Dan Klyn will lead an Architecture Walk at CanUX 2019

Our first walking workshop since the early Banff days.

 Workshop F3: Half Day Architecture Walk At The National Gallery of Canada
} Nov 1, 2019   1:00pm – 4:30pm

In 1982, the government of Canada held a competition for the design of two important new buildings in Ottawa and Hull: the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Civilization (now the Canadian Museum of History). Moshe Safdie submitted a bid to do the history museum in Hull; the committee instead hired him to do the art museum in Ottawa, which took another six years to design and build.

Since its opening in 1988, many things have changed, both in and around the National Gallery. With a nod to Stewart Brand, this workshop is designed around one question: how do buildings learn?

Workshop facilitator Dan Klyn contends that there is no finer teacher for learning to see systems, understand cause and effect, and appreciate the complex interplay of form and function, than the man-made environment. Unburdened by academic training in architecture, Klyn designs and leads architecture walks from a UX perspective, and helps participants find fruitful mappings into digital design work from careful observations of what’s going on in a building. In this mostly-indoor (but not entirely, so bring your tuuk) walking workshop, participants will be encouraged enjoy being non-experts, to go slow, and to test naive hypotheses about why the interplay of the elements in space occur in the way that they do.

Think of it as the opposite of a design sprint.

Klyn’s research into the history and evolution of the National Gallery as a “container” for collections, and as a space for humans to engage with content, includes interviews with Mr. Safdie. Participants will be encouraged to do some pre-work of their own, and to utilize the digital resources of the National Gallery in advance of the workshop to select a painting, sculpture or other artifact that’s currently on display, and to share what they’ve come to know about these items as the afternoon unfolds.

Experience level of attendees: novice to expert
Physical exertion level: moderate (we’ll be walking most of the time)

 Speaker Bio: Dan Klyn

A renowned information architect, Dan Klyn is the co-founder of The Understanding Group (TUG). When he was studying Library and Information Science program at Wayne State University, Dan wanted to be a descriptive bibliographer. His path changed thanks to a series of random and serendipitous events including meeting IA pioneers and former CanUX speakers Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld, and eventually teaching Morville’s self-described “boring” Polar Bear Book-based Information Architecture course at University of Michigan. Through these experiences, Dan realized that he himself is an information architect – something he was doing long before he even knew the term.

Before co-founding TUG, Dan developed information architecture, e-commerce strategy and design for brands such as American Girl, Harley-Davidson, Brookstone, NOOMA and TJ Maxx and manufacturers including Herman Miller, Seagate and Lumber Liquidators. Dan likes coffee an awful lot, and still teaches information architecture at the University of Michigan School of Information. His research is focused on applying the teachings of Richard Saul Wurman and Christopher Alexander in digital practice, specifically applying the tenets of physical architecture to the design and architecture of information spaces.

In April 2016, he began serving a 2-year term as President of the of the Information Architecture Institute, and is the second acting IAI president (Abby Covert) to feature on the CanUX stage.

For more info, you can follow Dan on on Twitter @danklyn or his personal site, wildlyappropriate.com.

Prior Presentations:
AN OPPOSITE TRUTH (CanUX 2017)
Nov 5, 2017 10:00am / 35 min

*Image credit: Dan Klyn