Despite scholarly alignments between user experience (UX) principles and contract grading, further accounts and studies of grading in UX courses are needed. My self-study of a UX course found that labor-based contract grading helped de-center instructor and peer evaluation and foreground user, client, and stakeholder priorities in community-engaged work, and that it supported engagement in a process of connected UX activities. However, I was also challenged to accommodate flexible UX processes and develop a course engagement model that maximized access to UX process opportunities. I conclude with a heuristic to guide the design of grading models for UX courses.

Bayes's theorem allows us to use subjective thinking to find numerical values to formulate assessments of risk. It is more than a mathematical formula; it can be thought of as an iterative process that challenges us to imagine the potential for "unknown, unknowns." The heuristics involved in this process can be enhanced if they take into consideration some of the established risk assessment and communication models used today in technical communication that are concerned with the social construction of meaning and the kairos involved in rhetorical situations. Understanding the connection between Bayesian analysis and risk communication will allow us to better convey the potential for risk that is based on probabilistic assumptions.

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.

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.

Traditional usability firms (or usability groups within large companies) tend to focus on evaluation, and their design process typically ends at the Discover phase. For organizations (or individuals) that tout themselves as "User Experience", the goal is to have the research and data dictate design, going so far as to have the research person creating wireframes - defining screen layout, interaction models and information architecture. After all, isn't a research-based interface what we're after?