This project analyzes keywords from Design Incubation’s colloquium research archive to track trends in communication design research over the past decade. Since 2014, Design Incubation has hosted public colloquia where academics and practitioners share and discuss research and creative practice. The archive offers a snapshot of communication design research from 2014–2023, largely reflecting U.S.-based work by professors, adjunct faculty, graduate students, and practitioners through presentation titles, abstracts, and author-submitted keywords. Through keyword analysis, we explore how the field has evolved over time and which themes and topics have emerged.
To build the dataset, we collected 2,355 individual words from author keywords across 284 presentation abstracts published between 2014 and 2023. We reviewed the keywords year by year using text analysis tools, beginning with word frequency. We also reviewed presentation titles and abstract text to confirm keyword accuracy and add keywords when needed. Before finalizing our approach, we beta-tested methods for keyword extraction and text analysis to ensure the dataset was as consistent and useful as possible.
Below are images that illustrate our process for building the datasets, along with early visualizations that begin to reveal patterns, shifts, and emerging areas of focus within the field. We question: What can these keywords tell us about communication design research over the past 10 years?
This work was completed in partnership with Design Incubation and Camila Afanador-Llach, and was presented and published at the 2025 UCDA Conference in May.
This project is ongoing and we continuing to analyze the data and interpret results through data visualizations, with the goal of understanding topics, trends, and gaps within the communication design research field.
As this work continues, we aim to create an interactive interface that visualizes the data in addition to static visualizations. We hope it can contribute to a communication design taxonomy, something that is still missing in the field and could be useful for researchers, practitioners, and educators.
