Kristin Pickering presents a valuable case study that focuses on how professional communicators and researchers make sense of the narratives and values between stakeholders who may be at odds with each other. This is especially important in land usage and environmental protection cases like the Grey Cliffs, where the practices of private citizens and government regulated organizations conflict. Through Pickering's well-structured case study, she shares a fascinating web of documentation practices, discourse expectations, and community narratives and how they affect the communication practices between organizations and communities.

Adopting text mining and semantic network analysis, this study compares employers' expectations for UX and UI design-related jobs. Analyzing a total of 3,269 job ads on LinkedIn, it discovered notable convergences in titles, seniority levels, industry types, and expectations for some competencies and deliverables, indicative of a significant interconnection between UX and UI design. Nonetheless, distinctions emerged in desired skills like research, development, coding, and background knowledge. Furthermore, specific tools and power skills received varying degrees of emphasis across the two domains. This nuanced understanding sheds light on the landscape of UX and UI design through the recruiters' lens.

Data Justice and the Right to the City consists of a set of case studies each exploring the intersections between urban governance and datafication. This volume, edited by Morgan Currie, Jeremy Knox, and Callum McGregor, situates itself within the critical discourse on how data-driven technologies reshape urban spaces, impacting notions of citizenship, justice, and democracy. Each chapter draws inspiration from Henri Lefebvre's concept of the Right to the City (RTTC) theory by integrating data justice as a complementary framework to address the political ramifications of datafication in urban contexts. RTTC emphasizes participatory parity in urban space by developing spaces and data systems that enable all residents, regardless of their economic status, cultural background, or political power, to have an equal say in how their cities are designed and managed.

In Amplifying Voices in UX, a diverse group of scholars and practitioners come together to explore different aspects of user experience (UX) with a focus on inclusivity and social justice. This book moves beyond conventional UX frameworks, presenting innovative pedagogical strategies and methodologies that highlight empathy, accessibility, and the importance of considering marginalized voices in design. The authors delve into areas often overlooked in mainstream UX discourse, offering new perspectives on how to create more inclusive and impactful user experiences.

Embodied Environmental Risk in Technical Communication , edited by Samuel Stinson and Mary Le Rouge, is a timely collection of essays addressing the ways that humans conceptualize and interact with their environment when attempting to communicate the dangers of crises---such as climate change and COVID-19. Explicitly responding to the work of Jeffrey Grabill and Michelle Simmons (e.g., in their seminal 1998 essay, "Toward a Critical Rhetoric of Risk Communication"), this collection offers a broad variety of lenses for thinking about humans' relationships to their surroundings, especially while communicating environmental risk. The 14 chapters in this volume apply methodologies including rhetorical and discourse analysis, ethnography, integrated risk communication, and antiracist framing to topics ranging from university communications about the pandemic to groundwater pollution to upcycled art installations, in the process complicating traditional understandings of risk as something that exists "'out there,' independent of our minds and cultures, waiting to be measured" (Slovic, 1999, p. 690). Considered broadly, the collection offers human bodies and ecological impact as more effective barometers for risk than abstract calculations; individual chapters offer heuristics grounded in human experience or environmental considerations, along with discussion questions and assignments for use in classroom settings. The diversity of topics and methodologies represented ensure that the collection offers something of interest to most scholars and practitioners of risk communication, environmental communication, or embodiment in technical communication.

Embodied Environmental Risk in Technical Communication , edited by Samuel Stinson and Mary Le Rouge, is a timely collection of essays addressing the ways that humans conceptualize and interact with their environment when attempting to communicate the dangers of crises---such as climate change and COVID-19. Explicitly responding to the work of Jeffrey Grabill and Michelle Simmons (e.g., in their seminal 1998 essay, "Toward a Critical Rhetoric of Risk Communication"), this collection offers a broad variety of lenses for thinking about humans' relationships to their surroundings, especially while communicating environmental risk. The 14 chapters in this volume apply methodologies including rhetorical and discourse analysis, ethnography, integrated risk communication, and antiracist framing to topics ranging from university communications about the pandemic to groundwater pollution to upcycled art installations, in the process complicating traditional understandings of risk as something that exists "'out there,' independent of our minds and cultures, waiting to be measured" (Slovic, 1999, p. 690). Considered broadly, the collection offers human bodies and ecological impact as more effective barometers for risk than abstract calculations; individual chapters offer heuristics grounded in human experience or environmental considerations, along with discussion questions and assignments for use in classroom settings. The diversity of topics and methodologies represented ensure that the collection offers something of interest to most scholars and practitioners of risk communication, environmental communication, or embodiment in technical communication.

In this article, we ask what it means to think of infrastructure discursively through situational analysis. First, we consider how policymakers have historically used writing and rhetoric to redefine, reframe, and resituate what infrastructure can be in technical documents. Second, we address the impact of policymakers' discursive practices on the spaces and material realities of communities. We view the infrastructural function of writing "as a conceptual foundation for revealing structures and foundations of organizations that affect people" (Read, 2019, p. 237). We use three texts as the space of our discourse mapping: President Franklin Roosevelt's "Fireside Chat on the Recovery Program," the Green New Deal, and President Joseph Biden's recently proposed American Jobs Plan. Through these three cases, we argue that infrastructure has always been defined in relation to environment. Any definition of infrastructure is rooted in environment or seeks to change environment. These shifts in definition have been used strategically to bring more visibility to marginalized communities and make their concerns central to the concerns of the United States' socio-economic agenda. We close with implications for both communities and policymakers.

Historically, the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) has seen its ethical responsibility in a rather narrow way: TPC has been thought to be related only to precisely and correctly transmitting information, and TPC's ethical responsibilities are more related to either technology creators or users, but less so to technical communicators (Dombrowski, 2000). However, in recent years, with the rapid development and application of science and technology, scientific discourse and technical communication have made greater impacts on society and people's lives than ever before. Our discpline has increasingly realized the "complex, active, and creative" (Dombrowski, 2000, p. 3) roles technical communicators can play. Under the influence of modern theorists (Weaver, Burke, Foucault, etc.), we start to think of science itself as a value and ethical system that involves goals, ethical procedures, and decision making, and more importantly, we realize the power of the language we use for scientific and technical communication. Our ethical decisions relating to the genre, language style, layout design, and inclusion/exclusion of certain information influences readers' perceptions of the fact, shaping their knowledges, values, and beliefs of the world. As Dombrowski (2000) puts it: "as our influecne grows, so do our responsiblities" (p. 3). Now it is the right time for technical communicators to realize our expanded roles and responsiblities in doing our work and to embrace the ethical and social justice turn in our field.

This article shares lessons from designing <u>EcoTour</u>, a multimedia environmental advocacy project in a state park, and it describes theoretical, practical, and pedagogical connections between locative media and community-engaged design. While maps can help share information about places, people, and change, they also limit how we visualize complex stories. Using deep mapping, and blending augmented reality with digital maps, EcoTour helps people understand big problems like climate change within the context of their local community. This article demonstrates the rhetorical potential of community-engaged design strategies to affect users, prompt action, and create more democratic discourse in environmental communication.

The United States is struggling with an opioid overdose (OD) crisis. The opioid OD epidemic includes legally prescribed and illicitly acquired opioids. Regardless of if an opioid is legal, understanding users' contexts of use is essential to design effective methods for individuals to reverse opioid OD. In other words, if health information is not designed to be contextually relevant, the opioid OD health information will be unusable. To demonstrate these distinct healthcare design contexts, I extend Patient Experience Design (PXD) to include community-based and technology-based contexts of use by analyzing two case examples of the Chicago Recovery Alliance's and PwrdBy's attempts to decrease deaths by opioid OD. Next, I discuss implications of community-based and technology-based PXD within communities of opioid users, critiquing each method and suggesting four contexts of use-heuristic categories to consider when designing health communication information for users in these contexts.

Defining global warming as a rhetorical construct built by stakeholders, this study investigates how Chinese state and social media understand risk and responsibility regarding climate change. This multi-layer, multi-dimensional, statistical and qualitative textual analysis focuses on the ratification and implementation of the Paris Agreement and the U.S. withdrawal from it. Findings indicate that a new green public sphere led by grassroots experts and aided by lay people is burgeoning in China and changing the way people conceptualize environmental risks and engage in environmental protection. With theoretical and methodological innovations, this study contributes to the emerging field of transnational environmental communication.

This article analyzes online policy tools used by public participants to participate in complex environmental risk deliberation, specifically in terms of HVHF (high volume hydraulic fracturing). This article argues that institutional environmental deliberation tools, which are increasingly found online, are embedded in ideological discourse frames that are often at odds with public user ideologies. This article argues that environmental deliberation tools designed and created by stakeholders through participatory design models are more effective in promoting complex deliberations about environmental risk. Such participatory tools more clearly take into account environmental justice, intersectional and precautionary considerations.

This article examines conversation analysis (CA) as a methodology for usability research for technologies used in multiparty contexts. Current laboratory-based usability practices often cannot account for how technologies are used in multi-participant interactions outside of the laboratory. In this article, I review new materialist approaches to usability and consider how CA might be integrated into this theoretical perspective. To do so, I present an example transcript of CA and review CA research on telemedicine in multiparty environments. I use this approach to argue that incorporating CA into a new materialist approach can help usability researchers to reconfigure the technical design of and the socio-material practices surrounding technologies.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Written communication and its accumulated principles of applied design often serve conservative and preservationist goals. Literacy and its various, sprawling technological apparatuses of production and distribution preserve ideas and prepare them for uptake and adaptation. What is preserved in writing speaks with greater reliability over time and choices about design can influence the validity or appropriateness of those texts, by invoking proper voices and suggesting or demanding appropriate relationships between people and institutions organized around those texts. While this may seem an inhospitable way to open a column in a journal on communication design, my point is not intentionally disparaging. Instead it is to draw a contrast between types of communication design work: that which works to affiliate discourse with a location and practices of uptake and that which creates and works across those locations.

Meloncon's Rhetorical Accessability explores the connections between critical work in disability studies and technical communication. The first collection of its kind, included essays combine theory and practice to emphasize the value of placing disability studies at the forefront of design, workplace practices, and pedagogies. Echoing the diversity of scholarship that has contributed to this emerging area of study---from disability studies, technical communication, rhetoric, and literacy studies--- the collection emphasizes technical communication as a crucial multidisciplinary ground for critical discourse regarding disability and accessibility. As a whole, Meloncon's collection initiates a broader scholarly conversation centered on issues of accessibility in various technical communication contexts.