On October 21 and 22, 2024, several WRAC faculty, staff, and students attended the Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Design of Communication (ACM SIGDOC) conference in Arlington, Virginia.

The ACM Special Interest Group for Design of Communication, or “SIGDOC”, is a community dedicated to advancing the practice and research of information communication. The SIGDOC conference offers a collaborative space where technical communicators, usability experts, information architects, software engineers, educators, researchers, web designers, IT professionals, and managers come together to discuss innovations, share resources, and collectively address questions related to information communication. Workshops and presentations explore innovative methods, tools, and processes for designing effective communication.

SIGDOC has grown exponentially since its reboot in 2013, becoming a central event for professionals and students in the field of design and communication. Leading the reboot was Dr. Liza Potts, Associate Chair of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures and Director of the Rhetoric and Writing Graduate Program at Michigan State University. With a long-standing commitment to SIGDOC, Potts has previously served as Chair, Elections Chair, Treasurer and Secretary, and Past Chair in the organization. She has produced numerous publications, shaping the organization’s direction and impact.

This year’s theme, “Emerging Technologies, Ongoing Challenges,” sparked insightful discussions on cutting-edge topics in design and communication while also providing a platform for scholars to showcase and publish their research.

Each year, the SIGDOC conference serves as a vibrant forum for networking, learning, and sharing groundbreaking work, empowering a new generation of innovators in information design and communication.

Graduate students and faculty in WRAC presented research on emerging technologies and the ongoing challenges they present, including: 

• Paige Brady: “Wearing Wellness: A Comparative Analysis of Diabetic and Non-diabetic Continuous Glucose Monitoring in a Self-surveilling Wellness Culture”
• Ben Lash: “COVID-Era Creativity—Making Data Accessible in Internationally Sourced Public Art” 
• Sara Doan, Liza Potts, Casey McArdle, and Imari Cheyne Tetu: “Advancing Accessibility: Emerging Technologies and the Future of Inclusive Design” 
• Adam Strantz (Miami Ohio) and Alex Mashny: “Beyond the Screen: Accessibility-Centered Design and Research Practices for VR”
• Alex Mashny: “Rhetorics, Poetics, and Artificial Intelligence: Reconfiguring AI Conversations in TPC”
• Mike Ristich, Casey McArdle, Liza Potts, and Bill Hart-Davidson: “The History of Technical Communication and the Future of Generative AI”

We talked to some of the presenters about their presentations and research:

PhD Student Imari Tetu

What is your program/year? 
I am a third-year PhD student in the Rhetoric and Writing program.

What is your presentation about/topic?
I have two presentations: a poster on “Inviting ChatGPT into Technical Writing Classes: Opportunities, Challenges, and Student Perceptions,” which is an overview of my mixed methods research project on using ChatGPT to support student learning in technical writing. I also presented on a panel focused on “Advancing Accessibility: Emerging Technologies and the Future of Inclusive Design” with Sara Doan, Casey McArdle, and Liza Potts. We discussed the MSU Experience Architecture (XA) program’s approach to accessibility and blended/hyflex learning.

What inspired you to choose this specific topic for your research?
For the poster, I am part of a research team EDLI (Evidence-Driven Learning Innovation, https://edli.commons.msu.edu) that looks at research, evaluation, and implementation of educational technology and digital pedagogy. I was interested in developing a research project that connected my background in technical communication with EDLI’s interest in emerging technologies for education.

For the panel, I have been involved with the XA program and hyflex teaching since the second year of my master’s program (in Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing at MSU). There is a strong connection between hybrid/flexible teaching and my professional/scholarly interest in accessibility.

How does your work contribute to the broader field of design and communication?
My work demonstrates how instructors could use generative AI such as ChatGPT to support teaching technical writing. In terms of the panel, we are demonstrating theories and applications of accessibility in teaching and learning for Experience Architecture and related fields.

How do you see your research impacting real-world communication design or practice?
Regarding the poster, showing one approach for integrating ChatGPT into the classroom as a learning tool extends the conversation about effective use of AI as a learning support. For the panel, showing how we are centering access as a critical concern in Experience Architecture demonstrates XA’s commitment to accessibility and provides applications of how to make learning experiences more accessible.

MA Student Sydney Keenan

What is your progam/year?
I am a 2nd year MA in Rhetoric and Writing. 

What is your presentation about/topic?
My research explores the social phenomenology that fuels the Spotify Wrapped trend, how a desire to participate in that trend can enable and encourage Spotify users to purposefully ignore or violate their own digital privacy and actively participate in economic surveillance, and the implications of such user behavior for user experience research and design at large.

What inspired you to choose this specific topic for your research?
A random thought one November got me thinking: “Why are the people that get upset that companies are taking and using their personal data against their will the same people that get excited about things like Spotify Wrapped?”

How does your work contribute to the broader field of design and communication?
I think it connects to a lot of things others are already working on—-surveillance, dark patterns, ethical design, etc.—-but opens a new interdisciplinary door that encourages us as a discipline to think about the humanity (not just behavior) of our users and what that means for ethical design and avoiding design that enables dark patterns.

How do you see your research impacting real-world communication design or practice?
I would hope to see more human–computer interaction and design research become interdisciplinary. I purposefully pull from several outside disciplines in my proceedings paper as proof that interdisciplinary research is a valuable, viable, and even better way to analyze user behavior and design, mostly because our users are humans with brains. In not considering that as part of our research we lose the explanation for their behavior (which I would argue is just as important—-if not more so—-than the behavior itself).

Assistant Professor Sara Doan and MA student Steven Brooks

What is your program/year?
Steven: I am a 2nd year MA in Rhetoric and Writing. Doan: I am an assistant professor of experience architecture in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures Department at Michigan State University.

What is your presentation about/topic?
Our presentation looks at how scientists and engineers advocating for clean air shared information about making makeshift air purifiers, known as Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, during the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While organizations like the World Health Organization advocated for preventive practices based on the idea that COVID is transmitted through contact and droplets, citizen scientists working outside of these institutions advocated for prevention practices based on the correct scientific paradigm that COVID is transmitted through aerosols. We discuss the rhetorical moves that the clean air advocates made to establish credibility through ethos and hedging in their technical communication about Corsi-Rosenthal boxes.

How does your work contribute to the broader field of design and communication?
Our work looks at the ways that extra-institutional actors create technical documents intended to protect people’s health when larger organizations fail to give accurate and timely recommendations.

How do you see your research impacting real-world communication design or practice?
Our research recognizes the value of tactical technical communicators’ work during times of crisis and uncertainty.

Please join us in congratulating and recognizing the important work of our students and faculty! The SIGDOC conference provides an invaluable platform for students to not only share their work but also gain the chance for publication, allowing emerging scholars to make a real impact on the field. With opportunities like these, SIGDOC continues to drive innovation, support professional growth, and shape the future of design and communication.

In Memoriam

This past April, we lost an invaluable member of our WRAC family. Bill Hart-Davidson, Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies, passed away from a sudden heart attack at the age of 53. A senior scholar and mentor in the technical communication community, Hart-Davidson stands out as one of the rare contributors to all three of SIGDOC’s publication platforms: the conference proceedings, Communication Design Quarterly (CDQ), and the now-retired Journal of Computing Documentation (JCD). Notably, he co-authored a piece in JCD’s final issue in 2002 and contributed to the inaugural issue of CDQ in 2012. 

This year, Hart-Davidson was honored with the Rigo Award, which celebrates an individual’s lifetime contribution to the fields of communication design, technical communication, user experience, or another related field.

Over his career, Hart-Davidson authored or co-authored 22 works within SIGDOC publications, spanning research articles, workshops, poster abstracts, and more. His body of work reveals a highly collaborative scholar and a supportive mentor who brought deep commitment and visionary insight to his research, often seeing possibilities that others overlooked and generously sharing that vision with the community. He will be greatly missed.