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Increasingly the conventional boundaries of academic disciplines are being crossed. No longer do we need to restrict ourselves to particular viewpoints or methodologies in order to analyse, interpret and understand the visual world around us. Rather, by exploring the potential that is found when disciplines cross over (or, sometimes, collide!), new ways of looking and seeing emerge. It was with this basic premise that Visual Communication was begun. As editors we came to the field from a range of different disciplinesfine art, design, media, sociology, semiotics and linguistics. Despite these different backgrounds we shared many of the same enthusiasms, interests and concerns. Where we had differences and disagreements we often found them productive in bringing about new ways of thinking about visual communication. It is this spirit we hope to make visible in our journal: shared interests and concerns, distinctly different voices and approaches.Interdisciplinary work is not unique to visual communication, but it is nevertheless particularly common in the field, perhaps in part because within many of the most relevant traditional academic disciplines (anthropology, sociology, education, linguistics, etc.) it has, at least until now, been a relatively marginal concern. All the more reason for those who work in visual communication against the background of these various disciplines to work together. In this editorial we want to highlight three areas in particular: the field of language and communication, the field of design theory and practice, and the field of visual anthropology and sociology.For many people working in the field of language and communication, visual communication has now become of central relevance. In this context, an interest in language as an autonomous object has moved to an interest in communication, in texts and communicative acts as social and cultural

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The screen may be understood as a designed interface (e.g. television set, computers, information signage) and has a central place in representation and communication of the social landscape, and in the cultural and technological imagination, as well as having economic significance in the digital era of the 21st century. Traditional notions and functions of the screen are continuously shifting-a shift made all the more dramatic by the development of mobile and ubiquitous technologies. In this special issue of Visual Communication on 'Screens and the social landscape' , we explore the 'screen' and related information technologies and ask what its implications might be for how people communicate and interact in public spaces as well as in their display and function in the urban environment, museums and galleries. We set out to explore this question by bringing together professionals and academics working in the broad disciplines of design, computer science, digital technology, linguistics, sociology and cultural studies to focus on the 'screen' as a common reference point. This collection of papers explores the different ways in which a range of disciplines understand and use the screen as a way of communicating and engaging visually either in the generation of their own messages or those of their clients. Some of the authors of these papers are multidisciplinary collaborators (e.g. Reas and Fry; Small, Botez and Rothenberg; Hooker, Sweeney and Triggs), some engage with the language/approach of disciplines other than their own (e.g. Struppek, Manovich) and others comment upon the screen as outside observers (e.g. Kress, Gere). The changing concept of 'screen' resonates in important ways across disciplines in the changing communicational and representational landscape of the 21st century and has important implications for the practices of artists and designers working with screens, computer scientists and engineers, and more broadly the shaping of forms of knowledge, popular culture and technology-mediated interaction. This issue focuses on changing notions of 'screen' in its broadest sense, including mobile and widely used technologies