You don't need to become a charismatic speaker or a gifted writer to be a great communicator. You're already a world-class problem solver.
Communication by Design shows you how to apply the systematic design process you already know to your presentations, papers, and proposals, ensuring your best technical work gets the attention it deserves.
Drawing on two decades of experience mentoring researchers at Stanford University, Jack Baker introduces a five-stage, audience-focused design process — Empathize, Define, Brainstorm, Prototype, and Test — and applies it to the communication challenges that define academic careers. From structuring a conference talk to navigating peer review, from designing effective scientific figures to writing a winning grant proposal, each chapter delivers actionable frameworks backed by research and illustrated with real examples.
Whether you're a graduate student preparing your first presentation or an experienced researcher looking to sharpen your impact, this book gives you a repeatable process for communicating complex technical ideas clearly and persuasively.
What you'll learn: - Why being thorough is not the same as being effective — and what to do instead
- How to structure talks and papers so your core message lands in the first minute
- The design moves that turn confusing figures into clear ones
- How to write scientific papers that survive peer review with fewer revisions
- How to frame grant proposals so reviewers champion your work
- How to give and receive feedback that actually improves the next draft
Jack W. Baker is the William Alden Campbell and Martha Campbell Professor of Engineering at Stanford University, where he has spent two decades teaching researchers how to communicate technical work. He has mentored more than three dozen PhD students and postdocs through hundreds of papers, talks, and proposals, and his workshops on writing, presenting, and publishing have reached tens of thousands of researchers worldwide.
He is Editor-in-Chief of Earthquake Spectra, has served on the editorial boards of five engineering and science journals, and has reviewed thousands of manuscripts — giving him an unusually direct view of what separates research that lands from research that gets overlooked. His previous book, Seismic Hazard and Risk Analysis, was a PROSE Awards finalist. At Stanford, he received the Eugene L. Grant Award for excellence in teaching, and his citation for the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute's Shah Family Innovation Prize credited him with "a unique gift in rendering easily understood, even by non-technical audiences, the most intricate of concepts."
He recently served as Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
