Mapping Design Research
& Scholarship,
combined & expanded

A note on sources

Both uploaded PDFs are the source — DRS_FoE_Mapping_of_Research_and_Scholarship.pdf and DEC‑Mapping of Design Research and Scholarship (AIGA DEC edition). Each is a photographed corkboard of anonymous sticky notes from a live workshop; neither is a set of researched claims, so most individual entries have no citation beyond "an anonymous participant wrote this."

The two workshops, dated and named. These were sequential phases of one Design Incubation initiative to map current activities in Communication Design Research and Scholarship, not two independent events. Phase one ran at the DRS Festival of Emergence 2021 ("FoE") on September 10, 2021. Phase two, Collective Mapping of Communication Design Research and Scholarship, ran November 12, 2021, 3–4pm EST, virtually via Zoom, as an AIGA Design Educators Community event — a recording is publicly available. Both phases were organized by Design Incubation Chairs Jessica Barness, Liz DeLuna, Heather Snyder Quinn, and Dan Wong (the editor of this system), with the AIGA DEC session moderated by Rebecca Tegtmeyer. A follow-up session at the CAA 110th Annual Conference (March 3, 2022) discussed the map's development trajectory. Event details were independently confirmed against Design Incubation's and AIGA DEC's own public event archives, 23 Jul 2026. The DRS Festival of Emergence session date (September 10, 2021) is taken from the published festival programme, p. 37, which lists the session at EDT 08.00 with local dates NZST 11 September 00.00 and AEST 10 September 22.00. Not yet confirmed: participant counts. The exact prompts and the individual-vs-group question are documented below for each phase, from the two session recordings.

The exercise, phase one, from the DRS session recording. The DRS Festival of Emergence session ran on a shared Miro board carrying an existing bubble diagram — output/artifact/product, practice, missions, and others — with three frames of questions beside it: one set for all participants, one research-based, one practice-based. Participants worked in small breakouts and were invited to add questions of their own to the board. Post-its were movable between the question frames and the bubble map, and were moved live: participants placed their own responses into the diagram’s categories rather than answering into a fixed structure. The categories were held loosely by the organizers — asked what the "missions" bubble covered, one replied that it was not defined, "that sort of place to put those things," and that missions "may or may not be the right way to categorize that… by all means add to it, change it."

The exercise, phase two, from the AIGA DEC session recording. The AIGA DEC session ran on a shared Miro board, in three timed blocks: "questions for all groups" (seven general questions, five-minute timer), then "research-based questions" and "practice-based questions" (five minutes each). The session then opened onto blank category bubbles — different kinds of practice, history, funding sources, movements, products and artifacts, research theories and philosophies — which participants filled and extended live, adding categories the board didn't yet have (economic development, design for non-designers, a corporate/partnerships bubble one participant built on the spot). Notes were individual, not group-negotiated: participants typed their own sticky notes simultaneously onto the shared board in real time, organized into a few informal groups, with each note attributable to one person's own contribution rather than a negotiated consensus. The two phases were a deliberate, iterative redesign of one tool, not merely two runs of the same exercise: the board itself evolved through several abandoned forms — category lists, then post-it experiments, then a Venn-diagram attempt dropped as "completely random" — after the organizers hit a stated methodological obstacle, in their own words on the recording, that "research and scholarship is very sensitive... people feel a lot of ownership... especially very discipline specific." The DRS Festival of Emergence phase happened at that bubbles-and-post-its stage; for the AIGA DEC phase the board was deliberately reset to blank category bubbles, seeking a US-specific audience after DRS had given the project an international one. The DRS session recording documents the limit that stage ran into: a participant, uncertain whether an item belonged under research or output, observed that things are "not in one place necessarily" and that some "seem like methods too," noting this could not be visualized on the board. The glossary's polyhierarchy — 77 concepts carrying more than one parent, with every trail shown rather than one chosen as canonical — is this system's answer to that limit. The project's own stated origin, from the session's opening remarks: one of the four chairs opened the session with their own tenure-and-promotion story — professional practice work that went uncounted as research at their institution — leading to a finding stated on the recording: "there really is a consensus that there is not a universal understanding of what research and scholarship is in communication design," and a working distinction between research, scholarly activity, and what a given institution counts toward tenure, which the speaker describes as overlapping but "not identical." The same remarks describe Barness coming to Design Incubation reporting a problem she kept hearing — that people did not understand what communication design research and scholarship is — and a discussion beginning from there, and describe the speaker's own prior work on the question over "seven years or ten years." The recording does not state who originated the mapping project, and this system makes no claim of individual origination: it is recorded as a Design Incubation group initiative. The opening speaker is Dan Wong, confirmed by him and consistent with the recording's account of a psychology background, a Decipher conference poster, and an inductive-research diagram — all three matching documents held by this project. Source: the AIGA DEC session recording's auto-generated transcript (youtu.be/GpntHPDqivI), reviewed in full, 0:00–59:55, 24 Jul 2026. Direct quotes have filler words (um, uh) silently removed for readability, and nothing else was altered. Participant remarks beyond the four named chairs are drawn on for methodology only and are not individually attributed, consistent with the sticky-note corpus's own anonymity convention.

I've kept every specific named person, institution, publication, and URL that participants themselves wrote, exactly as written, and compiled all of them into one index — jump to Sources & References Index ↓ — so anything "sourced" in the ordinary sense is easy to find in one place rather than buried in sticky notes. Published works the participants named (Bennett, Davis, Jones, Garfield, and the listed journals and magazines) now carry full APA records — verified 19 July 2026 — in the system-wide Bibliography.

Where a document quoted someone else's published work (an essay by Audrey Bennett, a diagram from Chris Jones's Design Methods redrawn in Meredith Davis's Graphic Design Theory, a line from designer Cheryl D. Miller, and verbatim institutional policy language from MICA and a "College of Arts, Media and Design"), I paraphrased rather than reproduced the wording — flagged in amber wherever it appears below.

As with the individual atlases, the underlying text extraction doesn't preserve exact spatial position on either corkboard, so notes are regrouped under each page's own stated question, with a handful of ambiguous items placed by best judgment rather than false precision.

This expanded edition adds a fourth and fifth provenance tier to the Field Atlas only. Purple items are inferred from the responses — relocating things the participants themselves said elsewhere in the documents into clusters where they logically belong (e.g., filling the DRS room's empty "Movements" circle with that room's own scattered language). Gold items come from general domain knowledge of the field — Claude's additions, not the participants' — used to fill categories neither room mapped. Gold items carry no evidentiary weight from the workshops; where they reference real works, journals, or organizations, those are listed in the appendix under "References supporting the added layer." Chapters I–III remain pure transcription, untouched.

What this atlas preserves, and what it imposes. The atlas preserves the two workshops' own organization — the corkboard groupings and the respondents' language, kept verbatim wherever legible — because the corpus is testimony about how the field maps itself, and testimony loses its evidentiary value when tidied. What the combined edition imposes is limited and labeled: the merge of the two workshops into one sequence, and the added-layer sections, which are explicitly credited as supplied rather than sourced (the purple and gold tiers above). The form is an atlas, not a hierarchy, for the same reason: these are overlapping views of a territory recorded by many hands, and forcing them into a single tree would replace the record with an interpretation of it. The system's hierarchical claims live in the glossary's taxonomy, where every placement carries a provenance line. Editorial self-description (GEN) of this atlas's sourcing practice; the preservation and added-layer conventions trace to the tiers documented above and the Sources & References Index below.