Research in Communication Design
Since 2014, we have been serving the community to further the field of research in communication design and related disciplines. Please consider a donation.
Join a community of design writers and academics.
Accountability • Community • Support
Get ahead on your new writing project or finally finish your ongoing one!
Apply to be part of a Spring 2026 Design Writing Group.
Participants meet biweekly throughout the Spring semester to build community and infrastructure around their writing practice.
Applications will be accepted until December 1st.
For more information and how to apply: https://writingspacechi.com/design-writing-groups
A program for design researchers, authors, and academics.
Do you have an idea for a book? Are you interested in turning your teaching innovation into a publishable article in an academic journal? Are you a new design writer trying to figure out where to publish first?
The Design Writing Fellowship (formerly the Design Incubation Fellowship Program) has three tracks: Books, Articles and Reviews. Participants take part in a 3-day virtual writing workshop, during which they receive feedback, learn about the publishing process, and commit to working on their writing projects for 3-6 months. Applications will be accepted until December 1st. The Fellowship Workshop will be held May 27th-29th, 2026.
For more information and how to apply: https://writingspacechi.com/design-writing-fellowship
Why we do what we do. Design Incubation awards for research in communication design.
Unlike many design awards, which tend to judge projects according to aesthetics, Design Incubation takes the conceptual intent and the impact of the work into account. This award means more than “peer approval” — it is national recognition of an educator’s research, teaching, or service-based contribution to the field. This is important for tenure and promotion candidates whose institutions expect evidence of excellence, often through external forms of validation. Beyond this, design and designers benefit from institutions that recognize the full scope of our work. In my case, much of my research and teaching seeks to build bridges between historical research and contemporary practice. Receiving the DI teaching award has helped me communicate the value of design and design history to my colleagues, peers, partners, and potential students.
Some ideas need time, space, and the right community to develop. For my project, that place has been Design Incubation. I am honored to join in celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Awards and deeply grateful to the organization, nominators, and reviewers who continue to recognize and uplift design research, especially work that does not always follow a straight line.
I first encountered Design Incubation at the 2017 UCDA Design Education Summit in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. The founders’ vision, voiced through a panel presentation, made a lasting impression. In 2020, at Colloquium 6.3, I shared an early version of what would become Tangible Graphic Design. That moment gave the project language, direction, reflection, and confidence.
Receiving the Design Incubation Award in 2022 was a meaningful moment of affirmation. It validated not only the outcome of my work but also the process behind it—messy, iterative, and deeply personal. The recognition opened new opportunities, broadened the visibility of my research, and encouraged me to continue asking challenging, yet necessary, questions through design.
The Design Incubation Awards offer more than recognition; they provide a platform for growth. As the program marks a decade of generous and inclusive vision, I invite designers, educators, and researchers to help shape its next chapter. Together, we can build a more expansive, reflective, and impactful future for design research.
In 2017, I was acknowledged by Design Incubation’s Scholarship: Creative Work Award after finishing my graduate work at NYU. The project was rooted in personal and intellectual growth, not in advancing my career. While I felt fulfilled, I soon realized my questions needed to translate into something meaningful beyond myself. I needed to share a story that others could connect with.
The recognition from Design Incubation marked a turning point. It helped me understand that my inquiry held value, and that I could shape it into something legible to the world. That award gave me clarity at a time of uncertainty, showing me that my work had potential to resonate beyond academia. It transformed what had felt internal and esoteric into something that could live beyond the studio or classroom. It helped me to move forward with more direction and a clearer voice, carrying with me not just the confidence of that moment, but a broader understanding of the impact creative inquiry can have on the world.
Design Incubation’s Communication Design Educators Awards for my collaborative projects, The Sit&Tell Project (awarded in 2017) and In The Round (awarded in 2023), in the service category, are meaningful recognitions. A significant mode of my academic work centers around Design as a Scholarship of Engagement, where my creative and collaborative work aims to foster growth in communities, spotlight the value of design, and contribute to the common good of the design discipline and the public. In these works, the designer and communities work together locally, and accolades from such a reputable organization as Design Incubation provide illumination and validation of the project’s impact and significance to extend beyond the project’s regional situatedness. As there are few venues where design educators can receive recognition for comprehensive service work by a jury of academic peers nationally, Design Incubation’s acknowledgment through a service category amplifies value to institutional and community stakeholder investments in Scholarship of Engagement projects and fortifies confidence for future opportunities.
Welcoming Cat Normoyle, incoming Director of Peer Reviews, and Camila Afanador Llach as Chair, Director-at-Large
This 2024 academic year has been busy and productive at Design Incubation. We have had many activities this fall, including the Design Educators Awards, currently accepting nominations and entries until December 31, 2024. In October, we had our first fully in-person colloquium since the onset of the pandemic and our largest one to date at Boston University with four sessions and more than 20 research presentations. This year, we celebrate our 10th year with new members and ongoing development. We continue to host the series, Design Your Research Agenda (DYRA), the latest one in November. We will be publishing this episode online shortly.
Starting this September 2024, we welcomed Cat Normoyle, Associate Professor at East Carolina University as the incoming Director of Peer Review. In spring 2025 she will be taking over this role from Camila Afanador-Llach, Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University, who has held the position since fall 2021.
Normoyle is a designer, writer, and educator whose research and creative activities focus on community engagement, interactive and immersive experiences, and design pedagogy. She has a strong record of contributions to design scholarship and community engagement, evidenced by publications, presentations, and grants. Notably her writing appears in articles and book chapters published by AIGA Dialectic, Design Research Society, AIGA Design Educators Community, Routledge, and others. She is a recent grant recipient of the Engagement Scholarship Consortium for her work on the project, Our Story: The LGBTQ Stories of Eastern North Carolina, which is preparing for a fall 2025 exhibition of work. She is currently working on a book project, “Community-based Practices in Action.” We are excited to welcome her as the new Director of Peer Reviews at DI.
Afanador-Llach has made tremendous contributions to the peer review process at DI over the last 3 years. She has further developed the peer review process, ensuring the double-blind process is objective, anonymous, rigorous, and fair and that it offers the benefits of the peer review to our members by offering feedback to all who have participated in our colloquium submission process.
Afanador-Llach will be staying on as a Chair and Director-at-Large as she segues into other DI initiatives. We would like to thank her for her three years of service as Director of Peer Review and we are excited to be working with her in new capacities.
Afanador-Llach was promoted to tenured Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University, and is currently researching and writing about the history of graphic design in her home country Colombia. She recently completed a three-year NEH-funded project cataloging and translating metadata, developing an online resource. With her experience with metadata and from her role as DI Director of Peer Review, we hope to further the development of keyword analysis and implementation at DI.
Three Tracks: Books, Academic Articles and Book/Exhibition Reviews
Do you have an idea for a book? Are you working on an article? Are you a new design writer trying to figure out where to publish first?
The Design Writing Fellowship (formerly the Design Incubation Fellowship Program) has three tracks: Books, Articles, and Reviews. Participants take part in a 3-day virtual writing workshop, during which they receive feedback, learn about the publishing process, and commit to working on their writing projects for 3-6 months.
Applications will be accepted until December 1st. The Fellowship Workshop will be held May 28-30, 2025.
For more information and how to apply: https://writingspacechi.com/design-writing-fellowship
Three Tracks: Books, Academic Articles and Book/Exhibition Reviews
Are you trying to bolster your research agenda or are you a design writer trying to decide where to publish? TheDesign Writing Fellowship (formerly the Design Incubation Fellowship) can help. The 2024 Fellowship has three tracks: Books, Academic Articles and Book/Exhibition Reviews. Participants take part in a 3-day virtual writing workshop where they learn about the publishing process, receive feedback on their writing and commit to working on their writing projects for 3-6 months. The Design Writing Fellowship is for design faculty, researchers, writers, and academics.
Applications will be accepted through November 30th
The 2024 Fellowship Workshop will be held May 29-31, 2024. All participants must participate in the workshop.
https://writingspacechi.com/design-writing-fellowship
Visible Language 56.1 -Special Issue
The essence of a field entails its scope, actions, and outcomes. Communication Design entails conveying ideas using visual words and pictures, or typography and symbology.
Therefore, it is reasonable that all the features of typographic embodiment from reading to interpreting, from social and cultural lenses to physical constraints of lighting and reading distance, from physicality of paper and ink to impression of high resolution led displays, from legibility of letterforms to rhetorical forms of writing, and more, should be well understood by communication designers. The same could be said of all the features of pictures, symbols, and icons, and in addition, all the features of the ways pictures and words combine in layouts across media from print to time-based to interactive media, and in addition to that, all the ways people interact with these features in a multitude of contexts. You get the idea. There is a lot to know about the extent, mechanisms, and impacts of Communication Design.
But because Communication Design is a young discipline we know relatively little about almost all the aforementioned features, at least we ‘know’ little with the degree of precision or rigor that characterizes so many other disciplines. Because adolescent Communication Design knowledge has a wealth of unanswered questions and a broad expanse of topics needing investigation, to advance, Communication Design needs sustained research programs that focus on the key features of the discipline.
Visible Language seeks to promote Communication Design research by exposing both what has been studied in-depth and what needs to be studied in-depth.
This is a call for papers for the Summer 2022 issue of Visible Language that report on one of two related things: either a paper describing a series of related research studies spanning several years centered around a single topic – in other words a sustained research program, or a paper reporting research into what communication design topics are important enough that they should be researched for a sustained period – in other words, key topics that should have sustained research.
Articles reporting sustained Communication Design research programs may be much different from article proposals reporting topics that need study. The report of a sustained research program will be retrospective and will cover not one study but where, how, what, and why a series of related studies have been conducted and may feature the role of collaboration, funding sources, and the nature of a rich topic worthy of sustained study.
Articles describing Communication Design topics that merit sustained research should likewise be based on systematic study but will be prospective in nature, using some form of gathered and analyzed evidence to support why a particular topic merits sustained investigation including the topic’s definition and known parameters.
Article proposals should be in the form of a one-sentence summary of the article followed by an outline of the manuscript argument in the general form:
Submit article proposals to:
Mike Zender, Editor, Visible Language
mike.zender@uc.edu
This is a collaborative, living, visual document that will further establish historical precedents and future trajectories.
November 12, 2021, 3-4pm EST
Zoom link
AIGA DEC edition with Design Incubation Chairs Jessica Barness, Liz DeLuna, Heather Snyder Quinn, and Dan Wong. Design Incubation recently launched a new initiative to map current activities in Communication Design Research and Scholarship (R&S). We kicked off this project at the international Design Research Society Festival of Emergence last month, and for this second phase, we are bringing it to the AIGA DEC. This map is a collaborative, living, visual document that will further establish historical precedents and future trajectories for Communication Design R&S. Join us as we share progress, generate dialogue, and continue to shape this project.
Moderated by Rebecca Tegtmeyer
The 2022 Design Writing Fellowship will be hosted by Writing Space, a community-based writing center for artists and designers run by Fellowship facilitator Maggie Taft. The program remains the same as it was in previous years and will be complemented by the other writing and editorial services Writing Space offers. Aaris Sherin, who led the DI Fellowship, continues to lead the Design Writing Fellowship at Writing Space and looks forward to working with a new group of design writers as they work to publish reviews, articles and books.
If you have a writing project you need help with or are a newer design writer looking for where to publish first, The Design Writing Fellowship has three tracks: Books, Articles and Reviews. Participants take part in a 3-day virtual writing workshop where they receive feedback, learn about the publishing process and commit to working on their writing projects for 3-6 months. The Design Writing Fellowship is for design faculty, researchers, writers, and academics.
Applications will be accepted 10/15-12/15
Fellowship Workshop will be held June 2, 3, 4 2022
