Bogdan Stanciu doesn't really understand how he ended up where he is, but for some reason he keeps going. To his advantage, life was unfair.

His design portfolio qualifies for the Unfortunate 50. In part, for not wearing enough black t-shirts. Bogdan’s experience is grounded in the Photoshop 2.0 he opened in the early '90s. The kindness of strangers, and getting hired by people who define design in different ways, helps Bogdan pay the bills.

Sharing stories and finding something in common is probably the only reason why you should join this edition of the IA Sunday Service.

Sam Raddatz (she/her) is a Program Manager at Netflix where she focuses on inclusion throughout their products. In her previous role as the CEO of Logic Department, she worked with non-profits like Wikimedia, The Brooklyn Museum, and The Trust for Public Land to create more intuitive & organized digital products.

With a background in project management, qualitative sociology and holding a Master’s degree in Information and Library Science, Sam tackles any challenge in the most organized and transparent way possible. She is a strong believer that there are design solutions that can make any interaction less frustrating in all aspects of our lives.

Scott believes that the most revered brands of tomorrow will be the ones that embrace and embody strategic valor, creativity and imagination, today.

As the head of Insight & Strategy at Integer Dallas, Scott’s role is to provide leadership, inspiration and senior-level perspective on commerce-driving strategies that raise the level of agency work across all clients’ brands. He is accountable for the performance, development and integration of The Integer Group’s Insight & Strategy department and providing leadership to the special commerce-driving units within the department: shopper marketing planning, data & analytics, ecommerce, experience strategy and retail strategy. Additionally, he is responsible for advancing the IP born out of the Dallas, LA and Bentonville offices.

Lynne Polischuik has over 15 years experience with user research and product strategy initiatives for some of today’s leading organizations and enterprises. She has conducted research on behalf of public sector organizations, Fortune 50 companies and consumer-focused startups. Lynne believes in a multi-faceted approach to research, and is passionate about both qualitative field work and quantitative research methodologies.

Some of Lynne’s current and past research projects include Google, YouTube, Automattic, http://HealthCare.gov, Facebook, Instagram, HSBC, The Sundance Foundation, the Government of British Columbia, VMware, ADP, Adobe, Harvest, Stanford University, Roche Pharma, Eli Lilly, Electronic Arts, Disney Interactive, BC Transit, CSL Hong Kong, Target, Hyundai, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sierra Wireless.

Brian is a consultant who’s spent the last decade helping clients improve the quality and value of their work as they create space for lean transformation, practice continuous improvement, and get comfortable with change.

Matt and Juls Hollidge do UX & information architecture work for governments, NGOs, and global businesses. They comprise a literal mom-n-pop shop called Kore, and yet (not unlike Gloria and Richard Wurman) they ply their trade on a global scale.

Matt, in all of his spare time, is the proprietor of @theamateurmixologist on Instagram.

I want to get it right, down to its basic core elements, to fully understand what a thing is made up of. To completely understand it, to go “okay: that's what this is, right down to its core elements.”

That’s why we're called Kore - we bring.. we bring it down to the, tiny, tiny, acute details. Trying to understand everything, to then build it all back up again. — Juls Hollidge

Marsha Haverty has been working in the field of information architecture since 1999. She has presented at UX Week, Information Architecture Conference, Google Design Speaker Series, Fluxible, CanUX, IxDA Seattle, and was named among 15 Women in Data to Follow on Twitter (2014) by Center for Data Innovation. She has special interest in bringing thinking from ecological psychology to design.

We have lots of different rhythms that we have to engage across our personal, professional lives. We’re good at using clock time as a tool, but it can be overused, and we fall into traps of valuing units of time above all these other rhythms. And for me, it's thinking about how can we inject some of these other kinds of timings back into the equation so that we're not always boiling everything down to clock time. — Marsha Haverty

Sarah Barrett is the senior information architect for Microsoft Docs, where she works with content creators, engineers, and executives to bring order to one of the largest sources of technical information anywhere. Her practice, developed on projects for companies like Adobe, the University of Washington, and Expedia, melds the lessons of old-school information science with enterprise-level data analysis and just enough research.

I know for a fact that some of the work that I was most proud of [as an outside consultant], and that represents like the most nuanced user insights and, you know, the, the most novel, you know, best IA ideas or whatever, ended up never getting implemented. And so, I really wanted to get a chance to follow things through and figure out how to make stuff actually happen. — Sarah Barrett

Kris Mausser is a content strategist who has honed her craft zooming out and diving deep on complex problems related to enterprise content, intranets, websites and products. She is an international keynote speaker, workshop leader, and former nominee of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40. Kris currently works on product content strategy at Shopify.

In 2007 I went across the border. We didn't have the iPhone in Canada yet. I snuck it across and then I jail broke it and -- I was like, "Wow, this is so cool. Like.. I can move the apps around! And, and not long after, FaceBook became a thing, and now we have user generated content. So there was this confluence of things that happened in a very short period of time, that caused us to have to think a little bit differently about content. — Kris Mausser

Christina Wodtke is a professor at Stanford University, an author, information architecture pioneer, and leadership development coach with over 20 years of experience that has included past work with LinkedIn, MySpace, Zynga, Yahoo! as well as founding 3 startups.

I was like, "Oh, product managers have all the power. If I'm a product manager, I'll have power."

No.

And I became a general manager at MySpace and no, you still don't have power. And from there I could see the CEO and the board and I thought, "You know, there's really nobody in charge." It doesn't really matter what your job is, if you can influence it. And if the culture is influenceable. — Christina Wodtke

Amy Espinosa first brought World IA Day to Tampa Bay in 2015. She was the Global Executive Producer for World IA Day 2017, and went on to serve as Treasurer and President of the IA Institute from 2017 - 2019.

It's not just about design. It's also about the underlying structure that makes these places easy to use and understandable. And so that's when I kind of was like: “okay, I'm leaving UX behind, going full force into information architecture.” And here I am. — Amy

Grace Lau is an information architect, content strategist, and taxonomist based in Los Angeles. She’s been a volunteer with World IA Day since 2016, and is serving as the 2020 Global Executive Producer for WIAD.

What does architecture mean? And what does information mean? You break it down that way. — Grace

With Peter Merholz, an experience design and product management executive with 20 years experience across a broad range of digital media. In 2016 he co-wrote, with Kristin Skinner, Org Design for Design Orgs, the first book to address building and managing effective in-house design teams.

I recognize the value of design as bringing a whole other frame for approaching problems. Unlike the analytical and reductive frames that you get with kind of this business and technical approach, design tends to be more generative, tends to be more holistic, tends to be more big picture, tends to be more emotional and visceral. So what you get when you bring design into these organizations is you're actually getting all this other...You're getting this new approach at thinking about problems. And, the reason for humanism is that I find the word design to be somewhat reductive. — Peter Merholz

With Noreen Whysel, COO of Decision Fish. Noreen is a longtime IA community organizer, and she teaches web design and UX at CUNY City Tech's award winning Communication Design program, and at General Assembly in NYC.

With special guests including Joey Di Nardo, Ronen Hirsch, Dorian Taylor, and James Mulholland, discussing the intersection of information architecture and the work of Christopher Alexander.

An hour-long conversation and audience Q&A with Richard Saul Wurman, inventor of the practice of information architecture and co-founder of the TED conference.

With special guest Lynn Boyden, IA educator and community organizer + Information Architect at USC Information Technology Services.

Decision points are bottlenecks, right? And the, the danger of making the wrong decision, is really ... It's, it's hard, and so, by getting more people's thoughtful opinions into the decision making process, I think you make better decisions. And the other thing, you know, we get a lot of, lip service about ethical design. And, I think one of the strongest things that gets you to ethical design is participatory design. — Lynn Boyden

With special guest Abby Covert, senior staff information architect at Etsy and author of How To Make Sense of Any Mess

Not just being another smart person in the room with an opinion because we have plenty of those. What we have is people that can take all of those opinions, bubble them up into the themes of the opinions and then present them back in an unbiased way and go: Okay guys, we could go this way. We go this way. We could go this way. Which way should we go? I find that work to be much more interesting and I find that people react to the concept of information architecture much more positively, you know? — Abby Covert

With special guest Andrew Hinton, one-time TUGger, full-time information architecture OG and author of Understanding Context

The idea is that you've got a creature ecologically situated in an environment. And then something in the environment changed. Including something with the creature, because they're part of their own environment. And now they have new needs that they didn't have before, and they're just trying to figure out what the need is, and how to get to some resource, right?

To take care of that need, and in order to get to a resource, and access it, and use it: that's a task. — Andrew Hinton