Communicating design-related intellectual influence: towards visual references

Prototype-driven design research often involves collecting and analyzing designed artifacts in annotated portfolios and design workbooks. These collections constitute important sources of intellectual influence for researchers, yet communicating this influence presents unique challenges, such as the difficulty of translating the aesthetic, material, or interactive qualities of a designed artifact into written text. Building on discourses of visual thinking and visual imagery in science communication and HCI research, this paper introduces, and elaborates, a novel research communication design concept called "visual references," which combine bibliographic information with photographic images, textual annotations, and diagrammatic annotations in order to communicate design-related intellectual influence.