Marsha Haverty set to debut at CanUX 2015

We’re thrilled to add another stellar speaker to this year’s CanUX lineup.

What We Mean by Meaning: New Structural Properties of IA
Nov 7, 2015   11:00am / 45 MINUTES

We know we can’t design meaning directly, but as IAs we can certainly facilitate it. This session delves into theory to uncover the nature of meaning so that we may recognize new structural properties of information that not just facilitate the emergence of meaning, but maintain its evolving thread in networks, cross-channel ecosystems, the Internet of Things, and other complex contexts.

Embodied cognition – the notion that meaning is not a clean, logical process inside the brain, but emerges as we act with information (physical and digital) in the environment – is offered by many IA thinkers to inform our work. But, we haven’t yet fully characterized the nature of meaning. We’ll do that in this session. We’ll visualize the way meaning emerges and evolves as an information-behavior coupling, and how this implies that meaning is not a static recognition, but a flow. Flows have properties like texture, viscosity, permeability. As IA practitioners, we may use structure to modify these properties. We’ll see that the phase-space of IA affects viscosity, facets of linguistic and perceptual information affect texture, and understanding factors affect permeability.

Recognizing these properties of meaning, and the IA structures that stand to modify them, we may make deliberate design choices in our projects.

Speaker Bio: Marsha Haverty

After completing her Masters Degree in Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington in 1999, Marsha Haverty started working as an IA in an interactive agency setting. Moving to software, she designed visualizations and contextual classification systems to help information security teams wrangle digital agents and make sense of shape-shifting data streaming from their IT networks.

In her current role as Principal User Experience Designer at Autodesk in Portland, Oregon, she helps 3D mechanical design teams collaborate on large product designs and harmonize their ever-growing libraries of parts and standards. During her previous tenure at Tripwire, Marsha was named one of the “15 Women in Data to Follow on Twitter” (2014) by the Center for Data Innovation.

But deep down, Marsha has always been interested in the evolution of IA as a field (she is one of the select few that attended the first IA Summits). Her brand of thought leadership has left a lasting impression on the IA community throughout the years via numerous published papers and articles (check out her Praxicum 3-part series from a year ago on the phase-space of IA).

You can follow Marsha on Twitter @mjane_h

*Image credit: Marsha Haverty / Lanyrd