How do people decide what information to trust, what actions to take, and what a place, organization, or technology means?
Communication is often described as the transmission of information. My research begins from a broader premise: communication is also the creation, negotiation, and interpretation of meaning.
I study strategic communication not only as the production of messages, but as the design of the conditions under which meaning is made.
People encounter organizations, institutions, technologies, and public issues through complex systems of signals. Buildings communicate institutional identity. Websites establish—or undermine—credibility. Interfaces make some choices visible while obscuring others. Policies signal priorities. Images frame people and problems. Physical environments influence behavior before a written message is ever encountered.
These experiences affect what people notice, what they understand, whom they trust, what they remember, and ultimately what they do.
My research examines how meaning emerges through interactions among people, communication, technologies, organizations, cultural narratives, and designed environments. This perspective connects my earlier scholarship in environmental symbology, environmental behavior, and human-computer interaction with my current work in strategic communication, ethics, risk communication, and research translation.
A Design Ecology Perspective
One of the central ideas guiding my work is that design is never neutral.
Every design decision changes the conditions under which communication and interpretation occur. A public space can encourage interaction or separation. A website determines how information is organized and discovered. An interface establishes which actions appear possible. A neighborhood can communicate belonging—or exclusion—before anyone says a word.
The same principle applies to strategic communication. Messages are never encountered in isolation. People interpret them through previous experiences, social relationships, media systems, cultural expectations, institutional histories, technologies, and physical environments.
Communication therefore does not simply occur within designed systems. It is produced through them.
Design Ecology provides a framework for examining those relationships. Rather than isolating a message from its context, I ask how information, symbols, environments, technologies, institutions, and human behavior interact as part of a larger communication ecology.
This approach is particularly useful for understanding complex public problems, where people may simultaneously encounter scientific findings, government guidance, news coverage, social media, professional advice, product design, community practices, physical environments, and interpersonal communication. Effective communication requires understanding how those signals reinforce, contradict, or reshape one another.
From Environmental Symbology to Strategic Communication
This line of inquiry has developed across more than two decades of research.
My MFA thesis examined how designed environments communicate through recurring symbolic structures, including thresholds, territorial boundaries, and journeys of discovery. That work led to subsequent scholarship on environmental symbology and to a continuing interest in the ways physical environments communicate identity, values, hierarchy, memory, and belonging.
Related research examining the Slave House on Gorée Island explored relationships among place, cultural memory, identity, interpretation, and contested meaning. That work continues to inform my current research on heritage communication, representation, and the ethical question of who has authority to construct and communicate the meaning of culturally significant places.
My research has also extended these questions into technological environments through studies of virtual learning environments, digital drawing interfaces, and pandemic-era study spaces. Across these projects, the underlying question remains consistent: how does the design of an environment alter what people perceive, understand, communicate, and do?
My doctoral research brought the same systems perspective to environmental health and risk. By tracing potential pathogen-transfer pathways through tools, footwear, equipment, human behavior, and the physical environment, the study demonstrates why communication cannot always be separated from the system in which action occurs. People may possess information about risk while working within environments that make safer behavior difficult, inconvenient, or invisible.
That finding has become increasingly important to my current research: knowing is not necessarily doing, and communication problems cannot always be solved by supplying more information.
Research Themes
My work in communication, meaning, and designed systems examines questions such as:
- How do physical, digital, visual, and organizational environments shape communication and behavior?
- How do symbols, images, and spaces influence identity, belonging, cultural memory, and public perception?
- What causes people to regard information, institutions, or messengers as trustworthy?
- How do people interpret risk and uncertainty across competing communication systems?
- How do interfaces and information environments structure attention and decision-making?
- How can communication reduce cognitive burden rather than contribute to information overload?
- How do visual and spatial choices frame publics and communicate institutional identity?
- How do organizational structures and communication practices affect stakeholder relationships?
- When does persuasion become ethically problematic?
- How can communication systems be redesigned to make appropriate action more understandable, feasible, and equitable?
These questions draw together strategic communication, environmental symbology, visual communication, environmental psychology, human-computer interaction, systems thinking, risk communication, and design research.
Communication, Trust & Ethics
Trust is particularly important within this research program.
Organizations often approach trust as a messaging problem: communicate more clearly, provide more information, or improve the campaign. But trust also emerges from experience. People evaluate whether institutional actions correspond with institutional messages, whether information is accessible and usable, whether uncertainty is acknowledged, whether different publics are represented fairly, and whether systems appear designed with their interests in mind.
This makes ethics inseparable from strategic communication.
A communication intervention can be persuasive and still be irresponsible. My work therefore considers questions of representation, accessibility, cultural meaning, transparency, uncertainty, power, feasibility, and unintended consequences alongside questions of communication effectiveness.
Rather than asking only whether communication works, I am interested in asking:
What works, for whom, under what conditions, toward whose objectives, and with what consequences?
Why This Matters
Many important public problems are not caused by a lack of information.
Information is abundant. Researchers publish scientific findings. Governments issue guidance. Organizations develop plans. Communities receive emergency alerts. News organizations, social platforms, professional experts, institutions, and interpersonal networks continuously produce competing interpretations of events.
Yet information alone rarely determines behavior. People act based on what they understand, what they trust, what they believe applies to them, what they remember, what their communities consider normal, and what their environments make possible.
Improving communication therefore requires more than producing better messages. It requires understanding—and sometimes redesigning—the broader systems through which people encounter information and translate it into action. This is especially important in areas such as public health, environmental stewardship, disaster preparedness, community resilience, organizational change, emerging technologies, and public decision-making, where communication frequently occurs under conditions of uncertainty and where failures of interpretation can have meaningful consequences.
Current Areas of Inquiry
My current research brings this perspective to several interconnected areas:
Strategic communication and ethics
Examining how organizations and institutions communicate with publics, establish credibility, frame issues, make persuasive choices, and navigate the ethical responsibilities associated with strategic influence.
Visual-spatial communication and environmental symbology
Studying how images, objects, interfaces, architecture, environments, and other designed forms communicate identity, values, cultural narratives, institutional priorities, and social expectations.
Environmental health and risk communication
Investigating how people encounter and act upon information about environmental and health risks, particularly when recommended behaviors interact with physical environments, technologies, established practices, or competing sources of information.
Human-computer interaction and information design
Examining how technologies and interfaces structure attention, information discovery, participation, and decision-making.
Research translation and evidence-informed decision-making
Exploring how scientific and technical knowledge moves beyond scholarly publication and becomes understandable, credible, actionable information for practitioners, organizations, policymakers, and communities.
Community resilience and adaptive capacity
Investigating communication as a mechanism through which communities recognize threats, coordinate resources, establish shared understanding, make decisions under uncertainty, and adapt to changing conditions.
Cultural memory, heritage, and representation
Examining how places and institutions construct public narratives about history and identity, including questions of interpretive authority, descendant voice, cultural representation, and ethical communication.
One Health and environmental communication
Studying communication at the intersections of human, animal, and environmental health, particularly where scientific risk, everyday practices, physical environments, and public decision-making intersect.
Together, these areas contribute to the broader framework I call Design Ecology: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how communication, environments, technologies, organizations, and human behavior interact within complex systems.
Looking Forward
As communication technologies continue to evolve, the central challenge is no longer simply producing or distributing more information. It is helping people determine what information means, whether it can be trusted, how it applies to their circumstances, and what they should do with it.
My research seeks to develop theoretical frameworks and practical interventions that help organizations, communities, and institutions communicate more effectively and ethically—particularly in contexts involving uncertainty, complexity, competing interests, and consequential decisions.
Ultimately, I do not see communication simply as information moving through a system.
Communication is one of the primary ways systems create meaning, establish relationships, coordinate action, and adapt.