Technical and professional communication (TPC) and user experience (UX) design are often seen as intertwined due to being user-centered. Yet, as widening industry positions combine TPC and UX, new streams enrich our understanding. This article looks at three such streams, namely, design thinking, content strategy, and artificial intelligence to uncover specific industry practices, skills, and ways to advocate for users. These streams foster a multistage user-centered methodology focused on a continuous designing process, strategic ways for developing content across different platforms and channels, and for developing in smart contexts where agentive products act for users. In this article, we synthesize these developments and draw out how these impact TPC.

This study details a method for mHealth app development and user experience design (UX) evaluation, which generates a comprehensive list of stakeholder-users, acknowledges UX barriers, advocates multiple methods, and argues that developers should address the UX needs of each stakeholder-user in a complex health-care system. A case study of a research project on an mHealth app for women who are considering prevention of or treatment for osteoporosis assists to elaborate and define the method. To find any measure of success, a fully functional app for older users should be integrated into the entire health-care system.

Despite the recent surge in social justice and decolonial scholarship, technical and professional communication (TPC) research remains a potential site of oppression. This article is meant to be a call to action; it attempts to (re)ignite discussions about what we value and how we express what we value. It encourages the field of TPC to be more responsive to the experiences and struggles of research participants—those we engage during our knowledge production process. I explore what I call oppressive rhetoric in TPC research with a specific focus on the term subjects in institutional review board forms and in the reporting of some TPC research about research participants. I assert that in spite of our best efforts in advancing the goals of marginalized groups and despite the forward-looking trajectory of progressive research, more work needs to be done to address oppressive rhetoric in TPC scholarship.

Research shows that Western and Chinese user instructions use visuals differently. Two basic tendencies may be discerned: Chinese manuals place more emphasis on visuals and their selection of visuals is less strictly confined to usability related functionality. This study investigates whether such cultural differences correspond to user preferences. Three hypotheses were tested: (a) Chinese users value pictures more than Western users; (b) Chinese users appreciate diverting, cartoon-like pictures more than Western users; and (c) Western users appreciate strictly instrumental pictures more than Chinese users. To test these hypotheses, a quasi-experiment ( N = 158) was conducted with cultural background as independent variable and appreciation for pictures as dependent variable. All participants rated 15 pictures, which were presented in the context of user instructions. All three hypotheses were confirmed. Cultural differences regarding the use of visuals should therefore be taken into account when localizing Western manuals for the Chinese market, or vice versa.

This article describes an interdisciplinary, partially online honors course entitled Video Game Theory and Design. The article reviews the literature surrounding video games and technical communication and then outlines the learning objectives for the course. The authors describe individual and team-produced assignments and suggest game design techniques for motivating students. We explain how we assess different projects, including oral game pitches and the complex technical Game Design Documents that are students’ final deliverables. Finally, we discuss how game design techniques provide new perspectives on writing and generate new possibilities for technical communication assignments. We close by proposing three tactics that are useful for teaching technical communication students in hybrid and fully online courses: (a) nonlinear association for creative thinking; (b) team-based assignments for writing and editing using game-based tools; and (c) iterative prototyping and playtesting for multimodal production. Each tactic is contextualized using examples drawn from the field.

This descriptive narrative depicts an academic program that deploys a collaborative project model for delivering concurrent multimedia courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Applying this model, online master’s students who are studying the management of technical communication activities remotely manage teams of on-campus undergraduate students who are studying multimedia production skills. The author piloted the collaborative project model during a recent academic term. Student response to the format was overwhelmingly positive from both graduates and undergraduates, and the resulting projects were of exceptional quality and well received by their respective clients.

In increasingly online higher education environments, instructors must develop positive and community-oriented learning environments, equivalent to, if different from, face-to-face learning experiences. Connectivism and communities of inquiry are complementary theories that facilitate the design and development of online learning and enable online learners to connect with peers. This article discusses two pedagogical interventions that encourage connectivism and foster communities of inquiry in online technical communication programs: (a) a face-to-face orientation workshop at the beginning of an online program and (b) a peer-review activity in a research methods graduate course. The article explains the development, deployment, and evaluation of the activities.

Teaching and composing with multimedia humanizes online technical writing and communication classes. However, students do not always see the connection between multimedia instructional materials, multimedia assignments, and the course learning outcomes. Purposeful pedagogy-driven course design uses multimedia instructional materials to connect assignments, course materials, and assessments with course outcomes. Technical writing instructors can integrate synchronous and asynchronous multimedia elements to address not only the what and why of online technical writing instruction but also the how of multimedia instructional materials. Example multimedia instructional materials and student projects discussed in the article can increase student retention and promote engaged learning.

Apocalypticism is a powerful brew of eschatological belief and political imagination that is extremely persuasive. This article addresses the intersections between apocalyptic rhetoric and the technical communication of risk, disease outbreak, and disaster preparedness by analyzing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s zombie apocalypse preparedness campaign. Specifically, I argue that the framing of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s campaign relies on and extends problematic iterations of apocalypticism and undermines the educational objectives of disaster preparedness and response. I conclude with suggestions for how technical communicators designing public awareness and outreach campaigns can use existential risk rhetoric for engagement without succumbing to the pernicious side effects of apocalypticism.

As people today use information products in contexts with distractions, we need to design for people’s attention. User experience design routinely relies on behavioral design to engage distracted users and nudge them toward specific behavior. Although practiced in user experience design, behavioral design is less known in technical communication. In this article, we use the CHOICES (Context, Habits, Other people, Incentives, Congruence, Emotions, and Salience) framework developed by McKinsey’s Behavioral Lab to introduce students to learn about behavioral design principles that make use of cognitive biases to influence people. We maintain that behavioral design is useful for technical communicators because they create digital assets that are part of the user experience.

This article reports on the second stage of a 7-year community-based research project involving service-learning students in technical and professional communication courses and nonprofit organizations in Baltimore City. The article explains how students and community members overcame failure to collaborate on literacy and employment workshops. To assess collaboration, researchers integrated usability testing on workshop resources with 15 ( N = 15) participants, postworkshop questionnaires with 34 ( N = 34) participants, and interviews with 2 ( N = 2) community partners. Participants responded positively, and 47% of workshop attendees found jobs. The article argues that community-based research should use participatory and iterative models and resilience theory.

This article uses personas to illustrate the range of technical communication knowledge work developed through its practitioners—to articulate the functions, characteristics, traits, skills, and workplace styles of positions someone in the field might pursue. Recent research has provided valuable data about the expanding and evolving skill sets of the technical/professional communicator. We build on that by triangulating the data from an analysis of job postings, a survey of technical communicators, and interviews and embedded observations of practitioners to develop personas of technical/professional communicators on the job. The personas can help students, programs, and practitioners understand and navigate the many types of roles that are available in the field.

Scholars have given much weight to the question of professional legitimacy in the field of TPC, but much of that focus has been given to practitioners in Euro-Western contexts. However, practitioners in India have also worked to strengthen their own legitimacy in a variety of ways, including by harnessing existing structural mechanisms. This article addresses the founding of the Society for Technical Communication India chapter in 1999 and its subsequent organizational impact as a mechanism toward improving the legitimacy of the field in India. It covers a historical analysis of the founding years of the Society for Technical Communication India chapter and discusses ways that founding members and early participants worked to build their own legitimacy.

This article considers best practices for writing articles in science, technology, and policy, focusing on writing for international scholarly journals in nuclear security. Its two main audiences are technical communication educators/researchers and internationals wishing to publish their work in English-medium scholarly journals. I discuss publishing scenarios and challenges facing such authors and offer guidelines for producing clear, effective, publishable articles, in English, for international discourse. My approach is based on traditional rhetorical principles, plain language studies, research pursued at nuclear security conferences, feedback from internationals at writing workshops, and my experience as editor of the International Journal of Nuclear Security.

This article reports on the first stage of a mixed-methods community-based research project involving residents of a socioeconomically challenged neighborhood in Baltimore City, Richnor Springs, and service-learning students in technical and professional communication courses at Loyola University Maryland (Loyola). To measure outcomes, we analyzed student surveys from 80 respondents and critical reflections from two students. We also analyzed interviews from two students and two community members. Findings indicate that there were no statistical mean differences in the educational experiences between service-learning and nonservice-learning students; however, there were significant mean differences in transformational experiences. Findings also indicate that community members responded positively and that stakeholders valued the personal relationships that developed.

This article presents a case study of the Smarter Crowdsourcing project the International Development Bank and Governance Lab cohosted to cope with the emerging Zika outbreaks in Latin America countries. Using the lenses of intercultural communication methodologies, user-centered design, and global cultural flow, I examine the exclusion of at-risk populations as marginalized end users of the project. I also examine the impacts of this oversight on the effectiveness of the technocratic solutions. I then conclude by discussing the implications this case has for international health intervention, global technical communication, and community-based research.

Patient safety narratives are a globally mandated format for representing individual patient experiences, and they include peer-reviewed case reports and narrative medicine. The authors show how the humanistic values described by Carolyn Miller in 1979 could enhance or contribute to international health and medical communication in relation to such narratives. They do so by expanding on twenty-first century work by Bowdon and Scott to provide a framework for considering how narrative competence and narrative humility may allow technical communicators to strengthen their practices within technical communication and the rhetorics of health and science by examining an individual problem within its broader, intercultural contexts.

Mobile phones offer promising solutions to basic health-care provisions for developing countries like Malaysia. However, for such technologies to be useful for health and medical intervention, information designers must make information shared via small-screen usable for diverse cultural audiences within a nation. In this entry, we use the international patient experience design framework to propose a heuristic for addressing this situation. This approach can provide insights that can facilitate the “glocalization”—or creating materials to address specific cultural contexts and make health and medical information more usable to diverse populations living in the same country.

This article addresses limitations in the scholarship on the Edwardian editions of the Book of Common Prayer (1549 and 1552) and contributes to the growing body of research on early modern technical communication by approaching the Prayer Book as technical writing for a primarily oral–aural culture. I examine three sample texts from the Prayer Book to showcase their oral qualities and how these oral qualities contribute to the utility of the book. This examination shows that the Prayer Book played a role in the development of technical writing in the early modern period and that its oral features contribute to the success of its technical aims.

Transgender persons face many barriers preventing them from accessing and receiving health care. Gender-transition care can be difficult because such care is frequently contingent upon geopolitics, such as location-based health-care policies that exclude transgender community attitudes and values. This article uses rhetorical cluster analysis to explore the combining two conceptual lenses—tactical technical communication and participatory localization—to study the do-it-yourself geopolitical medical literacies of transgender people in one Reddit forum. We found being trans online means to be tactical and geopolitical, encountering and negotiating geopolitical awareness of health-care options, exposing a privilege invisible to cisgender users.

This article examines how normative assumptions about disability, family, and care perpetuate barriers to social services in cross-cultural contexts. It reports on an 8-month case study of how a county-sponsored, person-centered disability grant targeted but failed to meet the needs of Somali applicants. I identify four impasses that alienated applicants and demonstrated the grant's process relied on culture norms, including medical definitions of disability, institutional expertise, and normalization of self-sufficiency. I develop three recommendations for future technical communication and policy interventions. This study offers insights into how person-centered initiatives can engage the contexts and expertise of diverse users within institutional structures.

Contrary to current scholarship in technical communication, which places the first women technical writers in the period of 1641–1700 AD, the first technical documents were written by women in 2400 BCE—eight centuries earlier. Enheduanna—the first woman writer and the first nonanonymous author ever identified—wrote many of the period’s great poems, including A Hymn to Inanna. Her work calls into question our discipline’s belief that persuasive writing began with Homer and was conceptualized largely by men. This fact has the potential to completely revise the history of both technical and persuasive writing, and women’s role in that history.

This article reports on a qualitative study of strategies and competencies used by technical communication and translation students to address challenges inherent in global virtual team collaboration. The study involved students from three universities collaborating in virtual teams to write and translate instructional documents. Qualitative content analysis of students’ reflective blogs and team transcripts was used to examine their experiences while collaborating. Students faced challenges related to communication, leadership, and technology, and developed various strategies to address those challenges. Although the students did not face cultural challenges, they reported increased awareness of cultural issues. Students also reported that the project helped them better understand the workplace and define career goals.

In the field of intercultural business and technical communication, intercultural communication has been a regular topic in curriculum for decades; various teaching approaches exist for developing students’ cultural awareness and helping them achieve a theoretical understanding about the concept of culture, cultural differences, and cultural conflict. But quite often teaching and learning are limited in the classroom context, although it is true that study abroad programs are available for a small group of students. As a result, students do not have enough opportunities to interact with members of other cultures, which limits students’ potentials for gaining intercultural competence. This study explores the rhetorical nature of simulations, defines the perspective of using activity theory as a framework to understand the learning process occurring in simulations, and provides an intercultural simulation example to explain how instructors can incorporate simulations into the business and technical communication curriculum.

This article presents an examination of research methods used in empirical research over a 5-year period in technical and professional communication. This examination reveals that the most common methods used are surveys, interviews, usability tests, observations, and focus groups. In addition, the field does incorporate research categories of case studies, experiments, and ethnographers. This examination, however, reveals serious shortcomings that need to be addressed for the field to have a sustainable research profile.

The release of genetically modified mosquitoes in the Florida Keys is part of a public health initiative to limit the spread of infectious disease. The local debate over this proposed action provides a current case study of a public, scientific controversy in which citizens and officials disagree about what is best for the community. The case study challenges technical writing students to consider complex cultural circuits, or networks, that comprise a specific controversy. The students analyze the rhetorical situation, create new content that contributes to the ongoing discussion, and learn about audience through usability testing their multimodal projects.

As a discipline and a set of practices, technical communication focuses on designing technical products through the effective implementation of usability to facilitate users in performing tasks with speed, accuracy, and satisfaction. This article proposes that designers in the Global North should consider the effective localization usability implementation in their products or systems so that social justice can be promoted in the Global South’s countries that import such products from the Global North. Using a purposeful sampling research method, this article shares findings from a study, emphasizing that technical products developed through participatory localization for usability might be in a better position to be used for promoting social justice and human rights in resource-constrained settings. The article discusses the implications of the findings, suggesting that northern products should be designed according to the usability expectations of local users in the Global South so that the North–South divide can be, at least, narrowed, if not eliminated.

The small amount of work on workplace writing assessment has focused almost entirely on student readiness for professional writing or included case studies of employer expectations for new writers. While these studies provide insight into current pedagogies for technical writing and writing instruction in general, the main conclusion to be drawn from them is the unsatisfactory number of recent graduates who display workplace readiness. In this article, we explore writing assessment research in both the academy and the workplace and attempt to identify ways in which the academy’s assessment practices lead, lag behind, or simply differ from writing assessment in the workplace. This comparison will serve to identify not only where the academy might improve pedagogy in its curriculum for technical communication in order to best prepare students for workplace writing but also where the workplace might learn from the academy to improve its own hiring and training procedures for technical writers. In this case study, we used Neff’s approach to grounded theory to categorize rater feedback according to a ranking system and then used statistical analysis to compare writer performance. We found that the direct test method yields the most predictive results when raters combine tacit knowledge with a clearly defined rubric. We hope that the methods used in this study can be replicated in future studies to yield further results when exploring workplace genres and what they might teach us about our own pedagogical practice.

This research explores a presumed link between today’s use of digital media and an ever-increasing lack of rhetorical awareness in students. Specifically, the study pilots a method for measuring rhetorical awareness through students’ e-mail transactions with faculty in technical writing service courses, questioning whether rhetorical awareness has decreased in the preceding 10 years. The findings indicate that students might be more rhetorically aware today than they were 10 years ago, but levels remain below expectations.

This article applies identity construction concepts to a professional and technical communication student intern’s use of agency as she negotiates a unique identity for herself within a state legislature. Following a literature review, the author highlights several of the intern’s key efforts to become part of this new governmental and legal discourse community, including learning legislature-specific genres, combatting the “totem-pole” hierarchy, making choices about appropriate professional behavior, socializing by creating an “entire family dynamic,” and making an effort to learn the culture of the legislature. These efforts are documented through the intern’s reflective, self-narratives and documents produced during the internship. Through this discussion, the author suggests practical implications for aiding students and newcomers as they transition to unfamiliar workplace communication environments.

Documenting and characterizing interactions between student interns and their mentors in the workplace offers perspective on student learning and enculturation that can help us introduce these ways of learning to students in the technical communication classroom, even before the internship. Three student intern conversations in the internship setting are the focus of this close discourse analysis, framed by 6-month-long case studies and Vygotsky’s learning theory. Results indicate that many similarities exist between classroom feedback and mentor feedback in the internship, but that differences in student agency may make negotiation important in the technical communication classroom.

In the field of business and technical communication, scholars have called for research on dealing with cultural conflict for a long time. But the limited study on dealing with cultural conflicts, along with the current political context in the United States, calls for efforts to systematically address diversity issues and cultural conflict in our research and teaching practices. One obstacle to advance effective communication strategies on cultural conflict in business and technical communication is the lack of communication with other disciplines. Through an interdisciplinary perspective, the current article introduces the concept of cultural conflict, examines strategy models to address cultural conflict in different fields, and provides an example on how to identify a strategy model to resolve cultural conflict in business and technical communication practices. This article concludes by emphasizing that there is not a best model that can be applied to handle cultural conflict in all circumstances and calling for research on exploring and identifying effective strategy models to resolve cultural conflict in business and technical communication practices.

To investigate how college students understand and use cloud technology for collaborative writing, the authors studied two asynchronous online courses, on science communication and on technical communication. Students worked on a group assignment (3–4 per group) using Google Docs and individually reflected on their experience writing collaboratively. This article explores leadership and how it interacts with team knowledge making and the collaborative writing process. Guidelines are outlined for instructors interested in adopting collaborative, cloud-based assignments, and the tension between providing clear instructional guidance for student teams and allowing teams to embrace the ambiguity and messiness of virtual collaboration are discussed.

Certain aspects of social justice research tacitly work from political frameworks of “passive equality.” Passive equality can limit a technical communicator’s ability to enact social justice in terms of (a) signaling the presence of an injustice and (b) waiting for the organization, institution, or state to make the correction (e.g., liberalism’s distributive justice). By contrast, this article foregrounds the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière as a way to cultivate a practice of “active equality” that enables technical communicators to enact social justice rather than wait for institutional redistribution.

Very few articles exist that document technical communication in Hungary. My Fulbright research reveals two general points: First, technical communication pedagogy stresses correct use of professional terms and phrases in technical translations or technical articles for fictional audiences. Second, it does not emphasize the importance of specifying target audiences in students’ work; similarly, Hungarian companies, perhaps driven by oral culture in communication, do not target at any specific audiences in written communication. In this respect, education and practice seems to shape each other. More research is needed to provide more elements to help us understand technical communication in Hungary.

Technical communication researchers have studied failure through a number of different case studies, though none more often than the space shuttle Challenger explosion. While scholars have offered several explanations in the intervening three decades, this work often treats the disaster as a failure of organizational communication, a failure of the material O-ring, or a failure of two discourse communities, engineers and managers, to engage in mutually comprehensible forms of meaningful deliberation. This essay hypothesizes that the real cause of failure was neither positivist nor social constructionist in nature, but discursive-material. I offer discussion of the Challenger case in order to frame a different study of project failure and show that complex technical projects fail for a number discursive-material reasons. Employing assumptions from actor–network theory and Barad’s theory of agential realism, this essay establishes a basis for how to read the Challenger disaster as one of competing and unresolved “conceptual structures of practice.” I then take this framework and apply it to a case study of a transportation project at a large, Midwestern research university. This project, the electric personal transportation vehicle, failed because competing structures of practice generated powerful actants that mattered in different ways. Insufficient project management activities also contributed to failure; the conclusion identifies concepts technical communicators can employ in establishing more effective project management strategies that work to resolve competing actants.

This article combines an adaptation of the Toulmin model of argument with a framework designed to analyze assertions of technology-related expertise in order to examine how expert witnesses fulfill the legal requirements for explaining the methodology underlying their testimony within the combative and sometimes prejudicial conditions of the courtroom environment. Its findings support previous claims about contributions technical communication scholars can make to the legal field.

As technical communication (TC) instructors, it is vital that we continue reimagining our curricula as the field itself is continually reimagined in light of new technologies, genres, workplace practices, and theories—theories such as those from disability studies scholarship. Here, the authors offer an approach to including disability studies in TC curricula through the inclusion of a “critical accessibility case study” (CACS). In explicating the theoretical and practical foundations that support teaching a CACS in TC courses, the authors provide an overview of how TC scholars have productively engaged with disability studies and case studies to question both our curricular content and classroom practices. They offer as an example their “New York City Evacuation CACS,” developed for and taught in TC for Health Sciences courses, which demonstrates that critical disability theory can help us better teach distribution and design of technical information and user-based approaches to TC. The conceptual framework of the CACS functions as a strategy for TC instructors to integrate disability studies and attention to disability and accessibility into TC curricula, meeting both ethical calls to do so as well as practical pedagogical goals.

Using frameworks from Ong, Turner, and Frohmann, the author analyzes excerpts from Hesiod’s Works and Days and from the Book of Exodus for technical features. These documents were found to contain technical information that was best used in face-to-face interaction. Further, the documents exhibit evidence of residual orality, an encroachment of oral register into written. These findings suggest that technical communication originates in the genres and oral registers of ancient cultures. Such details have been missed owing to a written bias of technical communication and of scholars who look upon such works only as literature. Presently, oral-based information is viewed as informal and less authoritative than written information. In the absence of writing, however, information can only be transmitted orally.

Design has come to be understood as an essential aspect of the work that technical communicators claim. As a result, research in the field of technical communication has approached studies of design in numerous ways. This article showcases how technical communication researchers assume the roles of observers, testers, critics, creators, and consultants in their handling of design artifacts. Such a model regarding these roles may help us to better understand the design relationships researchers presume as they further knowledge of design within our field. This article offers a framework to leverage into a comprehensive and integrated model for explaining our work on design to others outside of technical communication.

This article uses a historical perspective to describe the development of the profession of technical communication through three ages: Brass, Beige, and Glass. I compare this development to the growth of the academic discipline and both to the explosion of noninstitutional technical communication—the growing body of tactical technical communication that happens outside of organizations and institutions. This leads me to describe today as the Golden Age of technical communication. I conclude that we should broaden the scope of technical communication and spread it as a set of skills valuable for everyone to learn.

Technical communication research has critically engaged with organizational trends toward flattened organizations like networks, horizontal arrangements, and adhocracies, assemblages that hybridize top-down management in favor of autonomous groups. There has been no engagement with a related but distinct trend: worker cooperatives. Co-ops promise similar advantages but are distinct as they claim to deliver what flat organizations promise: access to governance, empowerment, and autonomy. In this article, I survey literature on flattened organizations, apply technical communication theory to account for cooperative communication, and conclude with an analysis from a qualitative study at a cooperative site.

This article aims to help doctoral students in technical communication prepare themselves for the academic job market and for the subsequent process of earning tenure and promotion in increasingly demanding environments. The authors propose that students do four things: (a) learn to spot and articulate research problems; (b) find their vocation—the work to which they feel a personal calling—within technical communication; (c) identify the research methods that best suit their personalities; and (d) articulate a research identity and agenda that they can explain at three different levels of abstraction: describing individual projects, naming the coherent themes that connect these projects, and defining themselves concisely as scholars. All these orienting practices involve students in stepping back, looking for larger patterns in their work and in their professional interests, and finding specific language to represent them.

To address graduate writing pedagogy in technical communication, this article reports on a study of 14 award-winning dissertations in the field. By treating dissertations as cultural artifacts constitutive of the educational contexts in which they are authored, this study reads dissertation methodology sections as research narratives to understand how we prepare new scholars and to examine the changing nature of what we value in the field.

This article provides a short history of the continuing issues that modern technical communication and technical communication faculty face. It discusses the first texts and many of the early pedag...

As technology continues to become more ubiquitous and touches almost every aspect of the composing process, students and teachers are faced with new means to make writing a multimodal experience. This article embraces the emerging sector of wearable technology, presenting wearable writing strategies that would reimagine composition pedagogy. Specifically, the article introduces Google Glass and explores its affordances in reframing student peer-review activities. To do so, the author presents a brief overview of wearables and writing technology, a case study of how the author deployed Google Glass in a first-year writing course, and a set of tips for using wearable technology in general and technical writing courses.

Image-based research conducted on and by research participants holds promise to extend participatory studies in technical communication by delivering research techniques that have been used for Policy Research in Public Health and other areas of participatory research (e.g., community-based participatory research). Even though they can expand policy (or even user design work), the use of participants’ images is not without challenges. The article discusses those challenges and suggests practices that stabilize the research logistically, relationally, and thematically; it also presents the approach as attractive for use in arenas that reward scrutiny even though they have traditionally been difficult to study.

In this special journal issue, we explore the turn toward human-centered design (HCD) in research and higher education. We begin with a discussion of how HCD emerged in scholarly work at the edges of our field in places such as design, psychology, art, and engineering. Following this, we consider how an HCD perspective is manifesting itself in academic programs in different institutional contexts. We then discuss how this trend is further illustrated by the transformation of our department at the University of Washington, which shifted from being the Department of Technical Communication to becoming the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering. Finally, we discuss the work of a group of researchers who contributed articles to this special issue. Each of these articles offers a perspective from someone within our field about how an HCD perspective has influenced their thinking and research.