Stacy Surla, Ananya Kaipa & Ming Rui Lee
Getting to Excellent in Teaching UX
Editorial
In April 2025, an international group of academics and practitioners gathered in Philadelphia for the 10th Academics and Practitioners Roundtable (Roundtable) on ‘IA and UX in Education: Getting to Excellent,’ to explore what constitutes excellent education in that space as a necessary step for a meaningful understanding of the current UX educational ecosystem, and for helping instructors and administrators identify drivers and indicators in support of improvements.
Pp. 1–14 — doi:10.55135/1015060901/261.012/1.049
Federico Badaloni
Function-Driven Design Method
A Relational Framework for Complex Systems and AI-ready Information Architecture
Function-driven Design, the subject of this paper, is a method grounded in the idea that it is more effective to design a “system” — that is, an app, a website, or a pervasive service — starting from the relationships between its parts rather than from the parts considered in isolation. These relationships can be interpreted as functions, that is, specific ways of addressing a need through a solution. The strength of the method lies in using this concept as a driving element across all phases of the work: to define ontologies, taxonomies, and the logics of content production, aggregation, and processing, up to establishing the product’s visible layer. The paper shows how the method’s characteristics — semantic clarity, hierarchical structure of statements, and scale invariance — make it particularly suitable for collaborating with generative artificial intelligence systems, both by supporting the overall review process at every project phase and by accelerating the production of deliverables. The method was developed over years of work designing products and services that were often very different from one another, and it was formalized in response to requests for guidelines from the students I have had the good fortune to encounter in my teaching activity.
Pp. 15–33 — doi:10.55135/1015060901/261.012/2.050
Spring 2026 is the current open issue of the Journal of Information Architecture. Papers and contributions will be added regularly until the issue is closed in June of 2026. Stacy Surla is the Guest Editor. Andrea Resmini is the Editor-in-Chief
