Background: This case recounts my experiences during a four-year participatory design project with colleagues in Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where I attempted to develop a system for people working in rural areas to share business information via mobile phones. Research questions: For the first phase of this project: How do businesspeople in Katanga Province use their cell phones to support their business operations? How do they want to use these phones in their businesses? How do their use and attitudes compare with those of graduate students at a Midwestern US university? For the second phase of this project: Can a cell-phone delivered information system be designed for artisanal miners and small farmers in Katanga Province to share local pricing information for copper, cobalt, and maize? Situating the case: Researchers in participatory design for social and/or technological change have traditionally assumed that including users in early design phases will result in democratization of project outcomes. When these participatory design projects are situated in intercultural settings, however, they are complicated by political and economic conditions, as well as differences in values and social relations. Because participatory design relies on dialogue within robust, multimodal communication networks, weaknesses in this approach arise when trusted social relations are not in place upon which to build these multimodal communication networks. Cases of participatory design between colleagues in the US and Sub-Saharan Africa illustrate profound effects of political and economic inequities on participatory design projects. Methodology: This is an experience report of a project that developed initially from a classroom project in which my students in the US conducted a communication audit for a partner based in Katanga Province in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A US-based nongovernmental organization (NGO) arranged the partnership and I later went to the field to carry out this project. About the case: Working with an NGO while based exclusively in the US, we attempted to develop a system from which people working in rural areas could share business information, such as reporting business conditions in a rural location back to the NGO's Lubumbashi headquarters 75 km away, via mobile phones. The project did not work because people in Katanga were not familiar with the information design issues involved in the system and I was not familiar with the actual business situation at the NGO in Katanga. To address these issues, I traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo and interviewed NGO staff and clients. But my presence in the NGO's Lubumbashi headquarters created irreparable social disruption. I continued the project with a new client in Katanga and revised goals for the information-sharing system, but that system, too, did not work for lack of a trusted social network of informants to participate in the information-sharing system. In the end, I was only able to complete an initial analysis of the needs. Conclusions: Despite the need to abandon the project, this case raised these questions about participatory design for information and communication technologies (ICT) projects when collaborators do not “speak the same language:” How can communication researchers effectively build trusted relationships with colleagues in developing nations in order to facilitate successful participatory design projects? Given the research obligations and reward structures at US universities, is it feasible for communication researchers to spend the time to build trusted relationships with colleagues in developing nations, which may not yield publishable research or quantifiable results for three years or more? Given the political and social conditions in many developing areas, can communication researchers rely on the stable conditions and personal relations that are necessary to conduct participatory design for ICT projects?

This article examines changing social media practices, arguing that technical communicators and teachers understand their roles as mediators of information and communication technologies. Drawing on a case study growing out of a colloquium on technology diffusion and communication between the Global North and South, the author proposes that technical communicators be attentive to the participatory nature of social media while not assuming that social media replace the dynamics of face-to-face human interaction.

Distinct from prose essays as cultural expression, we use technical communication for functional purposes, addressing questions of how people learn as we craft our communications. Aristotle set out psychological principles of how people learn -- or are persuaded to change their minds -- when he laid down his foundational advice for rhetors to cultivate "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion on almost any subject presented to us." Building on this foundational principle, technical communicators since World War II have studied how to achieve persuasion (or change) by making information accessible, formatting documents, writing at designated reading levels, and setting out instruction steps clearly. Recently, we have also become interested in how, through the concept of rhetoric, oral and written language acquires poignant social, ethical and technical dimensions, situating Aristotle's "faculties" of persuasion within specific cultural and political contexts.

Medical personnel in hospital intensive care units routinely rely on protocols to deliver some types of patient care. These protocol documents are developed by hospital physicians and staff to ensure that standards of care are followed. Thus, the protocol document becomes a de facto standing order, standing in for the physician's judgment in routine situations. This article reports findings from Phase I of an ongoing study exploring how insulin protocols are designed and used in intensive care units to transfer medical research findings into patient care “best practices.” We developed a taxonomy of document design elements and analyzed 29 insulin protocols to determine their use of these elements. We found that 93% of the protocols used tables to communicate procedures for measuring glucose levels and administering insulin. We further found that the protocols did not adhere well to principles for designing instructions and hypothesized that this finding reflected different purposes for instructions (training) and protocols (standardizing practice).

After World War II, the United States government and citizenry were concerned with truth, propaganda, democracy, and national security as they entered the Cold War era. This was a time when technocrats, engineers, and scientists could lead our free-world government through the perils of our tense relationships with Russia, Red China, and Korea. In the early 1940s, Rudolf Flesch began developing what he termed a “scientific rhetoric” to help writers of functional documents more effectively communicate technical information to a general public. He came up with a readability formula to help writers evaluate whether their writing was effective and this readability formula has profoundly shaped notions of “clear writing” for the last 60 years. This article explores Flesch's development of this readability formula, placing his work in a historical context, as well as discussing how the readability formula fit into a larger project to make effective writing more of a science than an art.

Augustus is often described as the emperor who transformed Rome from a city of brick to a city of marble. When he returned victorious to Rome in BCE 29, Augustus embarked on a project to rebuild Rome with the splendor its new imperial status demanded. Despite the tranquility and prosperity enjoyed by most Romans during the Early Empire, many also felt a sense of loss. Much had changed in their social order at the end of the Republic. The nobility and the lower classes began to share more interests and Roman society took on a more egalitarian and commercial nature. Under Emperor Augustus, the function of rhetoric was stripped from legislative arenas and confined mainly to legal courts and ceremonial competitions. In the spirit of renewed patriotism and pragmatism, principles of rhetoric were also applied to writing about technical subjects, such as engineering and architecture. Both Vitruvius and Cicero used his writing to persuade Roman citizens to reclaim their heritage: of building arts in Vitruvius' case; of philosophy and meaningful public oratory in Cicero's case.

When the idea of culture is expanded to include institutional relationships extending beyond the walls of one organization, technical writing researchers can address relationships between our power/knowledge system and multiculturalism, postmodernism, gender, conflict, and ethics within professional communication. This article contrasts ideas of culture in social constructionist and cultural study research designs, addressing how each type of design impacts issues that can be analyzed in research studies. Implications for objectivity and validity in speculative cultural study research are also explored. Finally, since articulation of a coherent theoretical foundation is crucial to limiting a cultural study, this article suggests how technical writing can be constituted as an object of study according to five (of many possible) poststructural concepts: the object of inquiry as discursive, the object as practice within a cultural context, the object as practice within a historical context, the object as ordered by language, and the object in relationship with the one who studies it.

Technical writing is rooted in books of Hermetic secrets and mining lore. Hermetic texts, written in the early centuries A.D., were based in experiential/experimental knowledge of illiterate people and were written as recipes for manipulating nature. Set against the legitimate, text-based academic knowledge of the time, this proto-scientific knowledge was called “secret” to give it authority through revelation. In the mid-1500s, Agricola combined the traditions of Hermetic secrets and handbooks to compile mining lore into De Re Metallica, in which he sought to write clearly and simply, illustrate information with graphics, and rationalize the use of occult knowledge based on its utility. This early technical text paved the way for philosophers, such as Francis Bacon, to legitimate scientific knowledge based on experience/experiments as being more “beneficial” for social organization than knowledge based on a priori textual authority and speculation in the then-dominant Scholastic tradition.

In the study of law, postmodernism's interpretive turn has given rise to a wealth of scholarship analyzing the relationship of law's rhetoric to its social, cultural, and political contexts. This shift has influenced some teaching of “substantive” law school courses. At the university level, the interpretive turn has prompted composition scholars to reconsider how the teaching of writing is implicated, but no similar shift has occurred in legal writing pedagogy. Instead, those teaching legal writing largely teach as they were taught, emphasizing the use of rhetoric as a tool for successful lawyering. Legal writing professors must move beyond this narrow conception of rhetoric to help students become adept at the discourse of the legal community and capable of critically evaluating it.

In using a community model of communication based on consensus, we adopt a double-edged notion that encompasses both harmony and coercion within the community. But the possibility that any one of us might engage in coercion and/or terror when we intend to create harmony is something we would rather not acknowledge. So we use the metaphor “community” only in its benign aspect, in its possibility of harmony, to describe communication. This article explores how ideas of harmony and coercion play out in the metaphor of community and suggests four dimensions as continua along which communities could be described: choice/chance, time/space, abstract/concrete, affinity/proximity. If we break up the clearly bounded, either/or approach to modeling community, we can better accommodate the ambiguity we intuitively understand as an important part of communication.