The same term does not mean the same thing across disciplines. Information design is often used as a synonym for data visualization, yet computer science and engineering define it differently. Interaction design is used colloquially for web design, when it is in fact a compound of several design fields. Disambiguation — clarifying concepts in the simplest terms a language allows — is an essential facet of any classification system. This map documents those crossings: where communication design's concepts meet neighboring fields, and where a shared word conceals a divergent concept.
From the project thesis — Wong, The Need for a Classification System in Communication Design (project-held proposal, unpublished; see Overview → Thesis). The information-design and interaction-design examples are the proposal's own.
What a crossover is. A crossover is a documented meeting between one of communication design's eight domains and a neighboring field — most often visible as a shared term whose concept diverges across the boundary (information design in design practice versus computer science), or a shared problem approached with different methods. Disambiguating exactly these collisions is the thesis's founding case for a classification system; this map is where the system does that work at the boundary.
What a dot asserts — and does not. A colored dot asserts that the intersection described in the field's panel exists, at the character described there, resting on the sources cited there — nothing stronger. Absence of a dot is not a claim that no relationship exists; it is a claim that none is documented in this build. The map is a view from communication design outward: it does not claim to represent how the neighboring field would draw the same boundary.
How the 27 fields were selected. Fields enter the map from three sources, in order of authority: fields named in the concept taxonomy underlying the glossary (tag_concept, created by the editor) — 10 fields strongly attested, 12 partially attested there; fields required to document the thesis's own disambiguation examples; and 5 editorial completions, flagged as such on their panels, added to round out coverage where the corpus and the thesis were silent. See the Sources tab for the per-field attestation tier and, for corpus-attested fields, a link to the matching glossary entry.
Source line. Selection rule and edge semantics are editorial self-description (GEN); the crossover claims themselves carry per-panel citations — see the Sources tab and the Bibliography. Corpus attestation counts verified against tag_concept_extended.xml, 22 Jul 2026.
Each external discipline is listed once, with colored dots indicating which communication design domains it intersects. Click any tag to read the crossover detail and its supporting sources.
A note on sourcing. The map has three traceable source layers, tiered by provenance.
SRC — the problem and its methodology. The disambiguation of design terms whose senses diverge across disciplines is the founding methodology of the project thesis (Wong, The need for a classification system in communication design, project-held proposal, unpublished — see the Overview → Thesis). The proposal's own information-design×computer-science and interaction-design×industrial-design examples are among the crossings mapped here.
SRC — field selection. Of the 27 fields mapped, 10 are strongly attested and 12 partially attested in the concept taxonomy (tag_concept.xml, 638 source concepts created by the editor — the same corpus the glossary's taxonomy is built on): each field name, or a component of its compound name, matches a named concept in that corpus. 5 fields are editorial completions, flagged as such on their panels, added to cover crossings the proposal names or implies but the corpus does not independently attest: Behavioral Economics & Decision Science, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Organizational Strategy & Management, Economics & Political Economy, and Environmental Science & Ecology. Every panel below and in the Domain Cards / Field Map views is tagged with its attestation tier; corpus-matched terms link to their glossary entry.
SRC / CAN — the disciplinary claims. Each crossover panel names the canonical texts and scholarship its shared-territory claims rest on; 102 distinct references across the 27 panels are linked to the Bibliography below. Where a claim reflects widely-held professional practice rather than a specific text, this is noted in the panel instead of a citation. Full APA (7th ed.) citations — verified 19 July 2026 — are in the system-wide Bibliography.
GEN — grouping and grading. The 8 category groupings below (Fine Art & Visual Culture, Humanities & Social Sciences, etc.), the Deep/Strong/Moderate/Emerging/Weak strength grades, and each crossing's assignment to communication-design domains are editorial judgments anchored on the SRC/CAN layer above, not derived from a source that publishes such a grouping, grading, or adjacency scheme. The 8 communication-design domains themselves come from the Domain Intersection Map.
Copyright © 2026 Dan Wong, New York, NY.