Dan Wong
Assistant Professor
Advertising Design & Graphic Arts
New York City College of Technology, CUNY
Retrospective summary
Prepared July 2026 from the presenter’s slides and speaker notes. No abstract was submitted for this presentation in 2014. Colloquium 1.0 was by invitation; abstracts were not peer reviewed.
Communication design academics are evaluated for promotion and tenure against research standards developed in other disciplines, while the field has few scholarly journals of its own and no accepted definition of what its research is.
Communication design practice, in and of itself, is research.
This presentation tests communication design against definitions of research drawn from federal guidelines, arts and humanities research councils, and university policy, on the premise that knowing where a discipline fits determines what it does. It situates communication design within a taxonomy of the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts, then distinguishes it from adjacent design fields: unlike industrial, interior, or fashion design, it cannot conceptualize in a vacuum, having no purpose absent a need to communicate. Drawing on Charles Owen’s mapping of disciplinary activity, it argues that extending practice toward research moves the field from synthetic and real activity toward the analytic, contributing to knowledge rather than only drawing on it. It then examines the fine art model, where exhibition functions as peer review, and advances a parallel for design: client selection as review, with professional credentials — experience, budget accountability, demonstrated return on investment — constituting reviewer qualification.
Against the empirical apparatus of the sciences — hypothesis, subjects, controlled trials, statistical analysis — the presentation asks whether research in design should instead be a natural result of practice. Institutional criteria already recognize a completed design project as research when it extends the field’s knowledge base, is open to peer review, is documented in writing, and has its methodologies described.
Practice satisfies the first of those conditions. The remaining three are matters of documentation and venue rather than of method — infrastructure the discipline has yet to build, and the condition on which recognition of practice as scholarship depends.
This research was presented at the
Design Incubation Colloquium 1.0: Inaugural Event at AIGA
on Thursday, June 5, 2014.
