Previous research has recognized the neoliberal trends that permeate the rhetorics of academic wellness, placing the responsibility for wellbeing on individuals rather than institutions and systems. In this study, the authors implemented a participatory action research (PAR) project to collaborate with different stakeholders in one university writing program and develop programmatic approaches to support the wellbeing one subset of academic faculty: graduate student instructors. Along with an account of how we adapted our PAR methodology to align with the wellness needs of our participants, we also provide a description and analysis of the intervention developed collaboratively in the PAR group. We end with five takeaways that researchers and stakeholders in graduate student education can apply to developing programmatic interventions that better support graduate instructor wellbeing: 1) research methodologies should adapt to foreground wellbeing; 2) productive conversations about wellbeing should start by acknowledging and validating the lived experience of graduate instructors; 3) students want to be involved in programmatic processes and procedures that support their wellbeing; 4) facilitating (but not requiring) non-productive social interaction among grad students can support GI wellbeing; 5) the work of supporting wellbeing is never fully done---we call on administrators, faculty members, and students to continue this work.

In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), Jane Bennett encourages her readers to slow down the internal thoughts of human superiority over "intrinsically inanimate matter" --- thoughts that prevent them from "detecting...a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies" and their political systems (p. ix). Some readers of CDQ may wonder why a book from 2010 is worth our attention in 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on women's reproductive autonomy, and the restrictions placed on the EPA's control over carbon emissions all suggest a clear resurgence of what Bennett calls the oft-repeated "vitalism-materialism debate" (p. 90)---the debate over how far affect, agency, animacy, and vitality extend. Bennett resolves the tensions of that debate by fusing traditional ideas of mechanistic materialism with the notions of an unknowable agency in all matter (not just humans), an agency that lacks representation in current political thought. If technical communicators and designers dedicated to crisis/risk communication as well as those studying and producing political technologies (Cheek, 2021, 2022) didn't see the application of Bennett's "vital materialism" at the end of the Bush era's heated debates over stem cell research and the war in Iraq as well as the North American power blackout of 2003, then perhaps, given the current political climate, I can persuade them to find merit in revisiting Bennett's arguments.

Beyond the Makerspace: Making and Relational Rhetorics (2021) provides an engaging study of contributions makerspaces provide (both within and outside the making movement) to meaning making through the lens of rhetoric and storytelling. Shivers-McNair situates herself as both a storyteller and an amateur maker in the makerspace she studies and considers applications from these stories for instruction and making knowledge. Situating rhetoric within makerspaces allows Shivers-McNair to create a broad understanding of the relational rhetorics that are "both more than symbolic and more than human" (p. 11). Questioning and evaluating the boundaries between individuals within these spaces allows Shivers-McNair to evaluate conceptualizing meaning making beyond the making movement, an important trend towards reconceptualizing making as an embodied and relational practice that extends to different contexts in society (Gollihue, 2019). Through six chapters, Shivers-McNair provides a concise look into how meaning can be embodied by the individuals of the SoDo Makerspace and how considerations towards making as a relational rhetorical act can extend beyond the scope of one specific makerspace. Readers are invited to consider making as a boundary-marking practice that can speak to the larger nature of how we understand meaning beyond words.

Our paper centers embodiment as a theme and a process in research through describing the fine-grained practices and everyday interactions that shape collaborative research in the contexts of watershed restoration and environmental monitoring. We focus on embodiment because it offers a means for attending to the process and politics of knowledge production within and across boundaries. We offer two case studies that focus on embodiment to structure research processes and shape ongoing, emergent, and collaborative research practices. We argue technical communication as a field is well positioned to include embodied practices in research design and writing.

There is a gap in the academic literature examining how visual elements enhance verbal communication. We intuitively know that a well-placed graph or diagram can help get a complex point across, but the "how"s and "why"s remain more art than science. When you look at the average academic journal, this shortage of visual research is not so surprising. Despite all the urgent dialog in recent years about multimodalities and visual literacy, the publishing process makes it very difficult to challenge this "text first" status quo.

Eli Goldblatt and David A. Jolliffe's 2020 Literacy as Conversation: Learning Networks in Urban and Rural Communities is to be interpreted as a "book of essays" and, more importantly, as vivid and lived conversations that aim to showcase nearly three decades of friendship between two colleagues concerned about meaningful community participation and literacy. This collection captures their reflections on their participation in community-based projects within the urban neighborhoods of Philadelphia and rural and semirural towns of Arkansas, but also offers an expanded and active understanding of literacy as social practice with complex relationships between sponsors, learning networks, power, and taking place in non-school environments having an access point through conversation and written symbols. Goldblatt and Jolliffe's endeavor to highlight the social connections and complexity of literacy aligns with their intent to include not just scholars in higher education, but also "everyday folk" or ordinary people including educators, government officials and policy makers, and people from all walks of life. As a scholar of color and teacher of a Hispanic-serving institution and as a community member of a predominantly Hispanic city in Texas, I was immediately intrigued and captured by the authors' commitment to highlight the stories of people who persevere and design interventions to construct hope and shape themselves and the world into a better place.

Building sustainable infrastructure is a core principle of Constructive Distributed Work (CDW), an integrated approach to project management and team building. In this article, we explain the origins of CDW and describe the theory of sustainable infrastructure that underpins our approach to training, supporting, and coordinating work across a diverse and distributed team. We illustrate how mapping strategies can help us make infrastructure more visible, and therefore more available for reflection and iteration, and demonstrate how a participatory approach to developing and sustaining infrastructure helps our team maintain its commitment to more ethical and inclusive research practices.

As artificial intelligence (AI) automates technical and dialogic processes, technical communicators produce value through articulating complex problems, facilitating new forms of participation, and managing user-generated content via experience architecture. Automated and intelligent agents are least able to grasp the context of experiences, requiring human input/feedback for maximum performance. The examples we trace both prepare communities to embrace AI as part of the available information infrastructure and create an automated infrastructure of intelligent augmented action. Following Star's anthropological investigation of infrastructure, we analyze organizational examples where rhetoric entangles AI, automation, generative design, additive manufacturing, gift labor, and assembly lines.

Understanding the characteristics of letters---their names, sounds, relations to the other letters, and shapes (aka letterforms)---is at one point in our lives so new that we need elaborate learning aids. But, after decades of reading and writing, letterforms become nearly invisible to most people, despite our daily use of text. Type Matters: The Rhetoricity of Letterforms challenges that invisibility.

Technical communication instructors, especially those with expertise in visual rhetoric, information design, or multimedia writing are well-suited to teach an introductory Digital Humanities (DH) course. Offering a DH course provides an opportunity to reach extrafield audiences and work with students from a variety of humanities disciplines who may not have the option of taking such a course in their home department. The article advocates for a DH course that offers a methods-driven pedagogy that engages students with active learning by requiring them to research, dissect, and report on existing DH projects, as well as work with existing datasets and methods from prior student research projects or existing DH tools. The sample student project reviewed here uses the data visualization software ImagePlot, and discussion includes how the student used the tool to examine changes in brightness, hue, and color saturation, as well as calculate the total number of distinct shapes from 397 comic book covers. Ultimately, the students are tasked with developing a research question and moving to an articulated methods-driven approach for exploring the question. The student project along with the tools and sample datasets available with them are treated as a module that may be included in an introductory DH course syllabus or training session.

The foreword, written by Judy Z. Segal, begins with a brief dialogue between a patient and a nurse that illustrates the effects of discursive actions on health and medicine. It is a dialogue between a patient and a nurse, reminiscent of stories of ancient cartographers who mapped their changing and uncertain worlds through stories, discovering ever new riches in a world that wasn't flat. In the same way, contemporary thinkers in health and medicine are discovering the treasure in exploring rhetoric and technical communication across traditional boundaries. These authors move through previously uncharted territory with story and new questions that extend the boundaries of our individual bodies. They explore important questions of individual human agency and how that intersects with social and rhetorical theory. Critical questions new to medicine in the twenty-first century, such as resistance, power of representation, and where advocacy for health justice lies, are topics explored through a variety of lenses in this collection.

The Science of Communicating Science by Dr. Craig Cormick is a lively introduction to the foundational principles of science communications, particularly those oriented towards the public. Dr. Craig Cormick is a well-known science communicator and former president of the Australian Science Communicators, a network of science communicators and journalists. Cormick has also written over 30 books of fiction and non-fiction---in addition to academic articles---and has worked with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), which incidentally also published his textbook. The Science of Communicating Science operates on the premise that science communication is a complex process requiring extensive and time-consuming interdisciplinary research. Cormick's textbook aims to simplify the learning process by distilling well over 400 sources into a compact volume so that novice science communicators may learn important skills for informing and empowering the public by telling engaging stories, fostering interdisciplinary skills, and understanding the audience.

In Rhetorical Work in Emergency Medical Services: Communicating in the Unpredictable Workplace (2019), Elizabeth L. Angeli explores the unpredictable workplaces which are the locations of emergency medical services provided by first responders, the EMS personnel who receive 911 calls but may have little idea about what to expect once they arrive at the site of the emergency. While rhetoric of health medicine (RHM) is not a new area of rhetoric, Angeli found little research about EMS professional rhetoric, leaving a void in understanding the modes of communication in these ever-changing, life-altering workplaces. Her text began as part of her dissertation project but morphed into a rhetorical analysis/EMS rhetorical training pedagogy for Technical Professional Communication (TPC) and RHM as well as EMS trainers and trainees.

Discussions about communication and education have become focused on social justice in recent years, and with good reason. Social justice is at the forefront of many aspects of our daily lives in news, education, and even entertainment. As digital rhetoricians and educators, we have found ourselves looking for ways to work at the intersections of our field and social justice to improve both learning experiences and networked communication in non-academic contexts. This work is both timely and needed, as the hierarchies and inequities experienced in "real life" often translate to, and are amplified by, networked and digital forms of engagement. Fortunately, Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues offers an insightful and practical discussion about ethical frameworks that contribute to our understanding of digital social justice. Colton and Holmes persuasively argue for the value of Aristotle's virtue ethics, especially the idea of hexis , as a model for empowering students, educators, and others to enact digital social justice. As they explain, Aristotle identified virtues "such as patience, courage, temperance, and liberality" that contribute to ethical behavior and "are developed not solely through reason or by learning rules but through practice of the emotional and social skills that enable us within a community to work toward...human flourishing and general well-being" (p. 32). An essential part of Aristotle's framework is hexis , a person's disposition that has been crafted through habit and repeated practice (p. 11). Colton and Holmes effectively demonstrate how a virtue ethics framework can empower individuals to take ownership of the ethical implications of digital practices. Throughout the book, Colton and Holmes address familiar topics in digital rhetoric ranging from captioning (pp. 3--5, 49--73), remixing (pp. 74--94), and issues inherent in online activism (pp. 95--126).

In Wicked, Incomplete, and Uncertain , Jason Swarts examines the changing role of technical communication in addressing user problems that are becoming more specialized and situated within use cases that users themselves do not readily understand. These emergent and real-time problems have led to the rise of online forums and communities, which this books studies in depth. In particular, Swarts studies four community forums for software technology products---Microsoft Excel, Adobe InDesign, Gimp, and Mozilla Thunderbird---that are not only commonly used by technical writers, but also popular products with numerous plug-ins and end users across industries. As a technical writer myself, I have used all of these products, and participate in forums for open source and cloud computing products at the enterprise software company that I work at (IBM). This review seeks to synopsize Swarts's book by reflecting upon how I have or have not used such techniques in my own workplace experience.

This paper introduces the concept of transactional design---integrating Druschke's "transactional" model of rhetoric and science and Kinsella's model of "public expertise"---to demonstrate how technical communication and user experience (UX) designers and researchers can play an essential role in helping scientists cultivate meaningful relationships with members of the public toward the goal of making scientific content more accessible and actionable. This paper reports on the challenges that arose when a water modeling system built for experts was adapted for a public museum audience. It discusses specific issues the UX team had in contending with outdated "deficit" and "conduit" models of communication when working with scientists to adapt the system; it provides a checklist for steps that technical communication and UX designers and researchers---as those who best understand audiences and work directly with users---can champion the idea of transactional design to setup knowledge-making partnerships toward the co-construction of public-facing scientific communication projects.

On behalf of SIGDOC and CDQ, we wanted to reach out to all of you and thank you for all you do in this difficult time. Our organization's greatest strength is in its members, and we hope you are all staying as safe and sane as possible while COVID-19 changes the way we work and play. SIGDOC has yet to reach an official decision on the viability or nature of our 2020 Conference in Denton, TX, but the Executive Committee along with this year's Conference Committee, lead by Stacey Pigg, are in consistent contact and weighing options. Above all else, our decision will be informed by the values that we have articulated as an organization, which are: valuing human well-being; engaging in financial stewardship; respecting labor; foregrounding accessibility; supporting early-career scholars; establishing continuity; managing community and networkbuilding; supporting innovation; valuing industry practices; and maintaining and facilitating interorganizational and international relationships. The option for SIGDOC 2020 that best addresses these core values will be the option we select. For now, we have confirmation that the proceedings publications will be moving forward and supported by ACM and included in the Digital Library regardless of the decision we make on the conference. This is great news, and fulfills our values in supporting scholarship and valuing the labor done by our authors, reviewers, and our program cochairs, Josephine Walwema and Daniel Hocutt, who have worked diligently in the midst of the pandemic. CDQ will continue to publish as often as we are able. We understand that our workflows have changed, dramatically for some of us. So while it may be that extra time is occasionally needed for a review, we remain committed to providing you as rapid turnaround as we can, and publishing cutting-edge research on communication design through our original articles, experience reports, and book reviews. In this issue, for example, we are pleased to share with you Sonia Stephens and Dan Richards' "Story mapping and sea level rise: Listening to global risks at street level," and Jennifer Roth Miller, Brandy Dieterle, Jennifer deWinter, and Stephanie Vie's "Social media in professional, technical, and scientific communication programs: A heuristic to guide future use." These two excellent articles are accompanied by reviews of Jonanna Boehnert's Design, ecology politics: Towards the ecocene, reviewed by Ryan Cheek, and Christa Teston's Bodies in flux: Scientific methods for negotiating medical uncertainty, reviewed by Ella Browning.

With growing attention to "intelligent content" and "dynamic delivery" in the advent of connected technologies (i.e., Internet of Things, artificial intelligence agents), component content management and structured authoring skills are becoming increasingly required of technical communicators today. To produce reusable intelligent content, technical communicators need a systematic workflow and common authoring standard. Our experience in industry and in educating technical communicators has led us to seek out resources for understanding existing standards and practicing them with technical communication students. As such, both authors have used the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) markup standard and experienced what may be a perplexing process in content creation and management. Carlos Evia's book, Creating Intelligent Content with Lightweight DITA , caught our attention as the title suggests an accessible way into learning and applying what has become a widely adopted standard for structured authoring. Understanding that Lightweight DITA (LwDITA) does not aim to replace existing DITA standards, we approach this review not with an intention to examine its viability, but rather a focus on the rhetorical work in structured content authoring and its continuous evolution.

This study examines a document produced by the United States Department of Homeland Security handed out to immigrant parents during the "Family Separation Policy" crisis of 2018. The article examines whether such a document could be ethically tested for usability. Ultimately, the text argues that by the standards of the Belmont Report and the best practices in usability research, such a document would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to test ethically. It argues that, while usability testing is an excellent tool for exploring how users interact with texts that can have life-changing consequences, it may also be used as a tool to perpetuate injustice and marginalize potential users.

Derek N. Mueller's Network Sense: Methods for Visualizing a Discipline (2017) presents a compelling argument for adding distant reading and thin description to the Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies (RCWS) research methods portfolio. Not only can these methods help professionals address information overload, but the methods also support disciplinary wayfinding and network awareness for veteran and initiate practitioners and scholars alike. Network Sense 's explicit goal is to help current and new members in RCWS avoid information overload and better understand their discipline and where it is going. Mueller's presentation and evidence builds upon lived academic experience of ever-expanding growth in research, conferences, publications, and professional activities in RCWS. Similarly, his detailing the dearth of non-local, reliable, and consistently gathered data articulates the experience and lived frustration of many scholars. Finally, his presentation and analysis regarding the increasing number of scholars cited at the end of the long tail as opposed to having more repeatedly cited authors explains the felt experience of sharing or disciplinary niching or potential diffusion. Winning the 2018 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award, as well as the 2019 Research Impact Award by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, underscores this book's value to its fields.

This article explores rhetorical practices underlying productive deliberation about climate change. We analyze discussion of climate change on a Reddit subforum to demonstrate that good-faith deliberation---which is essential to deliberative democracy---exists online. Four rhetorical concepts describe variation among this subforum's comments: William Keith's distinction between 'discussion' and 'debate,' William Covino's distinction between good and bad magic, Kelly Oliver's notion of ethical response/ability, and Krista Ratcliffe's notion of rhetorical listening. Using a three-part taxonomy based on these concepts, we argue that collaborative climate change deliberation exists and that forum participation guidelines can promote productive styles of engagement.

Claims for America's potential for energy independence are substantiated largely thanks to advancements in an extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing or "fracking." This article focuses on the negotiations among individual landowners and oil and gas companies as they enter into leasing agreements to permit fracking. The author draws on his own experiences as a landowner in the Marcellus and Utica shale region. Of primary concern is how landowners construct their own understanding of risk amidst a network of local, regional, and global actors. Landowner and oil and gas company relationships are analyzed using theories of rhetoric and risk communication.

Dear Reader, You've probably heard the story of the city of pigs before, that lovely allegory in Book II of the Republic , where Socrates attempts to prove that justice is not only desirable, but belongs to the highest class of desirable things: those desired for their own sake and consequence. But this is an important story to retell, as it frames the consequence of the scholarship contained in this issue on environmental justice and technical communication in a way that perhaps few other stories can.

This experience report shares the story of course redesign for cultivating technological and code literacy. This redesign came about as a result of listening to advisory board members as well as responding to recent scholarship calling for more specifics on the teaching of component content management and content strategy. We begin with discussion of code literacy differentiation between code-as-language, code-as-tool, and code-as-structure. We then share detail about our advisory board engagement and the resulting advanced-level technical communication course in which, framed by technological literacy narratives, students produce a static HTML site for a client, develop a repository for this work (GitHub), use XML and the DITA standard for dynamic document delivery, and create a digital experience element to accompany the site. We document and analyze student narratives and online course discussions. We emphasize a more holistic approach to code literacy and that course redesign should be a collaborative endeavor with advisory board members and industry experts. Through these experiences, students gain requisite knowledge and practice so as to enter the technical communication community of practice.

This article explores what lip reading can teach us about interface design. First, I define lip reading. Second, I challenge the idea that people can "read" lips---an idea that is deeply imbedded in the literate tradition described by Walter Ong (1982) in Orality and Literacy. Third, I frame lip reading as a complex rhetorical activity of filling in the "gaps" of communication. Fourth, I present a lip reading heuristic that can challenge those of us in communication related fields to remember how the invisible "gaps" of communication are sometimes more important than the visible "interfaces." And finally, I conclude with some reflections about how lip reading might "reimagine" disability studies for technical and professional communicators.

Building from previous work by Lauren and Schreiber (2017) and research individually conducted by the author (Lauren, 2018), this brief teaching case provides a rationale for coursework in project management that draws from experiential learning to teach facilitation. The case begins by providing a research context for how communication designers are increasingly focused on practices of facilitation in their work, particularly in fast-paced, distributed work environments. The case presents two metaphors (gardening and cooking) for helping students think about facilitation techniques. Then, the article describes a project management course that emphasizes the importance of facilitation in classroom exercises and major assignments by developing skills in three foundational areas: improvisation, document design, and systems design. Each area is described with examples to help instructors of project management adapt or use similar approaches at their own unique institutional, programmatic, and classroom contexts. The article concludes with four suggestions, such as partnering with industry practitioners and arranging site visits to see project management in action. As well, the concluding suggestions explain recent iterations of the course's design.

This special issue asks us to refl ect on the transformative potential of disability studies to reimagine technical and professional communication (TPC). Informing this special issue is the notion that disability "enables insight---critical, experiential, cognitive, sensory, and pedagogical insight" (Brueggemann, 2002, p. 795). Rather than consider questions of access from the margins---e.g. after we receive a letter of accommodation from a student, when we need to satisfy a legal mandate, or when we turn to our organization's web accessibility checklist---disability studies places disability and difference at the center of our practices and pedagogies (p. 814).

This study builds a model of open video game development, an emerging user-centered design practice where a developer publicly releases an incomplete game and iterate on it while gathering feedback from the player community. It argues that open development is fundamentally a communication and user experience practice characterized by a commitment to access, transparency, and feedback. Ultimately, it shows open development as a practice where game developers are consciously designing a compelling experience of participation in user research.

Usability involves connecting design to need. Individuals need to achieve an objective; if the design of an item meets that need, the item is usable. If not, it is not. So, usability depends on how well the design of an item addresses the need of the user. The need to hold two items together, for example, can prompt individuals to design a fastener in order to meet that need. The usability of the resulting design, however, is a matter of how effectively the individual can use it to hold items in place.

User expectations are often connected to context. This means the better UXD professionals understand connections between location and usability, the greater the chances they can create materials that meet expectations of usability in a particular place. The cognitive factors of prototypes and scripts can provide a foundation for investigating such factors. This entry examines how prototypes of place can help identify aspects of location that influence the usability of items in a space. In so doing, the entry also provides strategies for researching expectations of contexts and usability and using resulting data to guide design practices.

Technical communication skirts the fringes of regulated biomedical research, which generally falls into the purview of specialized regulatory writers. However, a worldwide move toward increasing data transparency in regulatory contexts has resulted in a need for specialized documentation for lay audiences as well as added disclosure of investigational interpretations regarding the benefits and risks of new or experimental therapies. Experts in biomedical writing believe that these materials require additional attention to meet reader needs, an endeavor that falls well within the traditional bailiwick of technical communication. Technical communicators who understand information gathered in regulated biomedical research should be able to improve the general accessibility of this complex information for a general readership; however, knowledge of regulatory practices is a gap in this group.

Employing Royster and Kirsch's (2012) concept of critical imagination, the authors imagine strategies communication designers might use to intervene in and disrupt racial injustice and oppression. Using activity trackers as technologies that communicate data about health and death, the authors retell and re-envision the case of Eric Garner, a victim of police brutality, and argue that data from activity trackers can potentially be used to reframe narratives about public health and policing. Further, through an examination of the rhetorical frames of dehumanization, disbelief, and dissociation, the authors assert that activity trackers, as communicative agents, may become transformative wearable devices that are developed and deployed with socially just communication design in mind.

As fitness trackers have proliferated, many now collect information about both physical and mental health indicators. Arguably, such capabilities promote the notion that achieving and maintaining health is holistic, pushing back against the mind/body divide that has long characterized how we tend to perceive health and disease in Western cultures (see Segal, 2005). In this article, the author argues that the visual (photographs and data visualizations) and language-based communication strategies used on Bellabeat Leaf's website, a smart jewelry device for women, employ a narrative of holisticism. Further, this narrative functions as a rhetorical trope that reinforces power relationships that align with a dominant underlying ideology of Western medicine---the notion that disease and illness can be controlled. The author proposes that future designs of the Leaf's smartphone application might allow users to visualize quantitative and select user-contributed qualitative, sensorial-based feedback to potentially provide a more balanced perspective of health.

An important element for global design is an approach that can be used for international (e.g., non-US) users. Such a design approach has to factor in how the user's culture influences how they perceive a design while using their mobile devices across a different culture. As mobile use is expected to grow globally, more mobile interactions will require increasingly robust tools for measuring user experiences across different online and physical channels. This article focuses on how experience mapping, a common user experience (UX) design technique that tells stories about how a user experiences a design as a seamless whole across such channels, can help address global mobile design contexts. To further address such global contexts, this article proposes extending experience mapping by considering the factors of existing infrastructures, global openness to innovation, local user contexts, and local beliefs on the function of technology so that designers of communication can better conceptualize sequences of events of interactions across cultures.

This study examines design aspects that shape human/machine collaboration between wearers of smart hearing aids and their networked aids. The Starkey Halo hearing aid and the TruLink iPhone app that facilitates real-time adjustments by the wearer offer a case study in designing for this sort of collaboration and for the wearer's rhetorical management of disability disclosure in social contexts. Through close textual analysis of the company's promotional materials for patient and professional audiences as well as interface analysis and autoethnography, I examine the ways that close integration between the wearer, onboard algorithms and hardware, and geolocative telemetry shape everyday interactions in multiple hearing situations. Reliance on ubiquitous, familiar hardware such as smart phones and intuitive interface design can drive patient comfort and adoption rates of these complex technologies that influence cognitive health, social connectedness, and crucial information access.

Everything changes over time. Societies evolve, original technologies emerge, and the structure of products shifts to meet the needs of new situations. What constitutes a usable design will similarly change over time. For these reasons, it's important to regularly stop and assess where a field is and what it is doing to determine how well its activities reflect the context in which it exists. Usability and user experience design are no different. This issue of Communication Design Quarterly represents such a reflection and a re-thinking of where the field is at this point in time.

Using the data generated by both consumer- and medically-oriented wearable devices to assess and improve fitness, wellbeing, and specific health outcomes demands attention to the user experiences of such devices as well as to the kinds of claims being made about their promise (cf. Gouge & Jones, 2016). This special issue participates in such work by presenting case studies situated at the intersections of wearables, communication design, and rhetorical analysis that explore the health, justice, and wellness-oriented promises of specific wearables. In this introduction, we briefly survey the research on wearables in the fields of rhetoric and technical communication, preview the essays in the collection, and propose some areas for future work that might be of interest to technical communication, communication design, and rhetoric scholars.

In the August 2015Communication Design Quarterly (CDQ)special issue on Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM), Lisa Meloncon and Erin Frost introduced readers to this "emerging field." Since aPoiroicommentary in 2013 written by Scott, Segal, and Keränen, numerous scholars that earlier identified our sub-discipline with the termsmedical rhetoric,have embraced this what might be seen as a more inclusive term, although I would argue that for some of us, the termrhetoricalready included at least every possible manifestation of health, medicine and language. However, RHM does indeed cast a wider net, as pointed out in the 2015 issue, including essays on architecture, social work, and psychology. While rhetoric per se is certainly found within all fields, if writing about such fields and especially from such fields is included in RHM, then such a transdisciplinary impulse takes us very much further indeed. While this particular issue can easily find itself under the RHM umbrella, these particular scholars writing here were invited because they had participated in 2016 as a very successful panel at SIGDOC annual conference. These five scholars have much to share and teach us, as well as move us forward in our thinking, research, writing and participation in health and medical settings.

In this article, the author proposes that the emergence of digital, disease-tracking applications over the past ten years like HealthMap (healthmap.org) and Flu Near You (flunearyou.org) that allow non-experts to contribute information about emergent public health threats have facilitated a "do-it-yourself (DIY)" risk assessment ethic. Focusing in particular on Flu Near You (FNY), a crowdsourced, flu-tracking program, the author argues that some participants use the mapping feature to curate their own risk information experience in determining the preventative behaviors they may want to engage in (if any) to prevent flu. As outbreaks of infectious diseases increase (Smith et al., 2014), mHealth technologies like disease-tracking apps are evolving as an important risk assessment tool for both public health experts as well as non-expert, public audiences. Better understanding how non-experts use such information can inform not only the design of these apps but visual risk communication strategies more generally speaking.

The concept of usability is often connected to the setting - or context - in which individuals perform an activity. International settings complicate such relationships by introducing new variables that affect usability in different locations. In international health and medical communication, this situation can create problems that affect the health and wellness of patients in other nations and cultures. International patient experience design (I-PXD) presents a heuristic for addressing this situation. I-PXD helps individuals identify variables affecting usability in different international contexts. Persons working in health and medical communication can use this I-PXD heuristic to address usability expectations in various international contexts.

In this entry, we argue that to promote multimodal literacy in online writing classes, instructors should address the following five practices in their course design:• Incorporate multimodal assignments and appropriate scaffolding tools;• Use multimodal instructional tools to teach and model multimodal composition;• Provide multimodal feedback to students' compositions;• "Teach" technology through the use of media labs;• Encourage reflection as a significant part of students' learning process.In so doing, we discuss each practice in depth, addressing the reasons and benefits for incorporating each, as well as advice about how to implement them. By implementing these practices in their online courses, instructors can successfully design classes that promote multimodal literacy.

Teaching user experience (UX) can be challenging due to the situated, complex, and messy nature of the work. However, the complexity of UX in practice is often invisible to students learning these methods and practices for the first time in class. In this article, we present findings from a study of rhetorical strategies of UX practitioners and pair them with strategies for teaching UX to students. While previous work on teaching UX reflects current practices in the classroom or reflections of practitioners, this study demonstrates the benefits of researching existing industry practices in order to inform pedagogy.

A few weeks ago, I was having dinner with a friend when a controversial subject came up. My friend had an extremely strong opinion about the harm caused by vaccination, and his argument went something like this: "I've seen the data. There was an infographic laying it all out." He couldn't remember specific numbers from the visualization he'd seen or the author of the article. He couldn't even remember the name of the publication, but the data visualization's overall argument was firmly lodged in his mind. His situation is not unique, and it provides telling insights on how we, as humans, perceive and respond to big data visualization.

Communication design specialists have many challenges in the twenty-first century global, online world. Geographically distributed teams must work together efficiently and effectively. People may need to interact across cultures and languages or using a common language like English or Spanish. In order to complete coherent design projects, they often need to negotiate varied communications software. Most important, both to communicate within teams and to clients with widely varied communication skills of their own, engineers and other communication design professionals must be able to engage the basic literacies of reading, writing, and digital (i.e., multiple media like images, audio, or video)---often called multimodal ---composition as a holistic skill set, and they must be able to use them well in online environments. These literacies comprise communication skills learned in school and honed in business settings; they are required for clear communicating whether through alphabetic texts or multimodal compositions.

Many of us have heard the expression "form follows function." It's a nice idea in theory: The notion the item we create inherently lends itself to a particular use. After all, the shape of a hammer should intrinsically tell us the tasks we can perform with that tool - be it pounding or pulling nails. But those of us who study human behavior related to use know this relationship of form to function is often far from the case. In truth, the connection between design and use is far more complex and often unpredictable.

Technical support, a traditional practice of technical communication, is rapidly changing due to the ubiquitous use of digital technologies (Spinuzzi, 2007). In fact, many technology companies now have dedicated Twitter accounts specifically for providing technical support to end users. In response to this changing technical support landscape, we conducted an empirical study of Twitter-based interactions among six companies and their customers in order to examine the nature of the emerging technical support genre on Twitter. Among other findings, we discovered technical support was widely sought among the customers of the companies studied (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Samsung, Hewlett Packard, and Dell) with nearly 200,000 tweets recorded in just a 38-day timespan. We also found a majority of individuals used Twitter to complain about a brand as opposed to seeking support for a specific technical problem. In our entry, we discuss the implications of these and other findings for technical communication practitioners and researchers who design for technical documentation in social media contexts.

Intercultural professional communication (IPC) requires a nuanced understanding of international users' interactions with technology and information. This requirement poses a distinct challenge to international communication and information designers who must overcome geographic, linguistic, and cultural barriers to understanding users as complex agents. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) annually publishes aHuman Development Report (HDR)that contains high-quality international statistics on the regional, national, and transnational contexts in which individuals use technology and information. Thus, the HDR can serve as a resource for communication designers working in international contexts. This article presents strategies for how communication designers might use the HDR when designing materials for users in other cultures as well as use when teaching international aspects of professional writing/communication."

This paper presents the results of a case study focusing on information and communication design in indigenous villages of rural India. The villages examined for this study were geographically remote and socio-economically underdeveloped, and their populations represented individuals who possessed low levels of literacy, limited language proficiency in English and mainstream Indic languages (e.g., Hindi and Bengali), and limited familiarity with computer us and computing practices. The authors sought to examine this context by conducting ethnographic field research involving a variety of methods. Through these approaches, the authors found a range of cultural and contextual factors are instrumental in shaping and co-creating communication design solutions for underserved international audiences. (Such factors include such as long-term research engagements, in-situ design development, and embracing dialogic and reflexive praxis when designing for local audiences.)

Light illuminates but also reflects, and when the medium of glass is a dominant design material it communicates within the architectural space. In this paper we suggest that the transience of light and transparencies of glass posit a duplicity that is aesthetically seductive but communicatively misleading. Specifically, the central aim of the paper is to address where truth sits between reflections and reason in the glass surfaces of a mental health environment. To provide a framework the paper first covers a brief history of glass, engages with its technological properties, its language(s) of the inner and outer, its aesthetic effects in an architectural poetry of light, and the messages conveyed to vulnerable clients and careful clinicians. Then, using a detailed case study of a purpose built mental health ward in Australia, we explore how glass engenders visibility, security, surveillance and power, concluding with recommendations for future builds.