[ATTW-L] #Award SIGDOC 2024 Rigo Award Winners

[Morgan Banville]

The Executive Committee of SIGDOC is pleased to announce the two winners of the Rigo Award for 2024. We had a large number of nominations for this year’s Rigo Award, with many of them being leaders in the field of technical communication. After much deliberation, we decided to give the award posthumously to Dr. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Dr. Halcyon Lawrence to acknowledge and celebrate their lifelong contributions to the design of communication. 

Dr. Johndan Johnson-Eilola was Professor and Head of the Communication, Media, and Design Department at Clarkson University, where he worked for over two decades. At Clarkson, he also directed the Eastman Kodak Center for Excellence in Communication and chaired the Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects Research. Dr. Johnson-Eilola earned his Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Michigan Technological University, where he wrote a dissertation about pre-Internet hypertext, which was supported by a fellowship from the Ford Motor Company. During his career, he published books about new media, online work, web design, and more. He published widely in technical communication journals, including Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Technical Communication, and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. His widely-cited research has won awards from the National Council of Teachers of English, Conference on College Composition and Communication, Computers and Composition, Kairos, and ATTW. Dr. Johnson-Eilola’s innovative work, especially in and around writing and communication technologies, has been instrumental in helping the field advance in many important ways. He served as SIGDOC Conference Co-Chair in 1999 and on the program committee four times. 

Dr. Halcyon Lawrence was an Associate Professor of Technical Communication at Towson University and the Vice Chair of SIGDOC. She was known as a prominent leader and researcher as well as a champion for marginalized individuals. Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, she earned a Ph.D. in Technical Communication from Illinois Institute of Technology and worked as a Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech before moving to Towson. Her work has been published in Technical Communication and Social Justice, Programmatic Perspectives, Computers and Composition, and Communication Design Quarterly. Dr. Lawrence’s research on artificial intelligence (AI) speech recognition and accent bias broke new ground on both linguistic justice and responsible AI.  On July 1, 2023, Dr. Lawrence was elected as the Vice Chair of SIGDOC, after serving as the 2021 conference program co-chair, member of the SIGDOC Board advising the 2022 and 2023 conference committees on program and proceedings development, and advocate for SIGDOC’s Design Justice program. She won an Excellence in Service plaque at SIGDOC’s 2022 conference and a 2022 CPTSC Research Grant to Promote Anti-racist Programs and Pedagogies. Dr. Lawrence was an excellent leader and researcher whose work will have an impact for years to come.

The Rigo Award is named after Joseph Rigo, the founder of SIGDOC. The award celebrates an individual’s lifetime contribution to the fields of communication design, technical communication, user experience, or another related field. Since 2004, Rigo Awards have been given every other year, alternating with the Diana Award.

Past winners can be found here: https://sigdoc.acm.org/awards/rigo-award/.

Dr. Stuart Selber has graciously agreed to serve as one of SIGDOC 2024’s keynote speakers to help us celebrate the lifelong contributions made by Dr. Johndan Johnson-Eilola. We look forward to celebrating at the SIGDOC ’24 conference in Arlington, VA (Oct. 20-22, 2024).
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