Design Matters

STC is inviting technical communicators to serve as judges in STC’s international competitions (technical publications, technical art, or online communication).  Judging in the international competitions provides a unique opportunity to share information with peers, network, and get a marvelous view of the best work that our colleagues are producing.  The deadline to apply is December 1. If you’re interested, the details are here. Read the rest of this entry »

November 3 - 8, 2006. ASIS&T 2006 Annual Meeting. Information Realities: Shaping the Digital Future for All Austin Texas. http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM06/index.html  Read the rest of this entry »

The Technical Communication Summit, STC’s 54th Annual Conference will be held May 13-16, 2007 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

If you are planning to attend the 2007 Annual Conference and would like to participate in a progression sponsored by the Information Architecture and Design (ID-IA) SIG, please send the information listed below to dcaruso@cdc.gov. I will submit the proposal (deadline September 1), check periodically with the presenters, and facilitate the progression at the conference. Read the rest of this entry »

I’d like to announce several activities the ID-IA SIG has been working on or will start working on soon. Our goal is to make SIG more active than it has been in the past couple of years and to tap into the potential our over 2600 members have to offer the SIG and each other. Read the rest of this entry »

To gather information for the next edition of “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web,” Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville have been surveying the Information Architecture community.

The newest survey “IA Education Survey, for Practitioners” is now open. The authors would greatly appreciate your input. Read the rest of this entry »

The distinguished newsletter of the Information Design SIG has returned, as the newsletter and website of the Information Design and Architecture SIG of STC.

If you would like to contribute to Design Matters, please contact the Website Manager, Sean Cleary. The email address is on the Leaders page.

By Geoffrey Hart, Associate Fellow, Montreal chapter, July 2005

Though there is much to be said for living in modern times, few of us enjoy the challenges raised by an increasingly rapid pace of technological change. Indeed, many of us now lack the knowledge to make informed decisions on issues such as cloning that arise from such change. Communicators refer to the knowledge and thinking skills required for such decisions as “scientific literacy,” because they resemble the more familiar literacy required to read and understand generalized information. In both cases, literacy requires more than simply the ability to read the words; it requires the ability to think about and understand the words. In their 1996 National Education Standards, the United States National Academy defined scientific literacy as “the knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts and processes required for personal decision making, participation in civic and cultural affairs, and economic productivity.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Barbara J. D’Angelo, Student Member, Texas Tech. U., January 2006

When I switched professions from librarianship to technical communication two years ago, many friends and colleagues warned me that I would be leaving behind the comfort and safety of a profession in which I had been trained for one that was unknown. But despite their concerns, I was certain I was making the right decision and that I would feel right at home in my new profession both academically and in practice. I was not completely new to field; I had been teaching as an adjunct for a technical communication program for a few years and was familiar with the parallels and overlapping areas of concern and how my skills and knowledge as a librarian complemented and fit with my new field. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ramesh Aiyyangar, India chapter
Reprinted from Indus newsletter of the India chapter STC, March-April 2005

While the field of information architecture (IA) has been around and growing for years in software, engineering, and library science, very few people understand exactly what is IA? Why do we need information architects? Read the rest of this entry »

By Geoff Hart, Associate Fellow, Montreal Chapter and Simon Riffou (graphic designer, Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada). Originally published January 2006

Traditional storyboarding techniques work quite well for primarily linear presentations such as videos. Because these techniques work so well, it’s tempting to extend them to cover user interfaces and multimedia presentations. Unfortunately, the paper-based model for prototyping doesn’t extend well to the nonlinear world of interfaces, hypertext, and multimedia. Read the rest of this entry »