Programmatic Perspectives

Design and Design Thinking in Technical and Professional Communication Programs

2023-08-09T11:37:20-07:00

In this introduction, we synthesize current research on design and design thinking in technical and professional communication, and present our motivation for interrogating design thinking in our pedagogies and programs.

Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models, and Design Thinking in TPC Classrooms

2023-06-02T13:49:35-07:00

How are Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) programs and administrators to approach Artificial Intelligence models? Our contribution to this special issue explores the ways that programs and instructors can incorporate AI models into the TPC curriculum without sacrificing rigor or ethics. We look to design thinking as an approach that we might consider for incorporating AI modeling. Because design thinking is already embedded in TPC pedagogical approaches, we believe that it is a natural fit for teaching students how to use AI ethically and iteratively.

Leveraging Participatory Design and User Experience Methods to Collaboratively Envision an Inclusive, User-centered Writing and Design Lab

2023-05-04T12:41:42-07:00

This article presents findings from a user-experience (UX) participatory design study informing the design of a new university writing and design lab. For this qualitative, mixed-methods study, we collected digital survey responses from 80 students and 17 faculty, conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 faculty, facilitated UX design sprints with 15 students, organized experiential learning projects for prototyping with 5 unique sections of undergraduate courses, and conducted user testing of the writing lab website with 40 participants. By sharing our mixed-methods research design, participatory design processes, data collection insights, and findings, we provide an example of how diverse stakeholders with competing needs can be brought together to collectively ideate human-centered design solutions that are accessible, usable, equitable, and inclusive for end users.

Online Design Thinking and Community-Based Learning

2023-05-03T14:36:16-07:00

This case study discusses the implementation of an online design thinking project that uses a community-based learning approach to co-design a curriculum with members of an Indigenous organization in the community of Hueyapan, Morelos, Mexico to teach Nahua to children and adolescents. The study seeks to help redress the marginalization and decline of the Nahua language in this community. It also intends to expand TPC pedagogies by culturally localizing design thinking in an Indigenous context and using it as a framework for course design, which can help teach cultural awareness and user advocacy while broadening the relevance and connection between students from underrepresented backgrounds and TPC programs and pedagogies. The methods employed include testimonios, empathy maps, and a community-based learning approach to prototyping an Indigenous curriculum. The curriculum designed reflects an Indigenous axiology that places value on pedagogies that are experiential, community-based, intergenerational, and based on ethical praxes. Designing a curriculum to revitalize an Indigenous language entails much more than memorizing words. Revitalizing Indigenous languages involves reinvigorating customs and traditions that exist in these languages and that colonization and globalization have endangered. Ultimately, this project proposes a TPC pedagogy committed to radical collaboration through design thinking and community-engaged learning.

Interventions, Ecologies, Reflections

2023-05-06T20:20:00-07:00

We argue that design thinking is particularly productive in technical and professional communication (TPC) classes when students leverage—rather than succumb to—the risk and uncertainty of the design process. To address possible resistances and to further support TPC students in inhabiting productive uncertainty, we suggest emphasizing and reframing three aspects of design thinking. First, we argue that design thinking orients students to strong interventions rather than the right solution. Shifting terminology to intervention potentially promotes the value of unknowing during the ideation phase and moves students toward a prototype without needing to be correct. Second, we suggest that this reorientation to intervention connects with design thinking’s human-centered design and builds students’ rhetorical awareness as an ecological understanding of situations, texts, and audiences. Third, we point to the role of reflection in design thinking and emphasize it as both iterative and materially entangled, rather than as a final step. To orient students to making interventions and building awareness of rhetorical ecologies, we position reflection as ongoing and embedded throughout the process.

The Wicked Problems of Lean Technical Communication:

2023-05-01T06:48:21-07:00

In this article, the author demonstrates how bringing together the critical frameworks of design thinking and lean technical communication can help meet diverse stakeholder values and promote technical communication curriculum within an institutional context. Specifically, outlined within is one faculty member's attempt to create a socially just technical communication curriculum that exists entirely within an asynchronous and accelerated online format. This article leans on how the empathetic capacities of design thinking and the value of sustainability inherent in lean technical communication come together to forefront equity and inclusion in course design, for student populations who need to be able to access their education more flexibly. At the same time, it is important to recognize that curriculum must be attuned to the needs of faculty as well, and that educators (particularly contingent labor) are not asked to complete unfair or disproportionately difficult pedagogical tasks. This framework points to methods for how administrators can use design thinking to outline various stakeholder needs and draw connections between institutional values and programmatic needs, to create an equitable and inclusive online curriculum that best serves students.

Design Thinking as a Pedagogical Tool for Writing Centers

2023-04-28T10:57:20-07:00

Design and writing habits externalize a sense of process and are predicated on social interaction. As Stephen North suggests, the goal in teaching writing should be “the development of general patterns of thinking and writing” (1984, p. 435). These general patterns of thinking require “acts of discovery, the recursiveness of invention, the consciousness of experienced writers and designers of their own processes,” and more (Kostelnick, 1989, p. 278). However, surprisingly, the connection between design thinking and writing center praxis continues to be an underresearched and undertheorized area of study.

In its ideal form, a writing center offers a dedicated space to facilitate compositional production and generative interaction where students learn to compose through their own work. With a design thinking pedagogy for the writing center, peer consultants and student writers can partner to develop solution-based, iterative strategies to composing effective communications.

The Stanford d.school’s steps for design thinking align to consultants’ work with developing writers—and with developing writers’ approach to their own compositional process—in the writing center. I offer a framework for writing center consultations that puts into practice the design thinking process as a contextualized and structured, but human-based approach to the composing process.

Using Design Thinking Methods as Tools for Writing Program Administration

2023-05-26T17:46:04-07:00

This program showcase contributes a different dimension to our collective investment in envisioning how design thinking methods can enhance our work in professional writing programs, as it describes recent attempts to integrate design methods into the author’s writing program administration at a large writing program at a Research 1 institution in the suburb of a major city in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The author focuses on three different ways they have used design thinking methods in their WPA work over the past two years: (1) using empathy research questions to prompt storytelling from faculty about their experiences both inside and outside the classroom during and following the pandemic, then using design thinking analytical methods to synthesize data and compose Point of View statements that help them to understand needs and opportunities for faculty; (2) using design levers to prompt teachers to think like designers as they plan, implement, and analyze learning experiences for students; and (3) using appreciative inquiry methodology to examine how faculty have integrated new curriculum designs aimed at enacting program-, department-, and university-wise values into our general education professional writing courses. While these design-oriented WPA projects are in-process and, as such, the analysis is preliminary, this discussion nevertheless contributes to our collective thinking about how design thinking methods might usefully inform our professional practice teaching, researching, and administrating within technical and scientific communication programs.

Experience Architecture

2023-05-01T02:51:32-07:00

This program showcase discusses the creation of an undergraduate user experience program housed in the Arts and Humanities and shared between two programs: the Department of Art, Art History and Design and the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University. The design of the program was grounded in three guiding questions: 1) How do we develop a UX degree that is rooted in Humanities at an R1 land-grant university? 2) How do we develop a curriculum that is interdisciplinary and upholds the values of the Humanities? 3) How can we remain agile and create space for curriculum revision that invites iteration in a way that does not chase industry, but produces graduates who can lead industry towards changes fostered by the work in the Humanities? In reflecting on these questions, the Experience Architecture (XA) Program was developed and deployed in the fall of 2013 and was revised in fall of 2020 to better situate the field under the umbrella of XA to filter conversations about human design thinking in and around a humanities centered approach to problem solving. We are humans building and designing systems for other humans, not ones and zeros building for other ones and zeros - our efforts should be grounded in the ethics, morals, and values of what it means to build, design, and care for humanities based systems, be they digital or physical.

We Took an IDEO Course Together

2023-05-02T07:26:21-07:00

In Summer 2019, six writing program faculty at Florida International University took a free, five-week online course on design thinking offered by IDEO and +Acumen. By the end of the course, we seriously questioned the elitist underpinnings of design thinking and recognized that practicing it at a Hispanic-Serving Institution with predominantly working-class students would require greater thoughtfulness about our local context than was present in the course materials. However, we also found that this shared learning experience had been worthwhile and that the ideate, test, and fail-fast mindset of design thinking could have useful pedagogical and administrative implications. To put it another way, through this course, we prototyped a writing program reconceived as an ongoing, collaborative design thinking process. In this article, we trace our experiences in and reactions to the course. Then we turn to how the experience of the course has informed our subsequent research, teaching, and administrative work. Finally, we close with a brief reflection on our work as a humble, incremental approach to design thinking and the value we found in sustained, reflective collaboration.

The Emergence of Jambord Usage as a Technical Communication Tool In a Covid-19 Zoom Classroom

2023-05-11T12:44:07-07:00

This article will address pedagogical approaches to Jamboard usage, effective outcomes via zoom amongst student participation, and how effective this tool is beyond just the classroom.

Aphorisms for Internationalizing Technical Communication Programs

2023-09-01T11:41:59-07:00

Online media increasingly allow technical and professional communication (TPC) programs to engage in international collaborations. For such undertakings to be successful, program administrators must address different aspects affecting international online exchanges. Doing so requires effective discussions between program administrators and the stakeholders involved in the internationalization process. Aphorisms that effectively encapsulate core ideas can play a central role in these interactions. This entry presents aphorisms administrators can use when discussing the internationalization of TPC programs with key constituents.

Review of The Changing Face of VR: Pushing the Boundaries of Experience Across Multiple Industries

2023-08-27T21:57:29-07:00

The Changing Face of VR: Pushing the Boundaries of Experience Across Multiple Industries discusses how virtual reality (VR) has been used to improve users’ experience with watching performances, news stories, nature, and other genres, and has been written by “practitioners and academics from different disciplines” (p. 8). The book analyzes and theorizes what VR is already doing and pushes readers to think, “what can and will VR do [in the future]? (p. 8).” The 11 chapters of this book distinctly show readers the immense technological growth in VR applications since its incipient stages in the mid-2010s and create hope for VR to become mainstream one day. The book was “written before Meta’s massive investment in VR” (p. 2) and before Apple’s June 2023 announcement of their Apple Vision Pro. Apple announced that with the Vision Pro you “can spread your work out across an array of large, digital monitors that are invisible to everyone else in the room” and “watch movies and play games on a 100-foot-wide virtual screen, or have FaceTime chats with friends” (Gershgorn, 2023). Such technology only demonstrates the potential for VR to go mainstream and pushes for the need to research VR applications further. This edited collection keeps readers interested in the technology and its far-reaching implications.

Review of The End of Genre: Curations and Experiments in Intentional Discourses

2023-04-17T07:06:32-07:00

The End of Genre: Curations and Experiments in Intentional Discourse challenges the notion that the humanities cannot, or should not, consider intentionality when interpreting discourse. In this text, Brenton Faber attempts “to address the relative inability of textual studies (and the humanities more broadly) to engage with and constructively participate in crucial problems of the twenty-first century” (p. 3). Because technical communication is a dynamic field in which the rules of genre are often superseded by the needs of the user, academics and program administrators will find much that is useful in this text for their teaching and for aligning their programs with industry trends.

Review of User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice

2023-08-14T12:55:57-07:00

This review of Kate Crane and Kelli Cargile Cook's edited collection Use Experience as Innovative Academic Practice walks readers through the guiding principles of the book with a view toward applying a UX lens to future curriculuar research and design projects.