As wearables become increasingly prevalent, there is a concurrent and growing expectation that we use these devices to track and monitor our bodily states in order to be responsible "biocitizens." To mitigate this, some health, design, and usability scholars have advocated for greater patient control over health data. To support these efforts, this article offers a set of criteria for analyzing wearables, criteria that account for the handling of data and user connections via wearables as they relate to three priorities: accessibility, adaptability, and iterability. These are meant to support analyses that will clarify the ways wearables can more ethically serve end-users'---that is, patients' and wearers'---emerging needs, rather than primarily serving the intermediary goals of care delivery personnel and systems to monitor and manage patient behavior. To do this, this article addresses the usability of wearables as it relates to other critical care issues, such as "information integrity" and enabling patients to maintain their own health records and participate in shared decision making.

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.

Successfully engaging in a health- or medical-related activity is a matter of understanding what one needs to do. This means information used in this context needs to be easy to use. Accomplishing the goals laid out in the essay will facilitate understanding and allow for effective use. Thus, successful medical and health communication are connected to one central concept: usability. But how to achieve this goal? The answer is through patient-focused design practices that help mirror the experiences of patients who are using such materials. This entry overviews such an approach - which I call patient experience design (PXD) - and explains why such an approach is central to best health and medical communication practices.

Simple drawing tasks are effective for evaluating the many options communicators have during early design stages. These drawing strategies leverage the metaphoric meanings of basic geometric shapes, not complex artistic illustration, to represent ideas while they are in development. Our paper supports this perspective by linking previous research on sketching, collaboration, and ideation to identify a specific approach to this kind of drawing that we term Geometric Page Forms. To further illustrate the value of these strategies, we give an example of how technical communicators used drawing during a workshop to develop communication solutions explaining complex information about sun block efficacy.

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.

In this paper, we explore the connections of information architecture (IA) with information visualization (InfoVis) through the discussion of different visualization designs used to demonstrate the occupations pursued by college students after graduation. In examining this topic, we used different information architectures to compare three visualization layouts based on the same data. The three layouts included one published visualization and two visualization designs developed by the researchers. We then used eight IA principles to compare how these visualizaitons communicate the complex relationship between majors, occupations, and their related characteristics in relation to the career paths of students.

Nonprofits must reach a variety of community audiences to sustain their organizations, and these audiences include potential volunteers, donors, and clients. With the increasing availability of open-source, freely available, and inexpensive communication technologies, many nonprofits can now develop a robust web presence that targets a variety of audiences via a variety of channels. In this article, we present a three-part heuristic to help nonprofits better manage digital content. This heuristic is comprised of developing audience awareness and interaction, making use of emerging technologies, and building sustainable partnerships. Using a project designed to help a homeless shelter improve its content strategy, we explore this heuristic and its implications for helping technical and professional communicators improve local nonprofit digital capacities.

The word "access" means to enter into, participate in, and engage with, and captions for sounds are a way to provide access to video content for persons with disabilities. Trying to capture an absolute way for captioning sounds in video media texts is as illusive, impossible, and unethical as trying to establish or declare a single way to write or to read a text. Sean Zdenek's book Reading Sounds investigates the practices that create captions and examines captions as a rhetorical artifact related to the composition of video. This review will examine Reading Sounds from the perspective of a practitioner in the area of web, classroom, and information communication technology accessibility and an academic focused on communication design and disability, indicating points relevant to both practitioners and academics.

Content is about ideas: It involves the thoughts, concepts, and perspectives we wish to convey to others. Context is what gives it form. If we know the setting in which we wish to convey information, we can present content in a manner that enhances the chances our ideas will be received (and understood as intended) by an audience. Of course, how we perceive a given context and how our users perceive it can be two different things. We thus need to know what individuals look for in a given context to guide how to design content for that setting.

Humans are so enmeshed in mobility systems that they identify with themselves through those systems. InCommunicating Mobility and Technology: A Material Rhetoric for Persuasive Transportation,Ehren Pflugfelder (2017) uses the term "automobility" to describe both "the specific kinds of mobility afforded by independent, automobile-related movement technologies" and "the complex cultural, bodily, technological, and ecological ramifications of our dependence on separate mobility technologies" (p. 4). Given identities enmeshed in ecologies of systems involving human and nonhuman actors through which transportation emerges, automobility is described as a "wicked problem" to be solved, in part, by technical communicators and communication designers naming and revealing the persuasive power of transportation systems. Understanding this persuasive power benefits practitioners by revealing the shared agency of automobility among the car-driver assemblage, and academics, by offering a framework for recognizing transportation as persuasive and therefore rhetorical.

Online writing instruction is a process of design that includes both spatial and temporal dimensions. Ideally, this process brings together design and pedagogy to move students through their online writing work successfully. Institutionally mandated LMS platforms often constrain this process. This article establishes three design principles and concepts for designing learning environments that take into account both space and time as designed elements of online classes. Applying the principles of backward design, modular content, and student choice to course design can help instructors design more thoughtful, participatory classes centered on student learning and instructor presence.

The concept of value is one of the most complex aspects of the communication professions. Most organization, for example, would admit effective communication adds value to almost any process. After all, effective communication helps members of an organization perform tasks more effectively (enhancing the value their work contributes to the organization). It also helps clients/customers view products as meeting their needs - thus contributing value to the individual's daily life. Yet determining how communication contributes value is a trickier prospect.

In this editorial, Lauer argues for expanding our methods of research to include a greater emphasis on quantitative and mixed-methods approaches. This expansion will compliment and help frame the qualitative data collection we already prioritize in the fields of writing studies and design. Lauer discusses the benefits of a mixed-methods approach and presents ten recommendations for how scholars, especially those who may be new to quantitative methods, can learn and employ these methods. Lauer suggests that we need to value this more comprehensive approach to data collection in order to better answer the many questions that remain uninvestigated in our field.

As the healthcare system in the United States becomes more complex, so does the information needed for administrators and clinicians to keep apprised of new regulatory and systemic changes. In this article, I use a review and analysis of an online resource project to identify effective practices to educate and support healthcare safety net organizations, or those clinics that serve low-income populations. The project team consisted primarily of healthcare researchers who used a systematic review of the scholarly literature to develop online systems for transmitting information about healthcare payment and service delivery reform to those serving low income populations. As the technical communicator working on this project, the author advocated incorporating concepts of user research and user-centered design to the project team. This research included a survey of provider-users. The analysis of this project revealed that, in the health and medical community, evidence-based medicine and the genre of systematic literature review may be privileged such that provider-user needs for information seeking are not taken into account when designing online communication based on these reviews. Communication designers may need to work with and adapt the work of translation science and knowledge-to-action to develop more user-centered online content for provider education.

The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologiesedited by Jason Farman brings together communication designers and theorists to offer numerous approaches for creating digital stories in an age of mobile, locative media. Contrasting the popular conception that mobile devices are a distraction, Farman argues the growing ubiquity of mobiles has led to their interface disappearing through daily use (p. 5). Users no longer need to consciously focus their attention on their devices and can instead seamlessly use such devices for everyday tasks. Due to this growing familiarity, the projects in the book "seek to "defamiliarize" people with their places and the technologies that mediate those places" (p. 5) in order to push interface to the forefront of users' attentions and see how mobiles provide a unique lens through which they interact with the world around them.

This article examines information source selection behavior among maintenance technicians and how this behavior might influence the design of technical information. For this entry, "maintenance technicians" are individuals who maintain machine equipment (e.g., generators or bearings) in industrial enterprises, and this process includes the troubleshooting of problems and the repairing of machine equipment. In this entry, the authors use a review of the literature on information source selection behavior to discuss core concepts within the field of source selection behavior. Three of the main concepts examined are "information," "information source," and "source preference criteria." These core concepts function as a frame of reference for discussing how maintenance technicians might select information sources to perform maintenance activities. The authors also use these concepts to review why certain sources are selected for use over others. The results tentatively suggest maintenance technicians prefer information sources that can be adapted to specific workplace contexts.

What if something as seemingly routine as an email or an interoffice memorandum could make the difference between preventing a crisis or allowing a dangerous situation to deteriorate? This is the question Carolyn Boiarsky asks her readers to grapple with in Risk Communication and Miscommunication: Case Studies in Science, Technology, Engineering, Government, and Community Organizations, as she presents analyses of communication artifacts in case studies from the last few decades of US history. In a year that brought catastrophic flooding in Louisiana and national controversy over a proposed oil pipeline's threats to drinking water and sacred sites on Native American land, Boiarsky's case studies---which include the 2010 BP/ Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, the 2011 opening of the Mississippi Spillway during river flooding, and the 2014 expansion of the Enbridge Pipeline after a leak in Michigan four years prior---are a timely addition to the literature on risk communication. Communication designers will find this book particularly useful because of its concrete, actionable strategies for practitioners and chapter summaries that lend themselves to quick access for future reference.

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.

This article investigates the writing mode, multimodal aspects, and folksonomic elements of digital composition gathered from a WordPress-based ePortfolio platform.* Focusing on the student perspective, data was gathered through both surveys of first year students and text analysis of digital compositions in order to produce quantitative results that can be replicated and aggregated. This research demonstrates the impact of assignment design and platform affordances on student composition practices. Results show that incoming students do not fit the "digital native" myth, nor are they prepared to engage in digital scholarship at the college level without significant guidance and specific requirements that scaffold digital work.

This paper argues that a SWOT analysis (Dyson, 2004; Helms & Nixon, 2010; Holtzhausen & Zerfass, 2015; Houben, Lenie, & Vanhoof, 1999; Noble & Bestley, 2011) and a multi-sectorial approach (Okware, Opio, Musingizi, & Waibale, 2001; The World Bank, 2000; Uganda AIDS Commission & UNAIDS, 2000) to strategic communication can provide communication designers with a conceptual framework for localizing climate prediction and risk management information. The overarching idea is to use a multi-way communication model, such as suggested by McQuail (1987), to downscale climate data in a way that better addresses the communication expectations of the public in different locales. Such approaches can reduce barriers that often inhibit the international transfer of technical and scientific data for public consumption in different global contexts. To examine these issues, this paper uses a SWOT analysis for considering strategic communication planning in international settings. In so doing, the paper examines the work of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGARD) Climate Predictions and Applications Centre (ICPAC) in its efforts to respond to climate extremes and ensure disaster risk management in the Greater Horn of Africa.

Ray Gallon's collection The Language of Technical Communication attempts to standardize the terminology used in the field by offering concise definitions for 52 key terms, each authored by a contributor with relevant expertise. As a reference work, this book resists summarization. In this review, I will instead assess the text according to criteria appropriate for a reference: ease of use, selection of included terms, and quality of the definitions provided. Although Gallon forwards no explicit thesis, by prioritizing information related to content management, the book does make a claim about the future of communication design. Individuals who are new to the field or whose responsibilities are expanding into content management will find The Language of Technical Communication valuable, while scholars and experienced communication designers will appreciate the contributors' consistent emphasis on the future of the discipline.

Professional practices in technical communication are increasingly being challenged by the emergence of collaborative media that enable users to access technical information created by non-professionals. At the same time, these technologies also allow technical communicators to provide a continually expanding audience with knowledge and skills needed now more than ever. Through a co-design case study, researchers developed a new and innovative platform for producing and distributing technical information including user-generated content. Moreover, the events of the case included market strategies in which a professional organization moved from a reactive to a more proactive position on collaborative media. In so doing, they outlined a set of new professional roles for technical communicators including editors, curators, facilitators, and community managers.

This entry defines value from users' perspectives and discusses the need to consider "user value" as an important framework for enhancing product usability in technical communication. Arguing it is essential to involve users in the process of product design, the paper emphasizes the need to recognize users as value co-creators. To further enhance and extend the study of usability, this article proposes a value proposition approach to design and notes such an approach can help communication designers effectively design, test, and deliver materials end users want and value.

On 9--10 October 2013, the information system research group at Mid Sweden University arranged an international scientific meeting on the theme Technical Information (TI). The event's organizers consciously kept the theme broad, but they also intentionally paired this general theme with a number of subthemes, namely Organizational Learning, Information Design, Information Management and Organizational Benefit. The objective of this design was to examine this overall topic from a range of perspectives.

Commentators often describe media as a "window on the world." That metaphor, however, doesn't work with today's technology. Windows facilitate passive observation: one sits and is at the mercy of what is on the other side of the window in terms of what s/he can view. Today's media, however, are interactive. From television programming to instragram posts, individuals use modern media to negotiate what they wish to access, when, and on their own terms. (Consider the drastic differences between the push view of broadcast television of the past vs. the pull approach to accessing Apple TV options today.) So, while we still do sit and "watch," we get determine what we view.

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.

This article examines the illness/recovery narratives created through Facebook and shared in groups associated with the trauma of venous thrombolytic events (VTEs). Until recently, there was little public focus on VTE recovery; however, due to advances in medicine, patients who might have once died are now surviving, but there is limited literature about what surviving a VTE means for the individual. As a result, people look for others like themselves to help them adjust to this situation. In this context, Facebook affordances help extend traditional illness narratives between patient and healthcare provider from a private to semi-public or public space. Individuals participating in these groups transform not only themselves, but others, eliciting empathy, sharing experiences, and developing a platform upon which to critique healthcare practices.

In less than a decade, social media have transformed almost every aspect of our lives. Now, most of us check our Facebook accounts more frequently than we check our watches, and it is not uncommon for one's Twitter following to encompass dozens --- if not hundreds --- of individual. The broad reach and the interactive nature of such media allow us to exchange ideas across vast distances and engage in conversations with broad audiences in the blink of an eye. As such, social media have become a central component of the communication practices of almost every kind of organization. But as with any technology, there are considerations one should keep in mind.

Motherhood is often a source of guilt, conflict, and ambivalence, and any communication about motherhood must be governed by an ethic of care and principles that take into account the fraught nature of such an identity. Social media provide individuals with new ways to discuss aspects of and share information about motherhood in different communication settings. Within this context, this article presents the results of 18 qualitative interviews of "mommy bloggers" and reports on the communication design principles and techniques these individuals employ to reach audiences of women. It also takes into account the contexts of users through social media. Overall, these bloggers use communication strategies such as identification, a rejection of perfectionism, an ethic of care, stories and narratives, branding, interactions with users, and a conversational tone to reach the target audience of women. These women act as professional communicators online by understanding this audience, living the reality of this audience through their own experiences, and designing communication that appeals to and ultimately improves the lives of their users. A study of their communication patterns can provide communication designers with insights on what I call empathetic user design and the importance of lived experience as authority.

Yik Yak is an anonymous, location-based social networking application that is extremely popular on college campuses across the United States. Because it is known mainly for the controversies it breeds, both scholars and professionals have largely overlooked Yik Yak's complexities and have instead focused on its more negative traits. This article discusses Yik Yak as a site for critical research, especially in the field of technical and professional communication. Yik Yak fuses physical and virtual space, places an emphasis on interactivity, and subverts traditional user hierarchies. By examining these characteristics and the posts that users generate, this article explores how Yik Yak serves as an impetus for the formation of knowledge communities---communities in which individuals work together to create and maintain collective knowledge. This article also advocates further critical study of Yik Yak communities and posits Yik Yak communication patterns have important implications for communication designers.

The help documentation landscape has changed with the growth of various forms of social media. People now post how-to videos to YouTube, they write crowdsourced documentation for open-source software, and they participate in and draw from a wide range of help forums. These forums are a form of crowdsourced help information in which experts and amateurs come together to address questions and explain materials. While these online forums can be thought of as a threat to the roles of technical communicators, they also present opportunities for professionals to adapt their skills to new roles as "community managers" of professionally sponsored forums. This article examines that point by showing how communication design is important for developing online help forum communities. Through the analysis of ethnographic and interview data, the article covers different areas of design important for understanding help forums as networked forms of technical communication.

This article examines the 2014 Sino-American University Student Digital Micro Film Competition, a collaboration developed and administered between the University of Central Florida in the United States and Shanghai University in the People's Republic of China (PRC). By using qualitative text analysis and visual content analysis to review key materials and events from this case, the researchers studied information design and cross-cultural communication practices of various aspects of the partnership. The resulting analysis reveals unique information design challenges associated with cultural differences in communication practices, visual design, and administrative style. The summary of the case and the results of the related research presented here also provide readers with information design strategies that can facilitate design practices---and the associated coordination of event planning---across different cultural groups.

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.)

In this paper, the authors discuss how the technical and ideological design of WeChat, a social media platform, enables the free flow of information within the context of heavy Internet policing and surveillance in the People's Republic of China. Through a case study of two instances of grassroots and social activism, the authors highlight how three unique features of WeChat---Moments, Friends' Circle, and Share to---enhance privacy and security issues related to information dissemination. In both cases examined here, the unique design of certain WeChat features enhanced privacy and security in ways that allowed for the free dissemination of information and public involvement through social media. In examining these cases, this study represents one of the first attempts to use a Chinese social media app to examine technology design within a particular political and social context. The authors hope the results of this study will further our understanding of the reciprocal relationship between technology, design, and the social context in which technologies are used.

Culture can be difficult to define, yet it is central to almost everything humans do. Culture shapes how individuals view the world -- what they consider right and wrong or appropriate and inappropriate -- and often provides the lens through which they perceive communication and create messages (Sardi & Flammia, 2011; Varner & Beamer, 2015). As such, culture can be one of the most important aspects communication designers need to consider when developing materials for an audience -- any audience. When extended to broader intercultural or international contexts, the need to understand how culture affects expectations and perceptions becomes even more acute. For this reason, the more communication designers know about researching, considering, and addressing cultural communication expectations, the more effectively they can develop materials that meet the information seeking and usage needs of a greater global audience.

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.

A primary information source for many patients and caregivers is an organization's website. This study analyzes 17 of the top hospitals in the U.S. to determine how they are communicating about the role of the hospitalist in the care of patients. Beginning with a review of the evolution and implantation of the hospitalist in the hospital setting, this paper then goes on to outline the information gathered and analyzed from the websites used in this study. The findings indicate that hospital systems need to improve the types and kinds of communication that it posts on their websites to assist patients with their information needs.

As state and federal legislation continues to regulate women's reproductive health, it follows that the field of technical communication must continue to develop methodologies to facilitate stakeholder participation in health policymaking practices. Scott's (2003) scholarship on HIV testing and his "ethic of responsiveness" serve as a foundation for methods to broaden stakeholder participation. Yet, as current legislation attempts to regulate health decisions of female bodies, more explicit feminist methods inviting feminist perspectives to resist such anti-feminist legislation must be developed. Frost's (2013, 2014a, 2014b) apparent feminism serves as a useful methodology that builds upon Scott's methods to enact feminist interventional methods. This article provides a case study of the reVITALize Gynecology infertility initiative, a health intervention project that appears to function as an ally of apparent feminism. Applying an apparent feminist analysis to the initiative reveals limitations of the project's feminist commitments. To address the limitations of the initiative, the article articulates the need to expand apparent feminism's methodology by accounting for stakeholder participation throughout health intervention projects. This article posits that expanding feminist approaches to designing public stakeholder input is vital to upholding technical communication's commitment to advocacy and an ethical feminist commitment to facilitating spaces for all citizens to contribute as public intellectuals.

Design plays a critical role in the development of e-health, greatly impacting the outreach potential for pertinent health communication. Design influences viewers' initial evaluations of electronic displays of health information, as well as directly impacting the likelihood one will attend to and favorably evaluate the information, essential actions for processing the health concepts presented. Individuals with low health literacy, representing a hard-to-reach audience susceptible to worsened health outcomes, will benefit greatly from the application of theory-based design principles. Design principles that have been shown to appeal and engage audiences are the necessary first step for effective message delivery. Design principles, which directly impact increased attention, favorable evaluations, and greater information processing abilities, include: web aesthetics, visual complexity, affordances, prototypicality, and persuasive imagery. These areas of theory-driven design research should guide scholars in e-health investigation with research goals of broader outreach, reduction of disparities, and potential avenues for reduced health care costs. Improving design by working with this hard-to-reach audience will simultaneously improve practice, as the applications of key design principles through theory-driven design research will allow practitioners to create effective e-health that will benefit people more broadly.

In this rhetorical analysis based on the Foucaultian constructs of power in medicine, specifically the docile body, the medical gaze, and health consumerism, the authors examine ways the pharmaceutical industry used web-based direct-to-consumer advertising, from 2007-2010, to craft interactions between U.S. consumers and physicians in ways that changed the traditional patient-physician relationship in order to drive sales of brand-name therapeutic drugs. We demonstrate how the pharmaceutical industry uses its websites to script power relationships between patients and physicians in order to undermined physician authority and empower patients to become healthcare consumers. We speculate that this shift minimizes or even erases dialogue, diagnosis, and consideration of medical expertise. We suggest that if it is important to uphold values of the modern version of the hippocratic oath, it may be necessary to provide physicians and patients additional parts in the script so that medical decisions are made based on sound science, knowledge, and experience.

Expectant parents use health communication messaging to make decisions about their childbirth plans. Recently, women have increasingly chosen to use doulas, or people who provide non-medical support during childbirth. This essay analyzes how a hospital designed public communication through promotional efforts regarding their no-cost, volunteer doula program. We use rhetorical analysis to analyze 19 promotional texts. By analyzing these materials through the rhetorical method of presence and absence, we found that the health discourse related to the doula program gave presence to expectant mothers. Additionally, the benefits of doulas, especially in relation to fathers or partners, remained absent in promoting the volunteer doula program. Through specific communication design recommendations, we focus on how to improve this communication to increase the use of doulas in our community, and in other communities. We conclude with implications and limitations of the study.

This study sought to investigate the effectiveness of an information exchange protocol (M.I.S.E.R) designed to increase the effectiveness of messages pertaining to rural trauma patients and triage prioritization. Trained coders were randomly assigned to three conditions; audio, transcript, and transcript and audio. Participants coded several hundred actual information exchanges between first responders and medical command operators. Findings confirm the effectiveness of the M.I.S.E.R. information exchange protocol as well as the effectiveness of exchanging crisis messages via two-way radio as compared to having a transcript of the call or both audio recordings and transcripts. Implications for communication design, healthcare practitioners, and effective modes for exchanging crisis communication messages are presented.

The introduction to this special issue on the rhetorics of health and medicine charts the formation of an emerging field and its importance to communication design.

Our daily activities now heavily rely on data, and sometimes are even controlled by them. Integrating InfoVis into people's daily lives can help them to access, explore, understand, and utilize the vast variance of data. This paper aims to explore and discuss the idea exchange between the traditional domain of industrial design and the novel field of InfoVis. There are three potential approaches. Extending InfoVis into a product design can fill up the small screen on the product and make the product more user friendly. Appling the 3D form of industrial design to InfoVis can bring it to the physical world and enhance the information qualify in our lives. We also argue that there could be a harmonious combination of industrial design and InfoVis that integrate the benefits from both. To understand this hybrid domain, we introduce some preliminary research explorations that covers both the industrial design and InfoVis, along with our education practices, including our assessment framework, research outcomes, education approaches, and student design projects.

In technical communication education, design is often narrowly and essentially framed as execution of features. This approach fails to account for the innovative phase of user research, the iterative design process, and contextual factors such as workflow and governance. Inspired by Alan Cooper's Goal-Directed Design (2014), this paper advocates for a "design strategy" approach to the practice and pedagogy of design in technical communication. In particular, it calls for treating design as a process of research, discovery, prototyping, execution, and evaluation. This design process must strategically serve organizational objectives and user goals.