In 2006 I was busilly attending to the nascent Tracey book, writing research bids, coping with egotistically self-destructive colleagues and finishing my probation. So I only had time to attend one conference (though I managed to set up a couple of things for the following year). Around this time I became aware that the issues around Graphics / VisCom research were bigger than ones of technology.
There were considerable issues to be coped with first: a lack of good theory on how the subject functioned (as a communications process), how it interacted with a broader society and indeed how you could explain visual culture (the heart of the stated aims of VisCom as an endevour).
My first paper as part of the revised agenda was on personal social responsibility and how graphic designers could fulfill their obligations to others (without bankrupting themselves). This paper had a narow focus, but addressed what were to become key issues in my writing: the social formation of the art; how the technical composed with this socialised art to form a response that reitteratively affected the social and the technical. In other words a feedback loop.

Saving the Soul of Graphic Design: How Technology Can Help Designers Meet their Social Obligations published by the International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society. Abstract:
Graphic Designers communicate, demystify and explain the world to the very people who need this clarity most. However, these same well intentioned people are frozen in place by the economic demands of the organs of dissemination; print, television and the Net: organs that are so expensive and so bound into the First World Technocratic infrastructure that they actively curtail any impulses that Graphic Designers may possess towards performing socially responsive work. Yet year by year communication technology moves on: what might the Graphic Designers of the world achieve if these new processes and devices could act as a bridge between the designers – both local and overseas – and the users on a local level? Might it not be possible by means of these emergent technologies, for Graphic Designers in the Developed World to partner with users in the Developing World, with the aim of producing local answers to local needs? A truer form of communication, one existing between partners, one beneficial to both parties, and one that may just offer Graphic Design a shot at redemption after all.
Keywords: Graphic Design, Communications, Society, Technology