As someone who teaches technical communication, I am interested in the stories behind the frameworks, methods, and best practices of information design. How did we get here? Who figured out what works and what we should do in the future? I believe the history of our field isn’t just interesting but also useful.

To gather these stories, I reached out to six scholars whose work has shaped how we think about information design: Saul Carliner, the scholar who gave us the “physical, cognitive, affective” framework. Karen Schriver, who wrote the iconic text Dynamics of Document Design (if you haven’t read it, you should). JoAnn Hackos, who built content management systems when most of us didn’t know what XML was. Carol Barnum, who made usability testing accessible to the rest of us. Charles Kostelnick, who helped us understand that visual design isn’t just decoration. And Caroline Jarrett, the reason government forms don’t make you want to throw your computer. Between them, they have over 240 years of experience. That’s a lot of institutional knowledge.

The article is published in Technical Communication Quarterly, but honestly, this feels like the start of something bigger. We need more conversations like this. More documentation of where we’ve been and where we’re going. If you’re curious about the full story, you can read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2025.2540984. And if you have thoughts about where information design is headed, I’d love to hear them.