Lauralee Alben will be on the Brandmaster’s Panel: Lessons Learned from Other Industries, at this year’s HeathCareAmerica’s conference entitled Building a Winning Competitive Strategy for Your Healthcare Organization: Harnessing the Power of the Brand. Speaking to senior healthcare executives, Lauralee will offer her perspective on creating effective brand strategies by presenting highlights from the strategy and design of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s web site, the E-Quarium.

Lauralee Alben and our client from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Mike Rigsby will be presenting “Envisioning the E-Quarium: Strategic design planning for Monterey Bay Aquarium’s web site” at this year’s Museums and the Web conference.

The presentation focuses on the strategic design planning and vision creation process for the E-Quarium, the online complement to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. More than six months of informed investigation and analysis resulted in an ambitious redesign of the web site, which launched in October 1999.

The DMI Advisory Board, along with Lauralee Alben, has selected John Maeda, Sony Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, as the winner of the 2001/2002 Muriel Cooper Prize.

The winner was announced at the 25th International Design Management Institute Conference at Cape Cod in October. John Maeda will receive a cash award, a three-year membership to the institute, and be appointed a Muriel Cooper Fellow. He will present the Muriel Cooper Prize Lecture at the DMI conference in Pasadena in May 2001.

Interchange hosted “New England’s largest regional non-profit educational technical communications conference” where, as a keynote speaker, Lauralee Alben presented ”At the heart of interaction design.” Lauralee shared her inquiry into designing the human experience. She talked about two interactive products designed at AlbenFaris and explored designs that others have created, from a common kitchen tool, a virtual cyberplaza, and a web site for farmers, to a controversial sound installation and beloved sanctuary gardens.

Lauralee Alben was one of a select panel of leading interaction designers invited to participate in this year’s discussion entitled, “Working on a Web Team: How to Survive the Experience.” Lauralee shared her professional insights on how to improve communication and smooth the working process to produce successful projects.

Lauralee Alben also served on the Program Committee for the DIS2000 conference. The conference provided a forum to discuss the process of designing interactive systems grounded in experiences of real design practice.

As the conference is described: “More and more organizations are involved in the development of interactive systems. We have informational kiosks, head-mounted directional maps, e-commerce, digital books, immersive toys, handheld grocery shopping appliances, DVD home entertainment systems, and nanny-cams. Yet even the most experienced organizations are only now beginning to understand the skills, resources, and processes needed to produce results that respond to people's needs and desires. There continues to be strong interest, both in practice and in academia, in better understanding the processes of designing these interactive devices and systems, and in finding ways to improve the results.”

Lauralee Alben judged HOW magazine’s first interactive design competition, along with Brad Johnson and John Waters. Get your August issue of HOW now, featuring 57 exciting examples of interactivity.

Twenty top designers from Samsung's IDS (Innovative Design Lab) visited AlbenFaris as part of a whirlwind tour of design firms and museums in the U.S., France, and the Netherlands, to mention a few. We were honored to be one of only five design firms in the U.S. to host this elite group of researchers whose quest was to extend their knowledge of the way design is practiced around the globe.

A morning of presentations included an overview by Jim Faris of the past ten years of interactive projects designed at AlbenFaris, followed by a lecture given by Lauralee Alben and Mike Rigsby, our client from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, on the strategy and design of their new web site, the E-Quarium. After experiencing a virtual tour of the aquarium, the group traveled to Monterey to see for themselves one of the world's leading aquariums.

Dan Boyarski, a visiting professor from Carnegie Mellon, guided the group, along with three other faculty: Hyoshin Park, IDS Information Design professor; and Evert Endt, Former Director of ENSCI/Les Ateliers (National Design School) in Paris; and Kyoung Soon Oh, Manager of the IDS education program.