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Triangulating communication design: emerging models for theory and practice

Published: 22 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes the enduring dichotomy between what is defined as science and what is defined as non-science, and shows how this dichotomy serves as a backdrop for current divisions between theory and practice. The canonical concept of invention and contemporary interest in problem setting highlight the similarities between the activities of theoreticians and practitioners and inform the development of a useful definition of rhetorical or communication design. While recent developments in activity-, work-, and ecologically-centered design provide a powerful metaphor for contextualizing communication design work, a tentative argument is made for attending to emerging opportunities and challenges related to distributed space and time.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGDOC '07: Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
    October 2007
    286 pages
    ISBN:9781595935885
    DOI:10.1145/1297144
    • General Chair:
    • David Novick,
    • Program Chair:
    • Clay Spinuzzi
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 22 October 2007

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    1. communication
    2. design
    3. practice
    4. theory

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