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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]

Copyright of Agathon: International Journal of Architecture, Art & Design is the property of DEMETRA CE.RI.MED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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]

Copyright of POTENSIA: Jurnal Kependidikan Islam is the property of POTENSIA: Jurnal Kependidikan Islam and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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)).

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]

Keywords: bushfires; cities; climate change; communication design; ecological literacy; edges; ibis; literacy; more-than-human; plants; sustainable development goals EN bushfires cities climate change communication design ecological literacy edges ibis literacy more-than-human plants sustainable development goals 323 330 8 07/24/20 20200801 NES 200801 It is January 2020. Recombinant Ecologies as a concept builds on the urban ecology term "recombinant ecosystem" that speaks to the disturbance of "natural" ecosystems by humans. For instance, the spontaneous recombinant association of weedy plants on the edge of a pavement can form a micro-wasteland, or a deliberate recombinant ecosystem can be designed in the restoration project of a heritage landscape garden. In our own article, 'The not-yet tropical: mapping recombinant ecologies in a Sydney suburb', we write about a plant-led visual communication project by our research studio, Mapping Edges. [Extracted from the article]

Can we still save the world? Probably everybody has asked themselves this question at some point. But when we concentrate so much on the negative side of things that we lose sight of positive developments, it becomes a problem. My diploma thesis and project originated from the experience that to try and save the world can be a frustrating matter. It is a search for serenity in social and ecological commitment. I recorded the outcome of this search in an experimentally designed book. This learning paper gives an insight into the project and describes how design, social and ecologial commitment and serenity can benefit from one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study documents how an academic team of mathematicians engaged in collective communication design work (CCDW) in order to improve how they communicated a process innovation to student stakeholders. The study, supported by interviews and observations, explains how team members worked together to develop structural and verbal strategies for sensebreaking student stakeholders' preconceived notions about how college-level math should be taught and learned. Findings identified two micro-skills, which were especially useful for CCDW on verbal communication: The ephemeral and situated nature of verbal communication means that communication innovations have to be recounted to the team – labeled backstage recounted piloting – and then later personalized by team members in their own spontaneous and ongoing flow of talk – labeled frontstage personalized mimicry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study addresses graphic and verbal elements as part of the communication design of matrimonial advertising. Following European trends and rules of the press, the Sunday Times of India newspaper preserves the traditional features in its design for the matrimonial column. It is argued that its communication design is a mixture of two design styles: universal (easily interpreted by the wide audience) and specifically Indian. This is not a problem, since matrimonial advertisements are addressed only to in-group members. For them, the use of ethnic motives in the verbal and non-verbal components of matrimonial advertising is more appealing. Through the signs of the semiotic matrimonial code, they enter the general space of cultural communication. This evokes their trust to the verbal content, creates a comfortable atmosphere for dealing with such a delicate topic and increases the chances of successful engagement. The pragmatic significance of graphic design elements prevails over text ones. All graphic elements, ornaments, lines, linings, vignettes, frames, etc., serve to create a respectful image of the person placing the advertisement, the person on whose behalf the advertisement is placed, and the potential bride/groom. Respect and traditions are key elements of Indian culture and are reflected in the space of newspaper communication. Understanding the requirements for the publication of matrimonial advertisements reflects the social structure and the specifics of interpersonal relations between men and women, parents and children. The interpretation of both visual and verbal signs by outsiders is largely dependent on his/her experience of Indian culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution investigates the role of communication design as a useful tool, in order to improve the relationship between places and inhabitants and turn our gaze on the deep bond between citizens, cities and signs. The city is seen as a device that enters into relationship, not only through physical elements, but also through allowed or suggested routes, rules and prohibitions incorporated in signage: it is precisely from the narration of places, from the elements that populate them, that you perceive specifically the city. To support this thesis, significant experiences realized internationally by designers and landscape architects such as Ruedi Baur, Catherine Linder, Malte Martin are illustrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]