Technical communicators should be conscious of how the algorithms that govern "middleware" (software that structures the presentation of data) constrain their ability to represent information. We use critical theory from the digital humanities to discuss how critical visual literacy allows designers to better present contextual information to enhance the user experience. We illustrate this approach with an example of medical communication by using social network analysis software to demonstrate the spread of Ebola in Africa.

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.

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.

This paper examines how the cognitive framework of collective mindfulness complements tenets of user experience in public health crisis communication. Collective mindfulness attunes an organization into preemptively identifying and avoiding potential failures that can have adverse safety and public relations outcomes. To illustrate the connection between this cognitive framework and user experience, this article shares findings from a case study with the 2014 Johns Hopkins Medicine Ebola Crisis Communications Team, whose primary goals were to improve the usability of Ebola personal protective equipment protocols and to prepare healthcare providers for a U.S. Ebola crisis. Based on a grounded theory investigation, this article suggests that the collective mindfulness principles of deference to expertise, resilience, and refusal to simplify complex procedures informed the team's ability to avoid a catastrophic communication failure. Additionally, these principles allowed the team to attune to key user experience principles, including addressing user context and user limitations.

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.

As a scholar who works at the intersections of technical communication and rhetoric of science, I like to think I know a little bit about effective approaches to communicating technical information. For over a decade, I've been a happy member of a seemingly productive research discipline devoted to understanding how best to communicate scientific and technical information to clients, stakeholders, employers, funders, and the general public. I am, of course, not alone in these endeavors and my work benefits substantially from the efforts of my many colleagues in the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing and the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Now, given this background, imagine my surprise when one of my colleagues forwarded me a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine decrying the state of science communication research in America. Indeed, I was shocked and saddened to see the report call for "building a coherent science communication research enterprise" with the obvious implication that no such enterprise currently exists (p. 74).

In this article, we present a method for analyzing the communication of people who exchange dynamic and complex information to come to a shared understanding of situations and of the actions planned and monitored by one party, but executed remotely by another. To examine this situation, we analyzed dispatchers working in police dispatch center in a large city in the Netherlands and their communication behavior in three different settings. The results of our analyses answer the question of how collaborative parties should assess an emergency situation in order to decide how to handle the incident in accordance with the procedures. Our results indicate which information must be communicated in order to deal with the current problem during the course of an incident. We will also demonstrate the proposed way of analyzing the communication used here is needed to understand how information is collaboratively handled in complex tasks.

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.

Research examining women's voices in academia, women's leadership in academic and industry contexts, and their management styles in business and social spheres has been more or less steady since the late 1970s. For the last ten years, female students have accounted for approximately 57% of the students enrolled in colleges and universities around the world (Martin, 2014). Despite these enrollment numbers, female administrators in many academic institutions and non-academic businesses are still outnumbered by their male counterparts. The collection Women's Voices in Management: Identifying Innovative and Responsible Solutions edited by Helena Desivilya Syna and Carmen-Eugenia Costea asks readers to consider women's voices in different cultural and global settings, "emphasizing and materializing gender equality [...] in top management, entrepreneurship, and leadership in complex sociopolitical and culturally diverse societies" (p. 10).

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the game industry, community managers engage in social and emotional labor as they split their loyalties between game communities and game companies. Community managers do not fully represent the interests of one group, and their intermediary role puts particular stresses on the types of emotional labor that they are called upon to enact. Further, community managers must also participate in social labor---work that builds and exploits social connections for monetary gain. Most of this labor, however, is undervalued and in some instances is simply uncompensated "free" labor carried out by members of a fan community. Ultimately, we argue, casting the role of the community manager as a social and emotional laborer feminizes this work, monetarily devaluing it while isolating workers in these roles from the communities that they ostensibly serve.

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.

This article explores the relationship between gesture and content on the social media platform Facebook. Analyzing the results of a digital content analysis of more than 1,600 posts from the Roatan Marine Park's Facebook page, this study reports the significant correlations found between various types of content, media, and engagement gestures. Findings suggest there is a relationship between content and gesture on Facebook, but what triggers stakeholders to "like" and "comment" on content is different from what triggers them to share content. The study concludes with six applications of these findings relevant to practitioners working with nonprofit organizations on Facebook.

The ubiquity of social media for professional and personal purposes has proven both an asset to scholars in writing studies (broadly conceived) and, in some cases, a cause for concern. Recent news events suggest that institutional decision-making surrounding social media is reactionary, severe, and steeped in discussions of "risky behaviors." These events (and others) result in anxiety surrounding social media use among individuals and organizations. In this article, we respond to these concerns with an empirical, mixed methods pilot study that investigates the ways new and emergent scholars might mitigate potential problems associated with social media use. The article presents preliminary findings that destabilize rule-based approaches and introduce uncertainties and vulnerabilities that accompany social media use.

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.