I came into this presentation honestly because the other one i wanted to attend was too full for my comfort. What a stroke of luck. I thought I needed to feed my brain but this was one of those sessions that feeds your soul. You take those when you get them. Olly Wright did a great job and this was one of the highlights of the conference for me so far. I don’t know I can accurately convey what the presentation was but you can read an abstract below. Hopefully I’ll add a link to the slides soon when I get one.

[audio:http://www.thechickentest.com/vid/IASummit2007/Information_Architecture_and_Ethical_Design.mp3]

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 21 megs )

Information Architecture and Ethical Design
Olly Wright

This presentation will look at how as information architects we can approach our work in this cultural context. How we might take an informed, ethical stand. It will cover some of the prominent contemporary theories of ethical design, culture / media studies, and behavioural psychology, and look at their applicability to information architecture. It will explore areas such as brand authenticity, privacy, social networking, push versus pull marketing, and ubiquitous computing. And it will provide concrete examples and methods for how these can be used in practice. The aim is to bring abstract ethical theory down to the level of the concrete and applicable, and perhaps inspire some to add ‘Help make the World a better place’ to every list of requirements.

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Backcasting: or how I learned to stop predicting and help my clients – Sam Ladner & Matthew Milan
• Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier – James Robertson
• Systems Thinking, Rich Mapping and Conceptual Models – Matt Milan & Gene Smith
• Project Touchstones how to bridge competing viewpoints and build vision consensus and innovation – Jess McMullin
• Using Search Analytics To Diagnose What’s Ailing Your Information Architecture – Lou Rosenfeld & Rich Wiggins
• Real information Architecture – New Mighty Deeds – Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph
• Information Architecture and Ethical Design – Olly Wright

[tags]IASummit, IASummit2007, InformationArchitectureSummit, EthicalDesign, OllyWright, Banksy[/tags]

So what is wrong with Samsung’s Value Proposition?

It’s fair to say that the success of the iPod is not about the hardware alone. The iTunes player and store together with the iPod give people a compelling and easy to use experience of finding and managing music. So Samsung wants to play off this by saying “Imagine More Choices” and then showing some of the other online music retailers that are available in Canada. Now I’m not sure if this is a transplanted campaign from the U.S., but the truth is that Futureshop’s Bonfire and Sympatico Music’s orders are fulfilled by Puretracks. So if you really are looking for music “Choice” 3 of the 4 options that Samsung is suggesting have identical catalogs.

What is so ridiculous is that these stores are obviously white-labeled versions of Puretracks. In fact it is so obvious I’m starting to wonder why I am even writing this post… Doesn’t seem like much choice to me.