At the Fourth International Conference on Design Computing and Cognition (DCC10), I have been presenting a paper for a workshop called “Design Communication”.
The workshop, organized by Anja Maier from the Technical University of Denmark, aimed at discussing the challenges in understanding and supporting communication in design, “while at the same time reflecting on the nature of research into design communication”. From the call of papers:

Virtually everything people experience today has been made by designers and everything that is designed is constantly evolving. Designers create products, services and experiences that people will need and want to have in the future. Whilst and perhaps by anticipating and creating the future, their very own work environment is changing.

Changes in the work environment manifest themselves in the breadth and depth of requirements designers are responding to, in the way designers are working, in the tools they are using and in the skills they and people they are working with are possessing. Designers also need to consider speedy changes in scientific discoveries, legal constraints, consumer’s culturally informed expectations of a designed object, attitudes in society in general and momentarily, for example, towards environmental and social sustainability in specific. This may be somewhat daunting as well as exciting. Designers and engineers need to understand these issues. They need to generate a co-ordinated view amongst often widely dispersed teams of how to respond to these mostly very tacit requirements. At the same time perennial issue like time and cost and widely distributed supply chains add pressure on the designer.

How can research into design communication capture these very changes and help designers in their everyday tasks?

My subject “Designing Dialogue in Media Architecture” dealt with design strategies for enabling, creating and developing dialogical situations and in mediated architecture.