Call for Proposals: SIGDOC 2019, “Broadening the Boundaries of Communication Design,” Portland, USA

The ACM Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication (ACM SIGDOC) invites proposals for a research paper, industry insight paper, experience report, poster, panel session, or workshop. These proposals should examine how disciplinary, social, geographic, technical, cultural, and ethical boundaries shape our professional experiences and civic lives in communication design, professional and technical communication (PTC), and user experience (UX) and/or how these boundaries might be questioned, broken down, or reassembled.

Boundaries can mark and hold space in crucial ways, but they can also divide us from each other. Boundaries can mark sites of tension that demarcate our disciplines, practices, or physical locations. When they are rigidly enforced and policed, boundaries adversely affect our professional communities and civic lives, straining the forms of trust that are essential for promoting inclusive, participatory, and collaborative design cultures. These boundaries can separate designers from users, researchers from stakeholders, academia from industry, people from policy, and ourselves from the better angels of our nature. For SIGDOC 2019, we ask attendees to reconsider and re-mark the boundaries of their professional and civic lives, old and new, that inhibit connections. We encourage attendees to rethink how more inclusive research, methods, and habits could bring about further innovation and justice within the design of communication. We invite designers, researchers, practitioners, and educators to submit proposals that think along or across the following axes: social, methodological, theoretical, and pedagogical.