Incorporating Quick Response (QR) codes in informal environmental education signage is widespread, but existing studies primarily focus on marketing rather than engagement in environmental issues. We present two case studies that provide new insights into the potential usefulness of QR codes as a mediating tool in informal environmental education and outreach. Overall, few participants attempted to read QR codes, but 73% of survey-takers had positive perceptions, decreasing with age. Education level did not impact perceptions. We surmise that interest in linked information influenced QR code use the most and suggest best practices for their incorporation into informal learning materials.

This introductory dialogue invites readers to think with a range of scholars about the role of community engaged researchers in the field. It draws together a range of perspectives as way of honoring CER through both methodology and genre. The authors provide insight into their own experiences and draw attention to elements of CER that rarely get discussed and published.

This introductory essay describes the need for clarity and openness surrounding community-engaged research projects, which comprise expertise, efforts, and experiences that often fail to make their way into traditional research accounts and articles.

This article offers productive usability as a usability approach that focuses on the usefulness of civic Web sites. Although some sites meet traditional usability standards, civic sites might fail to support technical literacy, productive inquiry, collaboration, and a multidimensional perspective—all essential ingredients for citizen-initiated change online. In this article, we map productive usability onto broader philosophies of usability and offer a framework for rethinking usability in civic settings and for teaching productive usability.

The spaces in which public deliberation most often takes place are institutionally, technologically, and scientifically complex. In this article, we argue that in order to participate, citizens must be able to invent valued knowledge. This invention requires using complex information technologies to access, assemble, and analyze information in order to produce the professional and technical performances expected in contemporary civic forums. We argue for a civic rhetoric that expands to research the complicated nature of interface technologies, the inventional practices of citizens as they use these technologies, and the pedagogical approaches to encourage the type of collaborative and coordinated work these invention strategies require.

In this article, we build on arguments in risk communication that the predominant linear risk communication models are problematic for their failure to consider audience and additional contextual issues. The “failure”; of these risk communication models has led, some scholars argue, to a number of ethical and communicative problems. We seek to extend the critique, arguing that “risk”; is socially constructed. The claim for the social construction of risk has significant implications for both risk communication and the roles of technical communicators in risk situations. We frame these implications as a “critical rhetoric”; of risk communication that (1) dissolves the separation of risk assessment from risk communication to locate epistemology within communicative processes; (2) foregrounds power in risk communication as a way to frame ethical audience involvement; (3) argues for the technical communicator as one possessing the research and writing skills necessary for the complex processes of constructing and communicating risk.