Communication by Design: An Engineer's Guide to Sharing Your Research by Jack W Baker

You don't need charisma to be a great communicator. You need a process. You've spent months on a research project. The results are ready. Now you have to present them at a conference, write them up for peer review, or explain them to a funding agency. Suddenly, all that technical excellence depends on a skill nobody taught you: communication. Most researchers learn to communicate through imitation and trial and error. They copy the dense slides and jargon-filled prose they've seen from advisors and colleagues, then wonder why audiences disengage, and reviewers misunderstand their work. The problem isn't a lack of talent. It's a lack of method. Communication by Design offers a systematic alternative. Jack W. Baker—Stanford engineering professor, journal editor-in-chief, and winner of communication awards—shows you how to apply the same design thinking process you use in research to your presentations, papers, and proposals. The approach has five stages: Empathize with your audience, Define your goals, Brainstorm approaches, build a Prototype, and Test it before delivery. Each stage keeps your audience central and turns communication from an art you're supposed to intuit into an engineering problem you can solve. Read more