beck ux

Super excited that our (Omar Sosa-Tzec and John M. Carroll) submission to SIGDOC was accepted and that we’ll be publishing a full paper in the ACM digital library to accompany the presentation. The paper takes an existing thread of my research in an exciting new direction, and I couldn’t have done it without the insight and input from my very good friend Omar Sosa-Tzec. Omar helped me cultivate the core concept in the paper and made enormous contributions to writing the text. Here’s the abstract:

Prototype-driven design research often involves collecting and analyzing designed artifacts in annotated portfolios, design workbooks, and exemplar collections. These collections constitute important sources of intellectual influence for researchers, yet communicating this influence presents unique challenges, such as the difficulty of translating the aesthetic, material, or interactive qualities of a designed artifact into written text. Building on discourses of visual thinking and visual imagery in science communication and HCI research, this paper introduces, and elaborates, a novel research communication design concept called “visual references,” which combine bibliographic information with photographic images, textual annotations, and diagrammatic annotations in order to communicate design-related intellectual influence.

I’ve written about this idea in another blog post (w/some illustrations!) so be sure to check it out here. If you want to read the paper, you can download the PDF here. I’ll add a link to the official SIGDOC proceedings once they’re published.