As Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) adopts User Experience (UX) methods, gaps persist in integrating UX-specific knowledge and practices into curricula. This article advocates for Conversation Design (CxD) as a crucial yet overlooked intersection of TPC and UX. CxD focuses on creating human-centered interactions for chatbots, voice assistants and other conversational interfaces, aligning well with TPC's rhetorical foundations in audience, purpose, and context. Integrating CxD into TPC curricula equips students for emerging industry demands and drives academic innovation. The article defines CxD, examines its relevance to TPC, offers instructional strategies, and presents a course-based case study as a curricular model.

In Feminist Technical Communication , Erin Clark both articulates and demonstrates an apparent feminist lens on the idea of slow crisis. She does this through a case study of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster (DHD), the 2008 oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico in which the lack of clear answers on health impacts demonstrates a critical need for transparency. By tracing DHD through a feminist lens and under the realm of crisis management, Clark raises important questions about what we mean when we talk about efficiency, how we define crisis, and how critical these questions are to the reconsideration of technical communication as neutral or objective. Her primary argument focuses on her theoretical contribution of apparent feminism that works to acknowledge and bring to light the need for explicitly feminist practices. Through Feminist Technical Communication , Clark provides scholars, practitioners, and community members with a new approach to crisis and risk communication.

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.

This article considers how learning environment design can help TPC instructors using social media tools in their courses to better support students' practicing of digital literacy. Based on findings from an IRB-approved qualitative study of a social media pedagogy that makes use of the platform Slack, this article contributes insight into how learning environment design in social media learning communities can assist instructors hoping to support their students as they practice digital and social media literacy activities.

This case study demonstrates that user feedback on social media is valuable for informing iterative product design for marginalized populations. Using content analysis, I analyzed 136 posts and comments from the reddit platform of a product (SteadyMouse) designed for people with Parkinson's disease. The analysis revealed four patterns in user feedback that may be useful for product redesign: technological details, embodied experience of the product, usage scenarios, and prioritization. While User Centered Design is often cost-intensive, this study suggests designers can intentionally solicit useful information from users in social media forums by offering a dedicated space on websites where product designers related to these four key topic areas.

Grassroots organizations often struggle to balance short-term fixes with long-term goals. Technical communicators supporting these under-resourced groups face a similar challenge: they must navigate between short-term tactical communication and the development of resilient, socially durable writing infrastructures. This article proposes user enfranchisement as a way for grassroots organizations to make quick, tactical interventions while simultaneously building the infrastructure to make strategic, long-term changes within their sphere of influence. Enfranchising tactics may be understood as rhetorical maneuvers that provide immediate, albeit provisional, access to participation within an institution or system, giving individuals agency and building a foundation for systemic change. Drawing on the case study of a street design manual created for urban areas, the article demonstrates how user enfranchisement: performs boundary/identity work, is intended to be conspicuous, expands the agential capacity of the user by building the social capital of the communicator, and serves as a bridge to longer-term infrastructural strategies with the capacity to create change in the world.

This article presents a case study of instructor and student perceptions of collaborative learning in multiple sections of an upper-level, online business writing course. Our goals are to understand current attitudes toward collaboration among business writing instructors and students and to examine points of dissonance regarding attitudes, frameworks, and definitions of collaborative writing. Further, we aim to understand how collaboration is valued, how it is framed and valued in terms of either process or product, and various associations between collaboration and community. Our results revealed collaboration to be a shared interest by business writing instructors and students alike but at the same time it is received differently in online versus in-person interactions. In this article, we identify these dissonances and discuss what they mean for collaborative learning.

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 Salt of the earth: Rhetoric, preservation, and white supremacy , James Chase Sanchez examined rhetorical processes that sustain white supremacy: identity construction, storytelling, and silencing. This cultural rhetorics project used narrative inquiry, autoethnography, and constellation to explore "hegemonic storytelling" (p. 47--48). Sanchez centered narratives about growing up "Brown" (p. 10) in Grand Saline, Texas and returning to his hometown years later to create a documentary film, Man on Fire , about minister Charles Moore's self-immolation in a local parking lot. Ultimately, Sanchez argued that a deeper understanding of oppressive rhetorics is useful for rhetorical scholars, communications practitioners, and storytellers of all types (historians, journalists, filmmakers, archivists, etc.). He guided rhetoric and communications design towards more thoughtful consideration of embedded communicative norms and the harmful practices they conceal.

In Salt of the earth: Rhetoric, preservation, and white supremacy , James Chase Sanchez examined rhetorical processes that sustain white supremacy: identity construction, storytelling, and silencing. This cultural rhetorics project used narrative inquiry, autoethnography, and constellation to explore "hegemonic storytelling" (p. 47--48). Sanchez centered narratives about growing up "Brown" (p. 10) in Grand Saline, Texas and returning to his hometown years later to create a documentary film, Man on Fire , about minister Charles Moore's self-immolation in a local parking lot. Ultimately, Sanchez argued that a deeper understanding of oppressive rhetorics is useful for rhetorical scholars, communications practitioners, and storytellers of all types (historians, journalists, filmmakers, archivists, etc.). He guided rhetoric and communications design towards more thoughtful consideration of embedded communicative norms and the harmful practices they conceal.

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.

This article presents a case study of instructor and student perceptions of collaborative learning in multiple sections of an upper-level, online business writing course. Our goals are to understand current attitudes toward collaboration among business writing instructors and students and to examine points of dissonance regarding attitudes, frameworks, and definitions of collaborative writing. Further, we aim to understand how collaboration is valued, how it is framed and valued in terms of either process or product, and various associations between collaboration and community. Our results revealed collaboration to be a shared interest by business writing instructors and students alike but at the same time it is received differently in online versus in-person interactions. In this article, we identify these dissonances and discuss what they mean for collaborative learning.

This paper reports on The Coping with COVID Project, a qualitative study and public-facing platform that invited participants to share their experiences, via stories and images, with navigating COVID-related public health guidelines. The study revealed daily activities during the pandemic summarized in three themes: lived 'compliance;' emplaced, storied negotiations; and affective, embodied efforts. In light of such findings, this article outlines recommendations for a participatory, actionable story and visual-driven approach to public health communication that recognizes the various contexts---e.g., physical, material, affective, structural---which impact how such communication is interpreted and acted upon by people in their daily lives. A heuristic is included for communicators, researchers, and community members to use in enacting this approach.

Wilfredo Alvarez's (2022) Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor premises its thesis around "the vital relationship among work, social and cultural integration, and language acquisition" (p. 3) for many multiply marginalized immigrants in the United States, particularly Latin Americans. In his case study of Latin American immigrants who served as janitors at a predominantly white public institute---Rocky Mountain University (RMU)---and their interactional, intercultural, and organizational communications with their patrons (e.g., university faculty, students, or staff), Alvarez theorizes how facets of social identities, communications, languages, and workplace settings are intimately intertwined to generate and reinforce public imaginaries and readings of marginalized immigrant individuals and communities.

Discursive infrastructures are forms of writing that remain mostly invisible but shape higher-level practices built upon their base. This article argues that citational practices are a form of discursive infrastructure that are bases that shape our work. Most importantly, we argue that the infrastructural base built through citation practices is in a moment of breakdown as increasing amounts of people call for more just citational practices that surface multiply marginalized and underrepresented (MMU) scholar voices. Consequently, this article both theorizes citations as infrastructure while also focusing on a case study of the MMU scholar database to help build a more equitable and socially just disciplinary infrastructure.

Building on the work of technical communication scholars concerned with social justice and electoral politics, this article examines the Coray for Congress (1994) campaign as a case study to argue in support of a more formal disciplinary commitment to political technical communication (PxTC). Specifically, I closely analyze the ideographic communication design of pre-digital PxTC artifacts from the campaign archive. The type of pre-digital political communication design products analyzed in this article are ubiquitous even today. The implications of four dominant ideographs are analyzed in this case study: <jobs>, <communities>, <families>, and <"see PDF">. Key takeaways for PxTC practitioners, educators, and scholars are discussed.

Technical communication and user experience studies traditionally uphold Western onto-epistemological distinctions between technical users and objects. Recent calls for the inclusion of cultural approaches to technical communication, however, have asked scholars to consider the influence cultural knowledge has on communication design. This article takes up these calls by reading technical documentation through new materialist and Indigenous ways of knowing. Using a prominent Jewish cemetery in Gainesville, Florida as a case study, this article treats technical artifacts and subjects as co-constitutive, arguing for the cultural and material agency of technical documentation design in mediating and shaping user experience.

This study examined how three successful entrepreneurs/investors assessed the visual rhetoric of actual pitch decks from novice entrepreneurs. We compare their evaluations to the result of a heuristic for assessing visual rhetoric, Color CRAYONTIP. While the pitch deck is recognized as a key artifact in entrepreneurship, no studies have specifically addressed the visual design of the deck nor the key design skills novice entrepreneurs should implement to effectively persuade potential investors of the idea's promise. This preliminary and exploratory case study begins a dialogue on this topic by performing a visual analysis of seven novice decks which were deemed successful by experienced angel investors. The analysis revealed five key skills that appear to account for the success of these decks with the reviewers: rhetorical awareness, typography, color, photography, and contrast.

This article argues for the inclusion of Hip Hop communities in technical communication research. Through Hip Hop, technical communicators can address the recent call for TPC work to expand the field through culturally sensitive and diverse studies that honor communities and their practices. Using a Hip Hop community in Houston as a case study, this article discusses the way DJs operate as technical communicators within their communities. Furthermore, Hip Hop DJs build complex relationships with communities to create localized and accessible content. As technical communicators, Hip Hop practitioners can teach us to create community-based communication design for more diverse contexts.

This article presents a novel method for data collection. It relies on a larger case study of the game League of Legends to forward the concepts of contextual cropping and collateral data. Contextual cropping gives researchers recommendations for gathering data with screenshots while respecting the in situ ecology of that data. Contextual cropping complements screenshot data with contextual metadata and offers potential collateral data with which to further texture research.

How do whistleblowers reveal critical issues unknown to the public during emerging epidemics to push for policy changes? Using a case study about a medical care worker (MCW) whistleblower in China during the SARS outbreak of 2003, this paper examines the ways whistleblowers navigate through complicated networks of power and mediascape to disseminate critical risk messages and call for changes.

As wearable medical technologies take on an increasingly prominent role in how health care is delivered, pressure to make the development process for such devices shorter increases. This case study will recount one attempt at a do-it-yourself (DIY) development process and collaborative usability testing. I argue that these efforts can complement traditional usability methods used in the development process of a wearable diabetes technology and provide more immediate access to technologies that can meet the diverse needs of end users. The case involves an open source DIY project developed by parents of children with type 1 diabetes in order to remotely monitor the blood sugar levels of their children.

This study identifies communication design challenges associated with firefighters' personal protective equipment (PPE), an assemblage of wearable technologies that shield these workers from occupational hazards. Considering two components of modern firefighting PPE through Zuboff's (1998) theorization of information technology, we offer an extended case study that illustrates how these wearables, as interfaces, automate or informate firefighters' practice of safety. Often lauded for their abilities to augment firefighters' work capacities and increase safety outcomes, our analysis revealed that these wearables engender practices that expose firefighters to unforeseen hazards and displace the "tacit craft skills and knowledge" that these workers mobilize to mitigate workplace risk (Spinuzzi, 2005, p. 164). Drawing from these insights, we sketch four points of tension that communication designers, system architects, and practitioners may utilize to consider the informating potential of smart-firefighting PPE equipped with physiological sensors.

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.

As usability research and user-centered design become more prevalent areas of study within technical and professional communication (TPC), it has become important to examine the best practices in designing courses and programs that help students better understand these concepts. This article reports on a case study about how usability research and user-centered design were introduced to TPC students. The article examines how students responded to and articulated new concepts and looks forward to ways TPC programs can develop comprehensive curricula that introduces students to these topics.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

As Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) utilized in workplaces, classrooms, and community organizations continue to proliferate, it follows that the kinds of knowledge necessary to assemble those technologies in order to engage in effective professional communication are becoming increasingly complex. This article details a study conducted of two student teams engaged in a service-learning class in which they were tasked with producing high-quality digital products---a mini-documentary and a simple, but interactive website---for client organizations---an art classroom in a local public school and a mentoring initiative within a local non-profit. The main findings of this study are that students mobilized a variety of resources and created a flexible network of technologies, knowledges, people, and modes of communication in order to address issues pertinent to their clients. In addition, I argue that the most important resource students mobilized was knowledge itself, indicating that one of the most important aspects of digital composing may be in-depth, practical knowledge of technologies, modes, and the genres they involve. Ultimately, the implications of this limited, classroom-based case study are that a situated understanding of how to assemble knowledges for the effective design of communication within a given communication infrastructure may be more important than access to the most cutting-edge modes and technologies, especially when working with resource-poor organizational clients.

Disciplinary differences cause multiple problems with trying to create a research study that gauges readers' comprehension of complex scientific information. This paper provides a case study of the some of the issues associated with research methods and methodologies on an on an interdisciplinary team.

In 1997, I worked with a team to conduct my first qualitative research project, a study of how software developers used code libraries when developing a common codebase (McLellan et al. 1998; Spinuzzi 2001). In particular, I was interested in how developers used inline comments to understand their own and others' code. At two sites, the developers used comments pretty much as you might expect: as notes for interpreting and communicating information about the code. But at the third site, developers essentially ignored the comments. One compared the comments to an approaching car's blinker: it might or might not indicate intent, but you'd be foolish to trust it. Another set his editor to gray out comments so they wouldn't distract him. A third used comments - not to interpret the code, but as landmarks for navigating it. "If I have 50 lines of code without a comment," he told me, "I get lost. It takes me a while to actually read the code and find out what it's doing. But if I have comments I can separate it into sections, and if I know it's the second section in the function, I can go right to it."