#3: World Information Architecture Café

One of the nonprofit communities we support, World Information Architecture Association, has started a new speaker series around information architecture.

Their last event talked about “balancing human and machine agency in AI-augmented experiences” Pretty deep thinking, eh?

The next events on the calendar bring about about taxonomies, managing designers vs doing design, and “less-than-perfect” mindsets.

• Aug 3, Custom Taxonomy Creation, with Heather Hedden
• Aug 10, From Maker to Connector, with Beau Ulrey
• Aug 17, Functional Instead of Flawless, with Jael Schultz

See the full calendar 👇

#4: World Information Architecture Day 2024: Call for Locations

Again, from the World IA Association, the annual call for communities to host a local event about information architecture and its connection to the global theme is out.

The theme for 2024 is about Context. They have a nice writeup about what “context” means and all of that.

World IA Day is March 2, next year. We can’t wait to see what talks will come out of this one.

This year’s theme about orientation and wayfinding helped open doors for ChunLing Hsu, one of our apprentices who organized World IA Day Los Angeles: She got an internship at an architecture firm doing research in built environments.

Do you want to organize a World IA Day event in your area? World IA Day is looking for community organizers.

If you’re curious about what it takes to organize a World IA Day event, let us know. DIA has quite a few people who have volunteered at the local events in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. We could do a virtual event if there’s enough interest!

#5: European Information Architecture Conference

Similar to its North American counterpart, EuroIA, the European Conference on Information Architecture and User Experience Design, is a multi-day in-person conference held in Amsterdam this year. It’s a community that DIA is supporting this and in previous years with their social media marketing and community engagement.

But what’s in it for you? A close-kit, friendly inter-disciplinary community.

Directly from their website:

Information architects increasingly collaborate and co-create with other fields such as interaction design, visual design, engineering, political science, social sciences and with a wide variety of societal stakeholders. How do we engage with other fields and support new interdisciplinary ways of working with a triple bottom line (profit, people and planet) as a founding principle and metric of success? [...] How is information architecture situated among different cultures, diversity, ethics, sense of place and sense of space, and the habits of different design communities?

• In-person, Amsterdam
• September 21-23
• Register at the link 👇, tickets starting at €599

#6: DIA Picks: Maggie Appleton on Digital Gardening on The Informed Life

The Informed Life is a podcast that interviews people on how they manage their information.

Recently, Jorge Arango interviewed Maggie Appleton about personal knowledge gardening. If you’ve been with us long enough, you know that DIA is big on personal knowledge management, documentation, and managing information for both work and personal life.

Read/listen to their conversation about metaphors, diversity of human cultures, and digital gardens.

Meanwhile, DIA’s Grace Lau is working on an exciting workshop opportunity about personal knowledge management coming out at the end of the year. If you’re interested in learning more about it, sign up for email updates 👇

#7: Join us for a DIA Community Hangout / SGVUX Happy Hour

We host an open virtual happy hour hangout every month for anyone who wants to talk shop and chat with us. Come hang out and meet new friends!

Thursday, August 17, 4pm Pacific on Google Meet

Register at the link 👇

That’s all for now!

Until next time, we hope you all stay cool this summer!