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The present study explores how disagreement space is managed in a multiparty argumentative activity of debate talk show that focuses on the political situation in Belarus. The communicative activity under study is viewed as a type of difficult conversation that takes place between two groups that differ in their ideologies (Ellis 2020). In particular, drawing on the polylogical framework of argumentation (Lewiński and Aakhus 2023) and communication design approach (Aakhus 2007), the study investigates the communicative practice of framing that the moderators and the debaters use to shape disagreement space. The analysis shows that the activity is polylogical not just in a sense of positions, participants, and places (Lewiński and Aakhus 2023), but also in how argumentative activity is framed, which has consequences for how the interactivity is constructed and how disagreement space is managed in the course of interaction. It also shows how the interweaving of negative and positive features of communication add to the complexity of difficult interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given that the identity of a successful organization is similar to humans’, it needs to be interactive, dynamic, evolving, and adapting to global changes and trends. With the advent of the Internet, social media platforms have allowed organizations and their identities to change and evolve like living creatures. The challenge that faces organizations now is to create brands that keep up with the ongoing fast-paced changes around us. When “Dynamic Branding” emerged, it gave a way to organizations in general, and cultural institutions in specific, to cope with these changes. Dynamic visual identities have several types, one of the most unique ones is interactive dynamic identities, which are identities built on interactive logos. What makes interactive dynamic visual identities that special is the level of flexibility and interaction they allow. In creating an Interactive dynamic identity, designers and users alike participate in creating several variations of a logo, which has a constant visual aspect in all variations, but every user can have their flexible input and create a different individualized variation of his own. The process of engaging the users in creating an interactive logo creates a very personal experience for the user, one that he would probably never forget. In that way, the user feels engaged, seen, and connected, to the institute in a different way, as he poured some of himself into it, he becomes a part of the institute and the institute becomes a part of him. The cultural institutions in Egypt could benefit greatly from interactive dynamic visual Identity systems as they could create an unbreakable emotional bond between the users and the Egyptian cultural institutes. A bond that would surely increase the engagement of the youth in the Egyptian cultural scene.

This paper presents a reflective examination of challenges to design and communication from the current digital revolution, using the prism of a 1980s television advertisement for the Yellow Pages. Originating at the same time as the height of the desktop publishing revolution, the advert illuminates a transitional period in the evolution of digital technology and media communications, marked by changing user practices and experiences. The advert's storyline follows a young man's quest to convert an old cine film (of his father) to videotape for his mother's birthday, in the process showcasing the impending shift from analogue to digital technologies and encapsulating the multifaceted implications and transitional challenges of the period. The hybrid setting of technologies, alongside the tensions, confusion and ambiguities of different stakeholders metaphorically symbolises and can be contrasted alongside, the challenges impacting the design, media and communications industry of the period and can inform reflection on contemporary challenges. Engaging with the narrative, the Yellow Pages advert is used as a creative device which functions as a cultural, historical, narrative lens with which to contrast against contemporary (and future) transitional challenges within the digital revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In simulation-based training, learners apply skills in an environment that approximates the real conditions of work. Trainers who design a simulation also employ assumptions about the design of communication, or how they believe learners should communicate. More specifically, simulation-based training events draw work groups' attention to communication expectations related to timing, timelines, and timeliness. Competing perspectives may produce temporality tensions. To better understand how temporality tensions affect work and workers, I conducted a qualitative case study of a large, multi-agency disaster-response exercise (the 'Tall Grass' exercise), which simulated a search-and-rescue operation. I identified competing design logics related to synching work streams, pacing activities, and providing feedback or input at the 'right' time, and I identified counterproductive effects of adopted communication designs. In response to the findings, I suggest alternative designs for communication that offer better function, fit, and attention to fragmented interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been slow uptake and growth in the local postgraduate student numbers in design, especially at the doctoral level. The question must be asked why, especially when looking at the growth of design as a discipline and a widening domain resulting from technological and social development. This study aims to explore industry perceptions about postgraduate studies in design to see if that could be a reason for the slow growth. The study starts with the background of the development of the design discipline, design education, and design research. An analysis of postgraduate graduate numbers over the last decade and current providers provides a context and general landscape. The analysis is followed by a report where the perceptions and attitudes of industry practitioners about postgraduate studies in communication/graphic design were qualitatively explored. The fieldwork comprised in-depth interviews that were conducted with communication designers at various points along their career paths. Three elements were explored: identification of the type of advanced knowledge needs in industry; how design professionals see postgraduate studies, their career paths, and vision for the future; and if postgraduate studies feature in their vision for the future. Some of the participants had previously attempted postgraduate studies and were not successful; their experiences added to the rich data. The research contributes to a better understanding of the reasons for the low postgraduate numbers, and the gap between industry and academia at postgraduate levels is confirmed. The study insights provide the possibilities of increasing postgraduate capacity in design by reducing the gap when designing suitable curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design education in Australia is still largely dominated by Westphalian perspectives, values, histories and ways of learning. The focus on Euro‐western aesthetics, technologies, timelines and processes marginalises other identities, cultures and places. This signals to students that they should internalise, value and master dominant narratives, knowledges and ways of designing. Responding to this legacy, this article details the development of an intersectional and transformative framework to guide pedagogy for design education futures. Drawing from intersectional, student‐centred and transformative learning theories, we argue that students can develop self‐awareness and critical evaluation skills through understanding and designing within their own histories and cultures. In applying our framework, we reflect on how we developed a communication design history curriculum that centres on previously marginalised designers and prioritises pluralistic work that comes out of diverse cosmologies, perspectives and points of view. Early results demonstrate that offering spaces for students to connect design to their own intersectional identities increases self‐reflection and belonging, while engaging students to contribute new knowledges and perspectives to design history than we have had in the past. We hope this framework contributes to design education moving towards and respecting expanded ways of thinking, seeing and teaching design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication has great potential: it connects people and ideas, inspires action and influences thinking. However, its potential also depends on its quality and its ability to be accurate, truthful and inclusive. Communication Design takes up the ethical responsibility of this potential, systemizing the knowledge and the skills of the discipline, transforming them into methodologies and techniques for constructing a message through the code of visual language. In this contribution, through a matrix analysis of case studies, useful communication strategies will be identified and described as powerful tools to raise awareness towards the achievement of some of the SDGs. After outlining the status of the literature on the ethical dimension that has characterised communication design as a lever for sustainable development, the research provides a systematic review of selected case studies relating to the discipline, which experience and bear witness to the systemic transition for sustainable development, encouraging social inclusion, awareness, and environmental sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

L'articolo si focalizza sulla trasformazione che la comunicazione sociale in Italia ha subito dagli anni ‘90 ad oggi grazie alla spinta delle tecnologie e delle strategie mediali, e all’innovazione dei linguaggi visivi. Dopo una rapida panoramica sulle origini della cosiddetta grafica di pubblica utilità, l’articolo esplora i concetti di crossmedialità e transmedialità analizzandone le ricadute progettuali e di consumo mediatico in relazione ad un tema di forte risonanza sociale: la lotta all’AIDS. L’analisi si concentra su tre campagne ministeriali, mettendo in evidenza il passaggio graduale da approcci monocanale indirizzati ad un target generalista a strategie transmediali e scelte grafiche specifiche rivolte a pubblici diversificati.

The article focuses on designing and testing infographics to enhance desirable food behaviors by manipulating disgust levels associated with the consumption of mushrooms, cheese, and meat. Topics include the identification of aspect categories (sensory, health, environment, moral), the evaluation of emotional responses, familiarity, credibility, relevance, and the impact on purchase intention and behavioral tendencies for the targeted food products.

At the beginning of the fourth wave of memory studies, the relationship with design appears poorly explored, although the memory project is fundamental for the contemporary and interdisciplinary past reframing. From this perspective, the article proposes an intrinsic but not yet evident link between memory studies and communication design for the territory, a young discipline that has taken up the "stratified place" as its own specific dimension, focusing on its valorization and visual translation. This novel connection is highlighted by the mnemotopic approach in which place and memory coexist in a unique meaning formation, supporting the remembrance of the territorial experience. Through a lexical transfer of the term mnemotope, generally used in other fields of knowledge (e.g. cultural anthropology), to design, it becomes a performative concept integrated into processes and artifacts as an active part of project development. The mnemotope as a plural object of territorial interpretation, sailing from Nora's lieux de memoire, passing through Assmann's cultural memory reflections, and landing in communication design, can be adopted as an alternative interpretative criterion that not only proposes a resematization of the memory of places but can be considered as a real medium for exploring the past that can also operate on a didactic level by being included in experimental design courses. In this context, the article will show how the mnemotopic approach has been developed during my personal doctoral journey and pedagogically implemented by the DCxT research group of the Design Department of Politecnico di Milano. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on fieldwork conducted with the designers of and participants in a new fellowship program to connect globally distributed grassroots leaders, this article defines a core set of communication-design practices that support emerging collectives and projects. The three practices detailed – creating a script, building a platform, and inventing protocols to document activity – can be understood as part of an "art of assembly" that is yet to be fully and systematically articulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the findings of a visual text analysis of selected infographics and data visualisations used in news websites during the COVID‐19 pandemic in Sydney, Australia. Infographics and data visualisations used in news website articles disseminated and communicated local and national information to the public about the COVID‐19 pandemic and related social implications. For the first time live data, animation and interaction were used in reporting health and societal information to a general news readership, contributing to the knowledge base and visual literacy of the public. The information presented was not only clear but also aesthetically appealing. This paper examines the styles of news digital infographics and data visualisation of three longitudinal studies using lessons learned from Grainger et al. (2016), Dick (2020) and Tufte (2001) and contextualises the context, narrative, aesthetics, communication, data, functionality and examines the collaboration between communication designers, journalists and the development team. The implications for communication design education are explored in the context of skills, tools and teamwork needed for future communication design students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, the digitization of memory is a crucial issue. As institutional mnestic repositories, archives are deeply involved in digitalization processes and must reconfigure their theoretical paradigms to keep memory active. They must find new horizons of meaning in technology and design practices. In these processes, the resource problem is evident: only in a few cases can a complete digitization of preserved documents be carried out. GLAMs are limited to partial virtual migration to allow read-only and remote access. Considering the impossibility of a full analog-to-digital conversion, it is necessary to reflect on the fact that it is not enough to think about the proliferation of information but about the quality of the translation strategies. In this context, invented digital archives emerge, where documents are thematically juxtaposed to generate new interpretative discourses. In between, digital design practices can extrovert territory by recognizing the archive of mnemotopes: a dense network of spatialized memories and cultural objects of territorial interpretation. The paper presents two case studies in which design, especially communication design, leads to a digital mnemotopic representation that aims to stabilize these compound realities on the territory. Through a conscious reappropriation of personal memory and its territorial context, individual mnemotopes enter digitally into processes of collectivization, not as sites of mummification but of idea generation.

Since the beginning of the millennium, the internet has undeniably influenced everyday life as well as the creative fields, in countless ways that have already been exhaustively discussed. In this paper, we discuss the term postdigital, which is relevant to anchoring the perception of digital design. Numerous theoretical works are dealing with the terminology of postdigital, with conceptualisations differing from one another. Postdigitality offers a set of speculative strategies with the intention of building a complex architecture for thinking and creating under contemporary conditions: how to critically consider, contextualize, and shift the perception of new technologies as part of the existing culture. Digital design has become an integral part of everyday reality: websites, mobile devices, tablets, but also products and services that use digital interfaces as interactive communication channels between a human and a machine. These interfaces require a specific approach to design. The term digital design covers the design of the entire range of digital products and services and is understood as a complex set of many disciplines: user interface, interaction design, information architecture, user experience design, visual design, web design, app design, or game design. The boundaries between the different areas of design are blurred and permeable, and although their mutual interaction can be beneficial, it is necessary to clearly differentiate between graphic and digital design. Digital design grows out of the principles of graphic (visual) design and introduces additional knowledge and very specific principles based on the nature of the digital medium and the transdisciplinary field of cognitive ergonomics.

In this paper, I use relevance theory to explain the relative effectiveness of three different nutrition labeling systems in communicating information and influencing consumer food choices. Facts Up Front [also known as Reference intake (RI) or Guideline Daily Amounts (GDA)], traffic light systems, and warning labels present nutritional information in different front of pack (FOP) formats. Research into the effectiveness of these systems shows that warning labels improve consumers' ability to identify unhealthy products, compared with both Facts Up Front and traffic light systems. Warnings and traffic light systems perform equally well, however, when participants are asked to identify the most healthful product. I demonstrate how these findings can be explained in terms of the processing effort and inferential steps required from the consumer when accessing relevant contextual assumptions and deriving relevant implications in decision-making contexts. That is, I show how the success of the various labeling systems is linked to their relevance in the context of interpretation. This analysis illustrates the explanatory power of relevance theory in relation to visual communication and has implications for communication design and policy more generally.

As part of the 14th Five-Year Plan, China aims to establish waste-sorting facilities in 436 cities by 2035. The success of waste sorting is dependent on individual-level changes as well as macro-level changes. Guided by the theory of planned behavior, the present analysis aimed to answer two questions: (a) What variables (e.g., attitudes and norms) were related to Chinese residents' waste-sorting intentions, and (b) what social marketing strategies and design were related to the participants' waste-sorting intentions? A cross-sectional survey of 459 Chinese participants was conducted in March 2021. Participants' attitudes toward waste sorting, perceived norms, self-efficacy, exposure to social marketing strategies, evaluation of communication design, and several other variables were measured using questionnaire items. The participants' attitudes toward waste sorting, perceived norms, self-efficacy, and hope predicted their intentions to sort waste. More importantly, two main social marketing strategies emerged from the analysis: Benefits and ways of waste sorting and the consequences of noncompliance. Promoting the benefits of and ways of waste sorting and communication design predicted intentions: These relationships were mediated by attitudes, norms, self-efficacy, and hope. On the other hand, strategies related to the consequences of noncompliance were a weak predictor of perceived norms and self-efficacy. Our results were significant because they provide guidance for future waste-sorting programs on the social marketing strategies to use and the need for more professional and well-designed promotional materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With regard to the idea of contemporary society as a system of relational networks, Communication Design for the Territory assumes a pivotal role as a facilitator for the exploration of territorial networks. The research takes on the perspective of "Apomediation", as it attempts to answer the question of how to design communication guidelines that improve accessibility and integration of the existing offer of services for health and well-being in urban spaces. Starting from the study of the social and health networks of Piacenza, the text defines the pivotal role of design with respect to the opportunity of guiding the citizen towards knowledge and participation in the services offered by territorial and digital networks. The goal is to give back to the community aggregated and inclusive information in the area, with the fundamental aim of enriching personal health culture in the daily practice of diverse lifestyles, while preserving the state of health in the event of an emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'1 Question 10 answers' is a didactic exercise, designed to investigate the notion of interpretation in communication design, and to reflect upon issues that arise in the creation of non-fiction narratives. In particular, this research analyses the relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee, as well as the poetic devices of collection, tabulation and repetition in storytelling. The exercises discussed in this project were applied in various educational contexts: initially from 2017-2019 on the Typography module of the BA in Design at the Universidade da Madeira (Madeira, Portugal), and subsequently in February 2021 during an intensive workshop with MA Communication students in the School of Design at the Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy). The exercise consisted of posing a question to ten people and collecting their narrative responses, before exploring how these might be interpreted as texts and translated into artefacts. The results produced by the students at the Universidade da Madeira were small books, while the students at Politecnico di Milano invented communication systems within several different types of media. This article discusses ‘the rules of the game’ applied during the exercises, describes the learning process, and analyses various works made by the students reflecting on delicate balance that exists between a work of interpretation and the processes of dialogue and active listening. The exercises discussed in this project were applied in various educational contexts: initially from 2017-2019 on the Typography module of the BA in Design at the Universidade da Madeira (Madeira, Portugal), and subsequently in February 2021 during an intensive workshop with MA Communication students in the School of Design at the Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy). The exercise consisted of posing a question to ten people and collecting their narrative responses, before exploring how these might be interpreted as texts and translated into artefacts. The results produced by the students at the Universidade da Madeira were small books, while the students at Politecnico di Milano invented communication systems within several different types of media. This article will discuss ‘the rules of the game’ that were applied during the exercise: it will describe the learning process, analyse various works made by the students and reflect upon the potentialities of the method in future contexts.

The article describes the importance of the analysis process for the practice of communication design. The main aim of the article is to show the difference between a creative attitude and a scientific attitude. Both of these attitudes seem crucial for reflective design, where the focus is on problem solving and delivering simple-to-use solutions to the end user. A scientific attitude ensures curiosity and a willingness to explore problems, while a creative attitude is responsible for the willingness to solve them in a creative way. Empiricism in design cannot be reduced to methods and tools; without curiosity, openness, and readiness, the methodological approach to research design work will lead to its automation, which may translate into the lack of a smooth transition between a scientific and a creative attitude, i.e., between reason and intuition. In such an environment, it is easy to become corrupted by statistical data, while the world and its possibilities are much wider. In design, no one requires repeated experiments in order to falsify hypotheses or refute theories; the goal is solving problems according to the principle of such doctrines like humancentered design, with people, about people, and bearing in mind that people need an environment to live and survive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prince Rogers Nelson (1958–2016) was an innovative American musician whose life and work defied categorization. His music combined the spiritual with the sexual while spanning funk, rhythm and blues, soul, rock and roll, and pop genres. Prince embraced nonbinary gender performance and, as a Black artist of enormous celebrity, exemplified what W. E. B. Du Bois named double-consciousness: a sensibility gained from looking at oneself through the eyes of others; a "two-ness" derived from being both American and Black. Prince used multivalent signs, symbols, and codes to craft an enigmatic personal mythology. In this essay, I use Roland Barthes's poststructuralist theory and Stuart Hall's writing on stereotypes to examine Prince's semiotic world. By studying recurring motifs in his lyrics, fashion, and visual communication design, I show that Prince's signifying practices constitute a sensual text that, through illegibility, catalyzed emancipatory cultural expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of the millennium, the internet has undeniably influenced everyday life as well as the creative fields, in countless ways that have already been exhaustively discussed. In this paper, we discuss the term postdigital, which is relevant to anchoring the perception of digital design. Numerous theoretical works are dealing with the terminology of postdigital, with conceptualisations differing from one another. Post-digitality offers a set of speculative strategies with the intention of building a complex architecture for thinking and creating under contemporary conditions: how to critically consider, contextualize, and shift the perception of new technologies as part of the existing culture. Digital design has become an integral part of everyday reality: websites, mobile devices, tablets, but also products and services that use digital interfaces as interactive communication channels between a human and a machine. These interfaces require a specific approach to design. The term digital design covers the design of the entire range of digital products and services and is understood as a complex set of many disciplines: user interface, interaction design, information architecture, user experience design, visual design, web design, app design, or game design. The boundaries between the different areas of design are blurred and permeable, and although their mutual interaction can be beneficial, it is necessary to clearly differentiate between graphic and digital design. Digital design grows out of the principles of graphic (visual) design and introduces additional knowledge and very specific principles based on the nature of the digital medium and the transdisciplinary field of cognitive ergonomics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the results of a series of co-design workshops devised to generate new messaging ideas for a novel hand sanitizer unit that features a video screen and feedback system. Students of different nationalities, ages and genders were involved in the process either to prime design sessions, or devise/evaluate new ideas for the screen to display in a university setting. The project aimed not only to produce animated designs for subsequent testing but also to elicit key preferences for hand hygiene message tone, content and visual appearance. Research findings revealed a clear preference in the student community for positive, caring and playful approaches to hand hygiene messaging in contrast to many messaging approaches featured in previous studies. In terms of visual approach, students expressed a preference for colourful illustrations rather than photographs or word-based messages. The paper highlights some particularly rich ideas developed to exploit the novelty of the device, such as specific animated sequences or immediate visual rewards of internet memes as ways to engage the student audience. Co-design proved valuable in devising new insights for the hygiene communication community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies have highlighted the expanding role of designers through interdisciplinary collaboration. However, the literature rarely covers the public perception regarding design, and it is unclear whether collaboration with designers in the early stages of development is generally acceptable in practice. Thus, this study aimed to examine the status of communication designers' role and collaboration in a multidisciplinary team to make suggestions and recommendations that can maximise organisations' potential competency in using designers. In-depth interviews were conducted to investigate the current roles of communication designers in organisations and clarify the determinants of the collaboration. Consequently, the propositions for maintaining a better collaboration with designers, together with the concluding remarks, were presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engaging with research is regarded as an essential part of design practice today by many experts. However, few academic studies have investigated research activities and attitudes within design professions. We conducted an online survey with 212 Australian communication design practitioners to understand how design research is valued and conducted. We found 90% of the respondents regarded engaging with research as 'highly important' or 'extremely important' for practising professionally. However, 76% indicated that the research activities they engaged in were 'not at all' or only 'somewhat' systematic. This suggests a mismatch between their positive attitudes and limited activities. We conclude that designers' considerable appetite for research engagement and their frequent yet informal, unsystematic research activities present substantial opportunities for collaboration between design academics and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crisis generated by the pandemic and the consequent condition of social distancing has led the senior population to significantly increase the use of digital media to socialise, stay informed, perform physical activity and run online errands. Starting from the hypothesis that motion design is one of the communication tools most used by seniors to carry out a large number of online activities, this contribution aims to propose strategies to make a motion design project more inclusive even for the older segment of the population. The examination of the main guidelines on interface design and usability and the analysis of the physical and cognitive characteristics of seniors constitute the methodological basis for defining design strategies to produce animated artefacts that can also be used by the elderly. Finally, the conclusions trace future intervention scenarios and possible research developments to make the response to the needs of the target audience more effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PAD dedicated the year 2020 entirely to women, their creativity and design action. The focus of issue 18, entitled “The Women’s Making”, was on the maker culture and its meanings. In this issue 19, the attention shifts to the field of Communication Design. The intention is to continue investigating the design contributions and views, expressions and cultural and political positions of women. We believe that the present issue can contribute to the international debate and widen its boundaries. The title of this second consecutive issue dedicated to women’s design intentionally quotes the text edited by M. Antonietta Trasforini, Arte a parte (2000). A collection of contributions that in its title wanted to highlight the marginality and omissions made against women artists in art history. This metaphor of the marginal place (“apart”) emphasises the “centre” partiality, that is to say of those who wrote history until now. This centrality of historical studies and its importance emerges in this issue of PAD, in which half of the essays have a historical approach...

As far as Design is concerned, while the presence of women in the applied arts is historically consistent, the role of women in the technological dimension is still underestimated and their presence still scarce. According to a report about gender segregation published in 2018 by EIGE “in all EU Member States men dominate specific fields, such as engineering and technology”, among the elements that contribute to fuel the gap EIGE highlights “stereotypes, social norms and cultural practices” (Reingarda, 2015) in a culture which is still oriented towards male. From the communication design perspective, the issue mainly concerns the representation of women in the media and the repercussions it has in reinforcing gender stereotypes. This paper aims to provide a contribution regarding the responses that communication design can offer to fight gender inequalities in the area of technologies. At the centre of the reflection is the work of research group DCxCG (Communication Design for Gender Cultures, Politecnico di Milano) in the fields of research and teaching. The contribution will focus on the projects developed by some students in response to the stereotyped representation of women in technologies. The projects represent educational experimentations aimed at strengthening the critical instrumentation of young designers and support reflections around new communication models.

In this article, I outline the evolution of recommendations for graphic and communication design education towards professional trends and the competencies required for future professional practice. I then identify common challenges for design and design education that are often not considered in these polemics, but have great impact on design education curricula. I will go on to define and discuss three areas of student growth that can respond to challenges within the university and changes in design practice: translation, creation, and articulation.

The communication of scientific knowledge is traditionally oriented towards objective truth and facts, and builds on the authority of science. This article argues that, besides or even opposite to these aims, creating authenticity has become a major factor of successful science communication. Conveying a "personal touch," or giving the audience a feeling of "being real," are crucial promoters of credibility. Significant methods of gaining trust and sympathy on the level of textual as well as visual presentation are disclosed by exploring a bestselling popular scientific book, and with references to ancient rhetorical texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory is rooted into places, and it can be an elective design tool to communicate the evolution of landscapes and to teach the value of memory. The Institute of Higher Education G. Galilei-R. Luxemburg in Milan interpreted the MIUR call for applications ‘Cinema per la scuola – I progetti delle e per le scuole’, proposing memory topics and creating a documentary about the Institute Marchiondi ‘for problematic children’. Communication Design reveals, with educational effectiveness, what lies behind the obsolescent atmosphere of the brutalist ruins of architecture and starts what can be called a ‘pedagogy of remembrance’. The research results in the analysis of the connections between virtual, physical and digital forms of memory, in an interpretative framework that opens to an educational context.

The growth of crowdfunding has attracted interest from academics and managers alike. Crowdfunders are consumers in the sense that they consume start-up ideas now and their outputs in the future. Given that a crowdfunding platform is almost the only channel for entrepreneurial marketers to interactively communicate with consumers, it is pivotal to study the effectiveness of campaign message design. Thus, the goals of this paper are, first, what impact does future-focused message framing have on seeking seed-stage finance when promoting novel ideas to retail investors who may become future consumers? Second, what are other factors that can be further combined as digital communication tools to effectively improve fundraising performance? We collected a dataset of 3361 reward-based crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter, the results of which show that a future-focused campaign has a negative impact on the amount of funds raised. In order to reduce such adverse effects on fundraising, campaigners’ extensive engagement is necessary especially when only a handful of reward options are available. This paper highlights the critical role of future focus in driving digital communication effectiveness and offers important implications for research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates postage stamps as a communication design medium that has a key role in the construction of national gendered commemoration. By examining the commemorative depiction of women on Israeli postage stamps, we analyze approaches to miniaturization and discuss graphic design's implications for the visual articulation of gender within national culture. We further discuss the impact of technological transformations and digitization processes on postage stamp design. We apply social semiotic methodologies, archival research, and interviews with the designers, presenting new findings pertaining to research for design. As such, the present research expands our understanding of small-scale communication design for smartphones, icons, and logos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication has been known to be one of the primary bottlenecks of federated learning (FL), and yet existing studies have not addressed the efficient communication design, particularly in wireless FL where both uplink and downlink communications have to be considered. In this paper, we focus on the design and analysis of physical layer quantization and transmission methods for wireless FL. We answer the question of what and how to communicate between clients and the parameter server and evaluate the impact of the various quantization and transmission options of the updated model on the learning performance. We provide new convergence analysis of the well-known FED AVG under non-i.i.d. dataset distributions, partial clients participation, and finite-precision quantization in uplink and downlink communications. These analyses reveal that, in order to achieve an O(1/T) convergence rate with quantization, transmitting the weight requires increasing the quantization level at a logarithmic rate, while transmitting the weight differential can keep a constant quantization level. Comprehensive numerical evaluation on various real-world datasets reveals that the benefit of a FL-tailored uplink and downlink communication design is enormous – a carefully designed quantization and transmission achieves more than 98% of the floating-point baseline accuracy with fewer than 10% of the baseline bandwidth, for majority of the experiments on both i.i.d. and non-i.i.d. datasets. In particular, 1-bit quantization (3.1% of the floating-point baseline bandwidth) achieves 99.8% of the floating-point baseline accuracy at almost the same convergence rate on MNIST, representing the best known bandwidth-accuracy tradeoff to the best of the authors’ knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution intends to limit the field of reflection to Communication Design. We therefore propose to reformulate the question: "When is Communication Design"? When can we talk about Communication Design and what are the conditions and processes that allow us to support it? To take care of them means to refocus the different levels in which the field is articulated: from that of the communicative artefacts, in their prosthetic dimension, to that of the systems that organize them, starting from directorial logic, coming to trace implicitly the profile of the communication designer.

This contribution is aimed at offering a disciplinary viewpoint on the “rules without words” for the purpose of investigating “non-linguistic” normativity from the Communication Design perspective. The intention is therefore to examine how Communication Design shapes social reality through the creation or strengthening of social, normative and tacit rules. The focus of the observation are the non-linguistic expressions, rules, that contribute to the development or maintenance of gender-based social inequalities. Specifically, the observation concerns the forms of schematic representation which permeate everyday life and have an informative and prescriptive function, characterized by a high degree of objectivity and addressed to the whole community - both men and women. The contribution inserts itself within an international framework in which the importance of gender equality is central and reaffirmed by the ONU Agenda 2030 and the Resolution of the European Parliament 2018 (2017/2210(INI)).

In this paper, we investigate the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided simultaneous uplink and downlink transmission networks, where one UAV acting as a disseminator is connected to multiple access points (AP), and the other UAV acting as a base station (BS) collects data from numerous sensor nodes (SNs). The goal of this paper is to maximize the system throughput by jointly optimizing the 3D UAV trajectory, communication scheduling, and UAV-AP/SN transmit power. We first consider a special case where the UAV-BS and UAV-AP trajectories are pre-determined. Although the resulting problem is an integer and non-convex optimization problem, a globally optimal solution is obtained by applying the polyblock outer approximation (POA) method based on the problem’s hidden monotonic structure. Subsequently, for the general case considering the 3D UAV trajectory optimization, an efficient iterative algorithm is proposed to alternately optimize the divided sub-problems based on the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed design is able to achieve significant system throughput gain over the benchmarks. In addition, the SCA-based method can achieve nearly the same performance as the POA-based method with much lower computational complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A pandemic introduces multiple factors that must be communicated to the public. The coronavirus outbreak has demonstrated the necessity of effective risk communication during a global pandemic and the importance of communication design within this process. Since March 2020, official and ad-hoc signage reminding the public to keep their distance, wear a mask, stay safe and stay at home have become ubiquitous in cities all over the world. This paper analyses the visual language of COVID-related signage – those made by designers and those made without – in London, UK from April 2020 to January 2021. A mixture of compositional interpretation and semiology was performed on 130 photographs of print-based signage to categorise them under themes. Results were categorised these under four broad themes: Thank you, Togetherness, Care; Safety and Security; Heroes and Protection; and Fear, Danger, Caution. The findings invite readers to reflect on the effectiveness of the visual communication strategy and ask who these designs are for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]