The evolution of communication design: a brief history of the acm sigdoc

  • Authors:

  • Brad Mehlenbacher

  • Affiliations:

  • North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 29th ACM international conference on Design of communication
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

This paper provides an abbreviated history of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group for the Design of Communication (ACM SIGDOC). The ACM SIGDOC has a relatively short history as special interest groups go (1975 to the present), but not in terms of the brief history and explosive growth of computer science, interface design, and the design of systems that support computer users. Indeed, interest in forming a special group focusing on systems documentation began to develop in the early 1970s. At the time, few technical writers (or few computer professionals who recognized themselves as technical writers) existed. Most systems documentation was being developed for military applications and large mainframe computer systems (such as those developed by IBM Corporation). Similar to the history of ACM SIGDOC, the field of communication design has burgeoned while simultaneously allowing increased fragmentation and distributed research initiatives across other developing fields.