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.

Increasingly, health and medical communication involves a global perspective. This perspective now includes coordinating international efforts ranging from treating globally dispersed patients to containing infectious diseases. In many cases, the focus of such information is instructional---content that tells individuals how to perform certain health-or medical-related processes. In such situations, usability is essential to success. That is, individuals must be able to use instructional materials as intended to achieve a particular purpose or objective. Communication designers therefore need to identify approaches that can facilitate the usability of health and medical content in a range of international settings.

Though usability is a must for all new applications, small organizations often lag behind in this area. This trend is frequently posed as a resource problem: User Experience design (UX) teams, usability testing software, and professional web developers are typically lacking in cash-strapped small businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions, so creating cutting-edge designs may seem impossible. We propose that what is lacking in these settings is actually knowledge of effective design workflows, however, not resources. What is lacking is a sound understanding of UX and an effective means of mobilizing existing resources. Based on a case study of a redesign process for a mobile application, we present evidence that all organizations can build awesome applications if they simply learn how to better manage their design processes.

This paper argues that online communication products should employ item-to-item collaborative filtering algorithms to equip readers with the best potential sets of information that fits their specific contexts. Many online resources are utilizing item-to-item collaborative filtering algorithms which harness the decisions of users to affect their experience. Examples include the recommendation engine used by Amazon.com to help steer customers to products they might enjoy, the "Music Genome Project" used by the internet radio platform, Pandora, and various user interfaces that quickly determine the best user experience to present each individual user.

Digital badges are studied and implemented for a variety of purposes. Regardless of the specific application, all badges have one thing in common: they contain explicitly designed information meant to motivate users. This information is created by the badge's developer, transferred using the badge as a vessel, and assimilated by the user. In other words, badges are devices for communication. This article examines this communication process within social environments from three different perspectives---badges as rewards, feedback mechanisms, and narrative. For each of these perspectives, this article provides examples and discusses the type of information that can be communicated as well as the design considerations required for successful communication.

Presentations are effective ways of communicating information, especially in the field of education, but they might not be equally or fully beneficial and persuasive to all users. Each member of the audience might be interested in a particular topic, come from a different background and profession, and have his or her own personality traits. In this conceptual paper, we first describe our persuasive personalization model; the Individualization Pyramid based on Yale Attitude Change Approach. The model consists of the following main sections: selecting contents by applying segmentation, adjusting comprehensibility of the text, tailoring the language of the text to fit with user's personality and recommending content that is associated with user's personal history within the related subjects. We then propose an enhanced version of our previously published presentation builder, which uses users' digital traces such as those on social media to personalize presentation content. Finally, we highlight the available tools and algorithms to assist us with developing the system.

Once one realizes that eBook formats (and particularly the EPUB3.0 format) are portable websites that can be carried on virtually any digital reading device, it should be self-evident that in the future eBooks may play an important role in corporate communications. This is especially true if one considers that eBooks solve important problems such as website passivity (websites are only useful when readers actually come to the site). Rather than wait for readers to come to them, corporations can send the websites to their readers (e.g., marketing, training updates, contact information, documentation). This may become especially true of the new IPUB3 format. Because e-reader devices have become so ubiquitous and because most new devices can read most formats, corporations can count on their audiences being able to access the content. This paper examines many of the positives and negatives that eBooks in general and the EPUB format in particular might bring to corporate communication. In the end, corporations will almost certainly adopt some eBook technologies. The questions become which ones, for what uses, and how? This paper addresses these questions.

This paper explores the potential for technical communicators to employ usability research with risk-based interactive geovisualization technologies as a method of cultivating "critical rhetorics of risk communication" for local communities. Through integrating theories from usability studies and risk communication, I offer some new directions for thinking about the productive usability of online, participatory technologies that promote citizen engagement in science. I argue that the key tenets of productive usability afford technical communicators the opportunity to build localized knowledge of risk in real, local users, which in turn improves the capacity for a community and its stakeholders to more effectively communicate risk.

This study examines an ethnographically-collected set of social media posts from 5 applications in order to understand the rhetorical functions of something we call "metacommunicative" hashtags (e.g., #PackersGottaWinThisOne, #thisweddingisawesome). Through a process of inductive analysis, we identified recurring genre functions that are both context-specific to applications' ecologies and, at the same time, "stabilized enough" (Schryer, 1993, p. 204) to warrant the use of rhetorical genre theory as a tool for understanding their communicative purposes

Extending digital products and services to global markets requires a communication design approach that considers the needs of international (e.g. non-U.S.) users. The challenge becomes developing an approach that works effectively. The concept of personas, as applied in user experience design (UX), can offer an effective solution to this situation. This article examines how this idea of personas can expand communication design practices to include users form other cultures.

Everyday spaces and places are increasingly experienced as hybrid---as a confluence of material and informatic possibility---thanks to the ubiquity of always connected mobile devices and robust sociotechnical networks. For example, the interiors of many contemporary vehicles are personal area networks that move with drivers through daily commutes, connecting them to their phone's text messages and social networks in and through the material space of their car. In such cases, communication flows strongly mediate people's experiences in, movements through, and perceptions toward spaces of work, learning, and leisure. This article explores such hybrid spaces from the perspective of communication design, offering a heuristic approach to user experience in a world where spaces are often crosshatched and multiple. This exploration focuses on the kinds of tools and practices common to knowledge work and its recent extensions into forms of knowledge play, where the means of knowledge work are coordinated and transformed for non-work pursuits. This article, then, presents a practical, persona driven perspective on the relationships between communication flows and hybrid spaces, challenging design of communication researchers and user experience professionals to rethink the everyday combinations of symbolic action, knowledge work tools and networks, and mundane locations and movements.

We are all patients in some way---or, at the least, patients-in-waiting. Although I am reminded of this reality on a daily, if not hourly, basis, it is most apparent when I log onto the Internet to engage in what millions of users have begun doing in the last few decades: surf for health information. Typing in "breast cancer" for what must be the thousandth time, I look again for research that will provide insight into this biopolitical phenomenon. Perhaps more telling, I search for information about my own body. As I scan the material, I cannot help but ask myself what qualities I possess or have developed and how they fit into the categories of "high risk," "moderate risk," or "low to no risk."

This poster brief describes ongoing research on user taxonomies in free internet pornography, examining tagging and filtering systems in two digital porn bulletin boards on the social network Reddit. These two communities.r/PornVids, a board for mainstream porn, and r/ChickFlixxx, a board for woman-friendly or feminist porn. offer unique insight into not only porn consumption patterns, but also ways of sorting pornography according to distinctly gendered preferences. The researcher concludes by describing future directions for empirical inquiry into internet pornography, making a case for the importance of affective considerations in user research and interface design.

In my last column, I wrote about the need for a more integrated view of the field of technical communication. I suggested that the more our field is able to collaborate and integrate with other fields that have a stake in content management (CM), the more our field's unique perspectives, knowledge, and strategies will be recognized for the value they add to the CM discourse. This discourse, which includes a collective of industry conferences, publications, blogs, online discussions and workshops and Webinars, focuses a great deal on how best to integrate organizational and user generated content as well as disciplines and departments, expertise and roles, and business processes and tools.

This paper discusses how co-creative, design-led, and user-centered design methods are being utilized to gain insight into the factors that influence the communication of food recalls. It looks at the role of designer and public in these methods and considers the value of these methods for other settings.

Scholars conducting analytical research in multimodal interaction design have not paid enough attention to the use of disabled participants in their work. In this column I argue that participatory action research with these users is overdue for the sake of building a culture of accessible designs. Working on a larger project on participatory design for a book, this commentary records my initial thoughts on how participation by disabled users needs to be central to the overall production cycle. I begin with the premise that each disabled user participates in this multimodal discourse from an entirely different vantage point shaped by their social, physical, and artistic experiences. It also emphasizes that each user interacts with multimodality differently depending upon the body they have, the adaptive technology they employ, and the uses they have for multimodality.