The sixth issue of Dialectic is slated to be published in the early spring of 2022 by University of Michigan Publishing and the AIGA DEC. This peer-reviewed, scholarly journal is now accepting submissions across all eight of the subject matter categories within which it publishes research, scholarship, and criticism in and around design education and practice and their intersections. To learn more about these categories, and how to effectively prepare a manuscript so that our editorial assessment team can review it, please visit the following URLs:

Dialectic: What we Publish and Dialectic: Submission Instructions

The deadline by which submissions must be uploaded to our online submissions portal is Friday, October 22, 2021 at 5:00 pm, CDT (U.S.). The URL of this portal is:

https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/dialectic/submissions/

Submissions for possible publication in Dialectic’s sixth issue can include written work or visual narratives/visual essays that are written to satisfy the specific theme articulated in the next paragraph, OR—that have not been written or designed to meet a specific set of themed parameters, but that do indeed meet the logistical parameters specified on a per-category basis in the web pages that are on offer at the first of the three URLs listed above.

In addition to the open call for submissions that was just described, Dialectic’s sixth issue is ALSO seeking submissions that critically address and assess the types of strategic and tactical roles that decision-making in the arenas of design education, professional practice, research, scholarship, and criticism have had in a more focused thematic area. Specifically, we invite submissions that examine, interrogate and/or criticize how designers and their collaborators have affected one or more types or examples of disinformation or misinformation over the course of the past 10 years, or the past 10 months, or a span of time between these, in a particular setting or settings.

The effects of intentionally concocting and spreading false information—disinformation—have become more acutely felt across the globe as diverse population groups have struggled to address a wide variety of specious, misleading, or erroneous narratives. These have worked to (for example) counter the need to increase vaccination rates to curb the spread of Covid-19, to oppose the operation of free and fair elections, and to counteract assessments of the effects of climate change (and what might be done to alter this, and why it is important to do so). The effects of spreading false information regardless of intent—misinformation—can and have led to small- and large-misperceptions that fuel thoughts and behaviors that are inappropriate, disproportionate, ill-suited to the situation at hand, or just plain wrong. Considering these circumstances, we invite designers, design educators and design researchers—and their collaborators—to look more closely, and perhaps more inwardly, at how and why we have agency in both exacerbating and suppressing these phenomena.