Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference on Design of Communication: documenting & Designing for Pervasive Information, SIGDOC 2005, Coventry, UK, September 21-23, 2005

Welcome to Coventry and SIGDOC 2005. This year's conference marks a major step for the SIG, the first time its annual conference has been staged outside North America. In addition to the traditional mainstays of the conference, the USA, Canada and the UK, the authors whose papers are included in these proceedings hail also from the Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Israel, the Netherlands and Brazil. The conference also marks a further broadening of the range of disciplines contributing to an event which has always been notable for its cross-disciplinary nature. Originally, when the SIG was founded by John Rigo in 1976, the 'DOC' in SIGDOC stood for 'documentation'. As a result the conference was supported mainly be technical writers and software engineers, a mix which resulted in many lively debates between these two groups of people, resulting in the chance for both communities to place their work in a wider context than is afforded by single discipline forums. However, the nature of both computer software and its documentation has changed radically since the inception of the SIG. Software documentation is nowadays often implemented using hypermedia technologies and may include embedded video, animation and sound. It is as likely to be delivered in real time over the web as it is to be published, packaged and delivered physically with the product which it documents. As a result of these changes in 2003 the 'DOC' was recast as 'Design Of Communication' -- a title which clearly voices what the conference is now all about: principles, methods and technologies for the design of communication between humans using computer technology as a medium. It is from this more recent mandate for the conference that the theme for this year's event arises -- 'Documenting and Designing for Pervasive Information'. We find ourselves in the middle of a major paradigm shift in computing - the advent of ubiquitous or pervasive computing, in which computerized devices pervade our technological environment. This results in a vast increase in potential means for the production, storage and delivery of information. In the pervasive computing world information products are as likely to be produced by global collaborations as they are by single authors. Rather than residing in single repositories, they may be distributed over many computing devices collaborating in ad-hoc arrangements. Instead of being delivered on a standardized desktop machine, they may be delivered on PDA's, cellphones, wearable devices and other, yet to be developed interfaces. For 'designers of communication' this new paradigm offers new questions concerning how we design our communications products, the methods we use, the concerns of usability and availability, the potential and pitfalls of pervasive information technologies. SIGDOC authors have responded with the papers that you will find in this document. Broadly, they are grouped under five headings: · Information Design Principles and Methods The ever changing nature of 'documents', particularly in the pervasive computing environment, requires continual development of the methodology of design of these information products. Five papers present a range of work on this topic, from both information designers and computer scientists. · Usability perennial topic for SIGDOC, which has traditionally taken advantage of its multidisciplinary nature to take a wider view on the topic than pure 'HCI'. This year's four papers are no exception. · Document Authoring, Production and Management The traditional topic for the conference, now seen in the context of hypermedia and web-centric documentation by the four papers included here. · Graphical and Visual Information Reflecting the broadening base of SIGDOC into graphical and visual design, five papers explore the potential of non-verbal communication media and design methods for them. · Pervasive Documentation Systems This year's theme has inspired the production of these six papers, which explore the design concerns of pervasive information from a range of viewpoints, including cultural, organizational and technical. .