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.