Communication by Design

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.

What you'll learn:

• Why "thorough" isn't the same as "effective"—and how to identify what your audience actually needs
• How to structure presentations so audiences remember your key points, not just your slides
• The assertion-evidence slide format that research shows improves comprehension and retention
• How to navigate peer review: responding to hostile reviewers, interpreting vague feedback, and revising strategically
• Techniques for writing papers that editors want to publish and readers want to cite
• How to handle proposals, teaching, conference networking, and job applications

Who this book is for:

Graduate STEM students preparing their first conference talks. Postdocs navigating peer review for the first time. Early-career faculty building a research reputation. Experienced researchers who want to multiply their impact. Anyone in engineering or science who has ever thought, "My work is good—why isn't it landing?"

Based on two decades of mentoring researchers and reviewing thousands of manuscripts, Communication by Design is the practical, actionable guide to ensuring your best technical work gets the attention it deserves.

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.