The world of access to and use of digital information has changed in the past few years. In particular the web has changed from an “I go get web” where people navigated to information and has transformed into a “come to me web” where people attract information to their devices and manage it from there, so to keep it near them when they want it an need it.

This change in the web is seen throughout all information ecosystems. People want to better control access to their information (yes, people tend to view all information and media they have come in contact with as “my information”) throughout their life. This control requires the information and media to be created in a manner that eases people’s use and reuse of the information on various devices, platforms and in applications they use. Each person has a personal information workflow that works for them or would like to have work for themselves. They want information and media to be easily accessed from home, work, and/or on the move. This is not a large request if we are thinking about the problem and weighing the solutions with the right framework.

Thomas Vander Wal will provide the relatively simple framework to better understand the elements we need to address how people interact with information. He will introduce the Model of Attraction and how to use it in our assessment and solution phases of our development process. He will also provide insight into the Personal InfoCloud, which is the theoretical place where people store their information they would like easy access to when they want it and need it. These two components (and the other related InfoCloud—Local, Global, and External) will provide a framework to model our understanding of our digital information and media distribution so to highlight how to approach the projects efficiently and to more easily bring to light problem areas with enough context that we can then work to address then witth viable solutions.

Attendees will come away with a better understanding of the current options the people they are designing and developing solutions for, as well as how to more efficiently think about and build solutions for distributed use beyond the web page.