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SIGDOC Newsletter
December 2006 :: Volume 7, Number 4

Our members | Looking Ahead | Interesting Items | Features | Job Market

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SIGDOC '06 Conference Synopsis, with thoughts on what is Design of Communication by Rob Pierce

SIGDOC 06 Conference Synopsis, with thoughts on what is Design of Communication?

By Rob Pierce

I recently attended the 24th annual ACM SIGDOC conference (special interest group for the design of communication) held on October 18 - 20, 2006, at Coastal Carolina University, Conway, South Carolina, and had the good fortune to learn firsthand about the broad range of current design of communication theory, practice, and research. This conference both confirmed and increased my awareness that what the DOC in SIGDOC is intended to encompass goes far beyond the development of technical content, and how global and far reaching in scope all facets of information design and development can be. The conference included a wide range of papers given by people from around the world, both from academic settings as well as corporate IT and industry-specific settings.

As the Conference Co-Chair of the technical program, I was responsible for two primary tasks; collecting a program committee who would review papers submitted and provide input as to accepting and rejecting papers, and then organizing and assembling the technical program both as presentations during the three-day conference as well as for publication in the conference proceedings that are published by an independent vendor that works with the ACM.

Putting together a program committee was an interesting challenge. Because of IBM's presence, including many years led by Michael Priestley who published several papers on DITA, I decided it would be healthy for SIGDOC to have representation from other companies that previously did not have much visibility and subsequently made contact with members of University of Washington and Microsoft Corp. The two work together in many instances and I was able to make contact with and attract two members from each.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Michael Albers, University of Memphis, USA
Roger Alexander, Washington State University, USA
Simon Blanchard, HEC Montreal, Canada
Peter Every, Coventry University, UK
Eduardo B. Fernandez, Florida Atlantic University, USA
Elena Gaura, Coventry University, UK
JoAnn Hackos, ComTech, USA
Kathy Haramundanis, HP Corp., USA
Tom Honeycutt, NC State, USA
Susan Jones, MIT, USA
Jean-Louis Lassez, Coastal Carolina University, USA
Brad Mehlenbacher, North Carolina State University, USA
Steve Murphy, IBM Canada Ltd, Canada
Robert Newman, Coventry University, UK
David Novick, University of Texas at El Paso, USA
Michael Priestley, IBM Canada Ltd., Canada
Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Scott Tilley, Florida International University, USA
Ashley Williams, Bridgeline Software, USA
Carlos Costa, Ph.D., ISCTE, Portugal
Davide Bolchini, University of Lugano, Italy
Aristidis Protopsaltis, University of Westminster, UK
David K. Farkas, University of Washington, Dept. of Technical Communication, USA
Alan Rosenthal, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, USA
Suzanne Sowinska, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, USA
Jan Spyridakis, University of Washington, Dept. of Technical Communication, USA
David Hicks, Aalborg University Esbjerg, Denmark
Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
Damiano Distante, University of Sannio, Italy

As the conference Co-Chair, I wrote a letter of welcome that was included in the conference proceedings. I think it provides some context to describing the conference so it follows here:

Welcome from the Program Chairs

It is our pleasure to welcome you to SIGDOC 2006, the 24th ACM Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication. This year’s conference continues its tradition of being the premier forum for presentation of research results and experience reports on leading edge issues of technical content design, development, presentation, and usability. This year's conference is A TRULY INTERNATIONAL EVENT with contributions from 60 authors and speakers, from 11 countries - representing 26 academic institutions and 5 international corporations. We have built on the gains made from last year’s conference in attracting a growing international interest and participation in SIGDOC. Last year’s conference, held in Coventry, England, was the first SIGDOC conference to take place in Europe.

The Call for Papers attracted numerous submissions from around the world. In fact, more than fifty percent of the submissions were not from the United States. The broad array of topics in the papers helps illustrate the need for, and vitality of, an ongoing forum between academic and corporate representatives in areas such as research, training, user experience, content management, information architecture, best practices, and tools or services currently being used or analyzed.

The program committee was perhaps the broadest committee yet to be assembled and included distinguished professionals from university settings as well as leading technology corporations, from around the world. There were 26 accepted papers that cover a variety of topics, expanding the areas traditionally included in the Design of Communication and its predecessor, Documentation. In addition, the program includes a panel on research issues in the Design of Communication. It is hoped that a strong working document will come from this session, garnering ideas from both panelists and attendees. We hope this panel will become a regular feature for future SIGDOC conferences.

Putting together SIGDOC 2006 was a team effort. We would like to thank the authors and panelists for providing the content of the program. Nothing would have been possible without the excellent program committee, who worked very hard in reviewing papers and providing valuable input to the authors. We are pleased to honor two deserving recipients of the RIGO award, Dixie Goswami and Carolyn Miller. Our keynote and invited speakers will provide exciting new insights: Dr. Yuzuru Tanaka, Dr. Klaus P. Jantke, Dr. Nicolas Spyratos and Dr. Jean-Louis Lassez. Finally, we would like to thank our sponsor, ACM SIGCAS, for their continued support of these successful meetings.

We hope that you will find this program interesting and thought-provoking and that the conference will provide you with a valuable opportunity to share ideas with other researchers and practitioners from institutions and corporations around the world.

Robert Pierce John W. Stamey
SIGDOC’06 Program Co-Chairs
IBM Corporation Coastal Carolina University

The countries represented (with ICANN country codes):

• BR - Brazil
• CA - Canada
• CH - Switzerland
• DE - Germany
• FR - France
• IE - Ireland
• IT - Italy
• JP - Japan
• PT - Portugal
• UK - United Kingdom
• US - United States

The universities represented at the conference included:

• Coastal Carolina University
• Coventry University
• Florida Atlantic University
• Florida Institute of Technology
• Florida International University
• Hokkaido University
• ISCTE
• LIPPA
• Michigan State University
• North Carolina State University
• Politecnico di Milano
• Pennsylvania State University
• Tech. Universitaet Ilmenau
• University College Cork
• University of Lugano
• University of Manchester
• University of Paris-South
• University of Pau
• University of Portland
• University of Sao Paulo
• University of Sianno
• University of South Carolina - Upstate
• University of Texas at Austin
• University of Texas at El Paso
• University of Ulm
• University of Washington
• University of Westminster

Some of the corporations represented include:

• BMW Group
• Bridgeline Software
• IBM
• TRIZjournal.com

Here is how the technical program looked, with descriptions for the presentations I attended:

SIGDOC 2006 TECHNICAL PROGRAM

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 18, 2006

WORKSHOP I
Research Ethics and Computer Science - T. Honeycutt, D. Wright (North Carolina State University)

WELCOME AND INTRODUCTIONS
• SIGDOC 2006 General Chair - Dr. Shihong Huang (Florida Atlantic University)
• SIGDOC 2006 Program Co-Chair - Robert Pierce (IBM Corporation)
• SIGDOC 2006 Program Co-Chair - Dr. John Stamey (Coastal Carolina University)
• SIGDOC PRESIDENT - Dr. Brad Mehlenbacher (North Carolina State University)
• KEYNOTE: Invited Keynote Speaker - Prof. Yuzuru Tanaka
• Director of the Meme Media Laboratory, Hokkaido University Sapporo
• Author of Meme Media and Meme Market Architectures: Knowledge Media for Editing, Distributing, and Managing Intellectual Resources

SESSION I: DOCUMENTATION ANALYSIS

• Why Don't People Read the Manual? - D. Novick (University of Texas at El Paso), K. Ward (University of Portland)

• A Method for Risk Mitigation During the Requirements Phase for Multimedia Software Systems - R. Koss, K. Witmer, T. Kasza (Florida Institute of Technology)

• Searching Documents on the Intranet using PDA - C. Costa (ISCTE, Portugal)

• The Effects of Reading Goals in Hypertexts Reading - A. Protopsaltis, V. Bouki (University of Westminster)

THURSDAY OCTOBER 19, 2006

INVITED TALK: Dr. Klaus P. Jantke, "Games that do not exist."

Dr. Klaus P. Jantke is Professor of Multimedia Applications at the Technical University Ilmenau's Institute for Media and Communication Science. Dr. Jantke spoke about current types of games and his research into games of the future in terms of learning and knowledge opportunities. He discussed the social responsibility of the media as well as the aspects of artificial intelligence in games. He cited much opportunity for improving, enhancing, learning, and education through games. A quote I found particularly interesting was "Computer science is the language of mathematics."

SESSION II: DESIGN OF COMMUNICATION 1

Several presentations in Sessions I, II and III were focused on Web user experience and accessibility in terms of theory, research, studies, and findings.

• Chains and Ecologies: Methodological Notes toward a Communicative-Mediational Model of Technologically Mediated Writing - C. Spinuzzi (University of Texas at Austin), W. Hart-Davidson (Michigan State University), M. Zachry (University of Washington). Searching for common patterns that can in the future help form the basis of a template(s) for best practices. this was the first of three papers/presentations that were collaborations between professors at three different schools that have well-established technical writing and computer science departments.

• Designing Aural Information Architectures - D. Bolchini (University of Lugano), S. Colazzo, P. Paolini, D. Vitali (Politecnico di Milano). Contextual information for visually impaired users. For example, how do you describe to the blind user the structure of a Web page (in addition to the actual Web page content)? Page reader work was done in conjunction with IBM, in China and Italy.

• Designing Communication: Considering the Dynamics - A. Williams (Bridgeline Software), Mary Moore. A review of changes over the past 20 years in SIGDOC papers, and the keywords. HCI is the only current keyword that maps to user experience.

SESSION III: DESIGN OF COMMUNICATION 2

• Taming the Inaccessible Web - S. Harper, S. Bechhofer, D. Lunn (University of Manchester). Web accessibility for visual impairment with a demo (where you closed your eyes) on current solutions that provide context (for example, the Web page structure) and content. This presentation extended what was presented by D. Bolchini in Session II.

• Visualizing Writing Activity as Knowledge Work: Challenges & Opportunities - W. Hart-Davidson (Michigan State University), C. Spinuzzi (University of Texas at Austin), M. Zachry (University of Washington). More Web accessibility current research, solutions, information, and trends.

LUNCH AND RIGO AWARD

The Rigo Award is presented to an individual for a lifetime of significant work in the design of communication. The Rigo award, which has been given since 1988, is named after Joseph Rigo, the founder of SIGDOC. The award celebrates an individual's lifetime contribution to the field of communication design.

Nominations for the Rigo award are considered carefully by the SIGDOC Executive Board (elected and appointed members) each year, and the final recipients are determined in a series of run-off votes. Winners are announced at the annual SIGDOC conference.

This year's winners were Professor Dixie Goswami and Dr. Carolyn R. Miller.

Professor Goswami is Senior Scholar for the Strom Thurmond Institute of Government and Public Affairs at Clemson University and is well-known to communication designer as co-editor of the (1986) book, "Writing in nonacademic settings." Her research interests include electronic networks and community formation, pedagogy and collaboration, teachers as researchers, and international professional communication.

Dr. Miller is SAS Institute Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Technical Communication at North Carolina State University, is a three-time winner of NCTE Awards for Technical and Scientific Communication, and co-edited the (1983) book, "New essays in technical and scientific communication: Research, theory, practice."

Award recipients cited the importance of accessibility both for impaired users and non-English speaking users. And they mentioned how accessibility is important not just for the blind or impaired but for the ever-growing elderly population who need internet access for many quality of life issues such as healthcare information. Dr. Goswami stressed education and the importance of designers of communication to focus on the array of accessibility issues and opportunities. Dr. Goswami said she thought in the corporate world, IBM is leading the way in future enhancements research and development for accessibility. She argued for accessibility to information to be viewed as a human rights issue and opportunity for technical communicators and designers to take a leadership role in forging future innovations for the user experience.

Some recent former winners of the Rigo award:

• 2004: Alan Cooper, author of About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.

• 2003: JoAnn Hackos, for contributions to the field of documentation and usability.

• 2002: Stephen Doheny-Farina, Clarkson University Professor of Technical Communications, for his professional contributions in the field of technical communications.

• 2001: Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things and The Invisible Computer.

• 2000: Barbara Mirel, for leadership in the field of technical communication in usability, human factors, and instructional writing.

• 1999: Terry Winograd, foregrounding human needs and consequences of human-computer interactions, productively complicating rationalistic traditions in computer science, and providing important new research directions in our field.

SESSION IIII: DOCUMENTATION USABILITY

• What Users Say They Want in Documentation - D. Novick (University of Texas at El Paso), K. Ward (University of Portland)

• Handling Objects: A Refactoring from an HCI Perspective - T.G. Kannampallil, J. Daughtry (Pennsylvania State University). An overview of teaching Java programming to an audience that is new to object oriented concepts. For example, Java declarations as relevant to object oriented information as related to user experience - in learning / teaching settings. The studies were based on college-level programming courses as a comparison between isolated programming vs doing it in an integrated development environment such as Eclipse, and weighing the overhead and additional costs of setting up the IDE vs writing code in a text editor. Some research has been done with IBM. This presentation was of relevance to documenting new Java APIs (and related programming task, reference, and code example topic files).

• Usability: Reconciling Theory and Practice - A.T. Wells (Michigan State University)

SESSION IV: DOCUMENTATION SYSTEMS

The presentations in Session IV were developer ("desktop") focused.

• A Framework for Transforming Structured Analysis and Design Artifacts to UML - T. Fries (Coastal Carolina University). Using UML to help model for design and implementation of components in a solution.

• Recovering Conceptual Models from Web Applications - D. Distante (University of Sannio). Taking legacy applications and using UML to help migrate to an OO model. This presentation described a process used for an existing application by using an IBM Rational Rose add-in that helped extract the legacy information and generated a UML model.

• ICODE: Enabling the Static Checking of Programs and Their Documentation - S.N.I. Mount, R.M. Newman, R.J. Low (Coventry University). Presented concepts and a tool for checking code, documentation, and Build/Makefiles for completeness, including the feasibility of such a tool to be used in real-world/industry settings.

PANEL SESSION - Research Issues in the Design of Communication - B. Mehlenbacher (North Carolina State University), C. Spinuzzi (University of Texas at Austin), D. Novick (University of Texas at El Paso), J. Stamey (Coastal Carolina University). The ACM SIGDOC Website describes SIGDOC as emphasizing "the potentials, the practices, and the problems of multiple kinds of communication technologies, such as web applications, user interfaces, and online and print documentation." This panel discussion focused on some of the challenges facing the designers of communication.

Drawing on research presented at this year's conference, the panelists invited attendees to collaborate in the development of future research agendas and workplace practices. One discussion (that I started) included the topic of not just the development of technical content but about the development of content types and contexts. For example, more research on data and meta data in terms of user experience enhancements is needed.

There was some agreement but not as strong as I had expected. Afterwards, invited speaker Nicolas Spyratos (Professor of Computer Science, at the University of Paris-South, France and Head of the Database Group, at the Laboratory for Research in Informatics) told me he was surprised by the lack of response and said he completely agreed that much research is needed on using metadata for what he agreed could be described as enhancing the user experience (for example, by using metadata for better performance in database searches, and more customized information being available to users).

RECEPTION, BANQUET

Guest Speaker: "The Art of Rejection" by Dr. Jean-Louis Lassez (from his experience as an editor of the Journal of the ACM). The talk was to be based on his years of experience as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Logic Programming (MIT Press), a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the ACM, as well as numerous invited talks, journal articles, and conference proceedings.

Dr. Lassez is a former IBM employee who entertained the banquet audience with his experiences meeting kings and queens in hopes of acquiring an award with a big payout, similar to the Nobel Prize (that is not given for the field of Computer Science). He tried hard to push for IBM employees to win such an award but was unsuccessful, he said, with hands raised and a mock shrug of his shoulders. In the end, I think Dr. Lassez's point was that we all face rejection and the art involved is to take it gracefully and with humor and to not let it impede one's progress to push for ongoing research and innovation. Rejection can be healthy, if it prevents stagnation of old ideas remaining in place too long (and continually being republished). It is the people in academia and corporate settings who must be driven to push for new ideas and methodologies in technology that can demonstrate why CS is a science that will eventually get the (award) recognition it deserves in relation to other fields of science. He wants to see CS someday recognized as a pure science and in his talk he placed the responsibility on each current practitioners in both academic and corporate settings to help drive this change.

Later that evening, I had the opportunity of speaking with Dr. Lassez and he described some of the current issues with teaching traditional computer science programming courses. He expressed interest when I described the IBM Academic Ambassador program and how IBM might help provide insight to creating courses with more direct business clarity for a real-world perspective for students. For example, rather than writing "hello world" programs from a text editor and then compiling them, it would be a lot more meaningful to write a function or utility ran in conjunction with an existing Open Source component, possibly writing the code in an integrated development environment (IDE) such as Eclipse.

FRIDAY OCTOBER 20, 2006

WORKSHOP II
Communicating Design Patterns with TRIZ, E. Domb (Editor, TRIZjournal.com), J. Stamey (Coastal Carolina University)

SESSION V: BEST PRACTICES

• Using Aspect-Oriented PHP (AOPHP) to Implement Version Control - O. Lemos, D. Junqueira, A. Graciotto, R. Fortes (University of Sao Paulo), J. Stamey (Coastal Carolina University)

• Researching Proposal Development: Accounting for the Complexity of Designing Persuasive Texts - M. Zachry (University of Washington), W. Hart-Davidson (Michigan State University), C. Spinuzzi (University of Texas at Austin)

• Integration of a 2D Legacy GIS, Legacy Simulations - M. Ohigashi, Z. Guo, Y.Tanaka (Hokkaido University)

SESSION VI: DEVELOPING DOCUMENTATION AND COMMUNICATION 1

• Designing Help Topics for use with Text-To-Speech - A. Kehoe, I. Pitt (University College Cork, Ireland). Another interesting presentation on accessibility issues and research.

• Systemic Enablement of Human Text in a Technical Communication Genre - D. Marlow (University of South Carolina, Upstate). Presented description and research of a tracking system for fixing issues in a telecommunications industry setting by processing "Tickets" in a call center environment. The description of a ticket bore a close relationship to a change management change request. Description and content structure of a Ticket was given, including who the stakeholders were, and the workflow and states for a ticket. The benefits of system process controls to help ensure that human requirements to complete or resolve issues are met was described. Future mining of information for future resolutions (rather than manual data analysis) was also discussed, as was the real-world situation of disparate systems for issues across some, or many, organizations and companies. The relationship of call centers and change management systems was also touched on, which was of much relevance to any solution that integrates a call center system with a change management system.

• Authoring Technical Documentation Using a Generic Document Model - I. Stock (BMW Group, Munich), M. Weber (University of Ulm). This presentation provided an excellent example of component-based information development and delivery using topic files and content reuse. BMW uses much conditionalization in their documentation source files in order to generate manuals for each model of car and each component or feature in each car.

A similar model was described for their development of visual information (for a mechanic audience) the illustrated service repair tasks for components in automobiles that may be in more than one model and may be based on sub-components that may be the same or different in various automobile models, The concept of different models of cars, engines, and all levels of components, many of which are available in several different cars was illustrated and in terms of the information that is needed for each component. The authoring process is to build a manual based on the components of a particular version of a vehicle that includes all of the features for that version. Each car has a unique manual even though several of the components are the same in each vehicle. Cars are component based and so is the documentation. With this solution, each car or product can be customized as can the manuals.

The documentation for the repair procedures was even more complex because it was all visual content files rather than text. BMW information developers call it "virtual documentation" that demonstrates the mechanical procedures for performing service on the car. Each visual process or task was constructed of (virtual) documentation modules that were built by component and constructed at runtime using preconditions and conditionalization. The construction of these visual procedures is described as "serialization of components," meaning that a given task might be built from a collection of components that are each sub-tasks of the entire task. Much of this work is also reused for numerous versions of cars/products/engines. The documentation tooling used by BMW is proprietary and content resides as tagged database source files.

LUNCH AND INVITED TALK: Prof. Dr. Nicolas Spyratos

Professor of Computer Science, at the University of Paris-South, France. Head of the Database Group, at the Laboratory for Research in Informatics ((LRI) - see http://www.lri.fr/), Affiliated Scientist, at the Institute of Computer Science (FORTH-ICS), Greece

Dr. Spyratos presented database algorithms for information retrieval with the goal of ongoing enhancements for user preferences, predictive queries and notification, as well as optimizing performance for information retrieval. In addition to much technical details on database solutions, Nicolas described the benefits and some of the details of using conditionalization and metadata for enhancing the user experience from the perspective of the database as well as from the user of a front-end application or Web browser.

SESSION VII: DEVELOPING DOCUMENTATION AND COMMUNICATION 2

• Designing Suited Interactions for a Document Management System handling Localized Documents - P. Etcheverry, C. Marquesuzaà, S. Corbineau (l'Université de Pau). Additional enhancements to client user browser systems were discussed.

• Documenting AOPHP - J. Stamey, B. Saunders (Coastal Carolina University). Providing online documentation and validating its effectiveness with a customized tool was conducted by Dr. Stamey and his students. Then, they studied the effectiveness of the approach for gathering feedback on the user experience (rather than using surveys, for example).

• Research Ethics and Computer Science: An Unconsummated Marriage - D. Wright (North Carolina State University). Described typical research standards for a science and some of what it will take for CS to become more of a recognized science.

• Interactive Applications for Communicational Situations: Assets of Genre and Verbal Interactions - P. Lopistéguy, P. Dagorret, M.Latapy (LIUPPA). Research on Web based enhancements for user experience were described. This talk included discussion about achieving a more granular level of customizations for users from a browser and Web server environment by distinguishing and then identifying users needs (the explicit) and user expectations (the implicit) as two unique components of what we know as the user experience. User goals based on interactions with the application (or Web pages) are measured and while explicit needs may be tied to requirements and requests for change, more is needed in tying expectations into analysis of application design that is genre-based, that is based on both types of goals or design considerations.

For example, a set of organizational customer wants might include:
• Competent help desk support
• Need to better manage increasing amounts of risk
• Deploy and support technology across the entire enterprise
• Increased resource utilization
• Have ample resources to manage complex, heterogeneous environments
• Consolidated output management services contracts

A set of organizational needs might be:
• Limit user access to secure, real-time information
• Enable an Increasingly mobile workforce
• Reduce number tools to manage and support
• Reduce costs
• Reduce the human dependency to a more self service environment
• Protect the security & privacy of critical assets
• Pervasive access from anywhere by any device
• Simplify/standardize the desktop domain, secure it and make it easier to manage
• Improved end user efficiency and effectiveness
• Managing security & risk in this increasingly open and pervasive environment

SESSION VIII: Wrapup, Invitation for Call for Papers for SIGDOC 07 in El Paso, Call for Nominations, and other SIGDOC news and updates.

Thoughts on Design of Communication

In the week after the conference, I received insightful notes from two of the invited speakers. Dr. Klaus P. Jantke and Dr. Nicolas Spyratos.

From Dr. Klaus P. Jantke, Professor of Multimedia Applications, Technical University Ilmenau, Institute for Media and Communication Science:

Dear colleagues,

My wife and I did return yesterday (Wednesday) to Old Germany. We have had a few more very enjoyable days in Myrtle Beach.

At this moment, I am in the train from Frankfurt to Ilmenau. The mail will be posted when I am in my office.

This is a brief e-mail about SIGDOC 2006 and about my impression of SIGDOC as a whole.
I did enjoy it very much to be at SIGDOC 2006, to meet you, to learn about the SIGDOC community, and to get an impression of the many interesting issues that might be summarized under the "Design of Communication" headline.

At SIGDOC 2006, at least, several issues have not been touched. It is not clear to me whether or not the SIGDOC community deals with those issues. To mention just one, we at our institute in Ilmemau put some emphasis on what is called in German in one word - "Krisenkommunikation". An English term might be "communication in crises" or so. This is a wide field. There are principles, process models, some pondering of tool support, and (naturally) cases galore. Design plays an important role in this field.

To draw a more general picture of "Design of Communication", I would like to tell you my view of the field. There is an assumption: The origins of SIGDOC in the documents/documentation field have to be respected. The original core of "technical writing" will somehow survive. But does it need to be the group's focus?! When speaking about "Design of Communication" within the ACM, we mean mostly digital communication. So, the area we speak about is "Design of Digital Communication". I consider this minor difference important. In the field which is named "Communication Science" in Europe (in the US, they frequently call it "Communication Studies") a large amount of work deals with non-digital communication.

Let's come back to the "Design of (Digital) Communication". There are four different perspectives at the topic:

1. The theoretical perspective - asking, e.g., for models of communication, for the conditions of understanding (incl. aspects of cognitive psychology) and the like. Even Memetics may be seen as a relevant foundation - in my opinion, it is.
2. The technological perspective - dealing, e.g., with the peculiarities of communication and communication design under certain technological constraints or asking for the exploitation of new technologies.
3. The system-oriented perspective - discussing all kinds of systems in use incl. design tools.
4. The application-oriented perspective - discussing the issues driven by application cases such as teaching/learning, entertainment, conflict resolution in enterprises or politics, and so on.

I believe that one should always have all four perspectives in mind. But scientific work needs to be focused. Therefore, I take (for a moment) the stand to stress one of these aspects.
For every perspective, I would like to discuss a sample problem.

Concerning the perspective (1), most models of communication make explicit the communication partners and something like a channel. When modeling channels, issues of communication safety and security arise. In my opinion, design that aims at security of communication is a particularly relevant sub-discipline.

Concerning the perspective (2), one may ask for the potentials of virtual reality technologies (as in the German BMW contribution), but one may also ask for the problems in VR reception such as inattentional blindness.

Concerning the perspective (3), there are dozens of system classes; it is not easy here to choose an example. Let us consider what some call Knowledge Management Systems. In my opinion, there is not anything such as "knowledge management". The problem we are dealing with might be better called "information logistics". This view leads to questions for an appropriate design.

Concerning the perspective (4), I would like to integrate e-learning and gaming. There are many attempts, but to my very best knowledge, there is not yet a single satisfying application case. All (really all) application systems for playful learning have deficiencies.

For every perspective, one could easily list a number of further topics. This illustrates how large, attractive, but also complex the "Design of Communication" area is.

Does it make sense to discuss such a picture of the field ...?!

Yours sincerely,
Klaus P. Jantke

It is worth noting that Dr. Jantke's wife is an IBM executive project manager in business consulting services (formerly known as global services) based in Frankfurt, who helps direct application innovation and customer solutions in telecommunications and other industry-specific areas.

The other note from an invited speaker came from Dr. Nicolas Spyratos, Professor of Computer Science, at the University of Paris-South, and Head of the Database Group, at the Laboratory for Research in Informatics (LRI). Dr. Spyratos, whose current research interests include information Integration (mediators, data warehouses, data mining), conceptual modeling, and logic and databases wrote:

I really liked the relaxed atmosphere of this conference, and hope to return to it soon. Here are a few comments from my first experience with SIGDOC:

1/ I think that the size and the spirit of the conference is great, and that you should try to keep it that way. As far as I am concerned, it's only when I am amused and relaxed that I can learn -and learn well and fast!

2/ I was almost completely ignorant of what technical writing was, so I learned a lot about it at the conference, however, I learned much less about design of communication!

3/ I think that there is much more to the design of communication than just technical writing. I believe that technical writing is an important component in the design of communication but it's just ONE component. Several other components have emerged in recent years, and continue to emerge. The conference ought to acknowledge their presence and try to incorporate at least some of them among its mainstream topics.

4/ In fact, I believe that design of communication is THE weak point of information technology today. If I were to summarize my criticism of information technology, I would say that information is useful only if you can get to it easily - unless you believe that "surfing" on the information ocean is sufficient (and.. fun, as Ulysses thought and did - in a different kind of ocean!). I strongly believe that getting to the right information easily has a lot to do with the design of how to communicate with information sources. And I would dare say that even surfing becomes more enjoyable with good design of communication. [Editor's Note: The reference to fun in Homer's Odyssey was likely inserted by Dr. Spyratos to amuse this Editor's stated appreciation for and avid interest in Greek literature.]

5/ All the above brings me to a proposal that I would like to share and elaborate with you. Indeed, I think that the SIGDOC conference should pursue several tracks simultaneously, one of which would be technical writing. What the other tracks should be is not easy to decide. Here are a few suggestions - results of .. random thoughts:

• Interface design
• Personalization or customization of information content
• Context sensitive information gathering

This said, personally, I am not for fixing a rigid set of themes, but I believe that having a few guidelines could help orient the discussion. In fact, the conference could have one theme at a time as a focus - a theme that should be selected by its scientific or steering committee. Of course, this would require a commitment by a number of people, say 6-8 persons, that would act as members of that committee.

Nicolas

While I agree that SIGDOC and the concept of the design of communication covers a broad array of potential areas of research and discussion, I thought the conference did in fact cover much that was far beyond the bounds of developing technical content. Still, it will be of much benefit in the future to do as both Dr. Jantke and Spyratos have suggested, and to better define and classify areas of design of communication. There were conference attendees who work in Computer Science rather than technical communication that did in fact request more clarity going forward what topics comprise the "DOC" in SIGDOC.

I’d like to give the final word on this topic (What is DOC?) to this editor’s editor, Kathy Haramundanis, former SIGDOC chair and senior documentation member of HP Corporation, who helped lead the change for “DOC” evolving from “documentation” to “design of communication.” I am grateful that Kathy has reviewed my newsletter articles since I began writing them, in 2000. She wrote,

I have felt for a long time that Design of Communication encompasses both the work of the technologist as well as the writer, and as such it has broad application. [Writers in some spaces are considered documentation engineers.] Structuring information, whether as online text, graphics, audio, or in something that is printed is a non-trivial task that has rarely been adequately addressed. People have adopted structures from printed docs for online work, but these are not always optimum. All this is why I thought it was so essential to change the meaning of the DOC acronym, and it seems this is paying off. Technical writing is a craft and computer science is engineering, and the two disciplines need ways to interact both informally (on the job, say) and formally, as at SIGDOC. Some merging of these occur with those who examine the interactions between users, information, and technology, but we need more rigor and experiments to learn what is optimum, or perhaps more usefully, to learn what to avoid. And the results will probably depend to some extent on the technology itself, and what it enables the user to do. We should not forget that both writing and technology have both vertical and horizontal implications in the marketplace, and ways to strengthen the active matrix in both these dimensions would be useful.

I don't see the world as flat terrain but rather as a rolling ocean. Things are always changing and few have the temerity to predict what will rise or fall. Years ago, typesetting was essential to a professional product, but today it is so commonplace we don't consider being without it. Technology gives and it takes away, so that change is a permanent constant.

I think design of communication includes all the technical writing, user-oriented technology, and human-computer/computer-human interaction topics that we can list. My main thought is STRUCTURE: how should we structure the information the user needs? Note that we need a variety of structures to accommodate the needs of the several vertical and horizontal cells in the marketplace matrix. For example, if we are writing for a medical audience, a vertical column in the matrix, certain structures will apply more commonly than if we are writing for an audience of auto mechanics who need to repair a vehicle. Also note that the technologist approaches design of communication based on a desire to expose the capabilities of the tool developed. This desire may not consider how the tool is to be used, which may be a contribution that the writer can make. ('Tool' is used here as a generic word and could mean any hardware or software application.)

I'd like to conclude this Conference summary by stating that Coastal Carolina University did a wonderful job hosting SIGDOC '06. The beautiful CCU campus, friendly people, the best faculty parking ever, great food, and onsite support were excellent. The international flavor of the conference and wide diversity of presentations helped exemplify the breadth of "design of communication" in SIGDOC. SIGDOC conferences continue to provide a vital community and relevant forum for both academic and corporate perspectives in our ongoing discussions about what comprises design of communication.

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