Technology and communication design: crossroads and compromises
Abstract
As I prepare to teach the latest iteration of my course in Visualizing Information, I am struck by how quickly visualization software and techniques are advancing. As an academic, whose primary job is as a researcher and teacher, my relationship with technology is rooted at the crossroads of excitement and dread; of just catching up and being perpetually behind. I feel excitement that advancements in web functionality and design, visualization techniques, and other technology-enabled practices are finally happening and can benefit my work and the work of my students. Conversely I am filled with dread that I rarely feel fully in-the-know, much less at the bleeding edge of these developments because my job doesn't necessarily reward that kind of knowledge. As a graduate student in the fall of 2000 (Is that really 14 years ago?) I earned a webmaster certification and followed that by helping in the redesign of several websites at my university. A decade later, as an assistant professor on the tenure clock, I was composing an academic webtext and I found myself needing the help of an undergraduate student to teach me how to integrate something called jQuery into my HTML5. I was dismayed over how rusty my skills had become once my tenure responsibilities had taken over.
- Journal
- Communication Design Quarterly
- Published
- 2014-02-01
- DOI
- 10.1145/2597469.2597472
- CompPile
- Open Access
- OA PDF Gold
- Topics
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- BibTeX RIS
Citation context
Cited by in this index (2)
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Doan et al. (2026)IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
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Shalamova et al. (2019)Communication Design Quarterly
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