User- and Human-Centered Design
Design teams can determine when and how to journey through the five basic phases of the design thinking process. Regardless of a team’s preferred workflow, an important consideration is that design thinking should not be treated as a rigid, linear design process. Teams should not treat the five phases merely as checkpoints to reach. Instead, a design thinking process should exercise iterative design. Different factors including new ideas, user feedback, and technological opportunities or limitations can take a team from one phase back to a previous phase or more. This should be embraced as an integral process to design so as to ensure user- centered innovations.
As design thinking prioritizes the user, technical communication values user- centered design as one of its principal practices. User-centered design was born of usability studies. Don Norman and Stephen Draper (1986) coined the term in their book, User-Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction, introducing it to professions like human factors, software engineering, and technical communication. The rhetorical roots of technical communication and its existing investment in audience analysis helped the field adopt user-centered design in the 1990s. Notably, Robert Johnson (1998) provided a theoretical model that combined rhetoric and user-centered theory. Johnson’s model rationalizes the adaptation of user-centered design in technical communication pedagogy. It resulted in the addition of courses like usability and user experience courses in technical communication curricula (Breuch, Zachry, & Spinnuzi, 2001). Another sign of this adaptation can be seen through the identity evolution in technical communication programs. For example, the Department of Technical Communication at the University of Washington—Seattle became the Human Centered Design and Engineering department in 2009 to reflect the prominence of user-centered design in technical communication (Department history, n.d.). Elsewhere, like the Technical Communication and Interactive
Design departments at Kennesaw State University and Metropolitan State University (Minnesota), and the Technical Communication and Information Design program at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs have added “design” to their core identity as a way to emphasize its place in technical communication instruction.
There have been discussions and debates regarding the use of the word “user” vs. “human” as in human-centered design instead of user-centered design. Citing Rob Kling and Susan Leigh Star (1998) and William Rouse (2007), Mark Zachry and Jan Spyridakis (2016) noted that human-centered design focuses on the social dimension of user interaction with systems that user-centered design has sometimes overlooked. Simon Baron-Cohen (2011) criticized that by making the human element invisible, user-centered design dehumanizes the user in interactive system experiences. Marina Yalanska (2018) of FAQ Design Platform (tubikstudio.com) took on the slight nuances in the two terms and observes that “human-centered design is the process of things deeply based on general natural characteristics and peculiarities of human psychology and perception” while “user-centered design is [a] more focused and concise version of human-centered design with deeper analysis of target audience” (n.p.). Yalanska summarized that human-centered design and user-centered design work hand-in-hand; the idea is to first design for humans, then define the needs of the specific category of users. Nevertheless, the shared missions of user-centered design and human-centered design have left the semantic bale unresolved. In this book, I apply the two terms interchangeably, with specific use of human-centered design when discussing the humane aspects of innovations.
Design thinking supports user- and human-centered design. It shares the same belief that the user—and empathy and understanding for the user—should be the primary motivation in all design decisions. The iterative nature of design thinking considers the whole user experience; it takes into account users’ hopes and needs (through empathy and definition), as well as their actual reactions and behaviors (especially during the testing with prototypes).
But Why Making?
Now, one may be surprised to see the inclusion of “making” in this book as the subject matter is design thinking in technical communication. “Making,” as popularized by a recent development called the Maker Movement (which I discuss further in the next chapter), has entered the field of technical communication, in practice and pedagogy'. Within computers and writing—a subfield of writing studies that has tremendous influences on technical communication—scholars have given attention to what making can teach them about learning and multimodal delivery. Making was a keynote subject for the annual Computers and Writing conference given by James Paul Gee (2013), and continues to manifest in conference programs, journal articles, and books. Chet Breaux (2017) observed that many writing scholars are already very interested in the practices used by makers and the artifacts they create even though the terms “maker” and “making” were popularized only recently. Amid differing threads of discussions and converging interests, I see an opportunity to create a space for patching “making” and technical communication together through design thinking, and weaving existing theories of multimodality and multiliteracies to create a case for meaningful making in technical communication pedagogy.
Besides the rationale proposed by Breaux (2017), this move is also largely inspired by Joyce Locke Carter’s Chair’s Address, “Making, Disrupting, Innovating,” delivered at the 2016 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in Houston, Texas. Using real-time voice sensing, motion tracking, and corresponding visual displays, Carter performed a sensational address that demonstrated a potential future for multimodal rhetoric that involves not just textual or auditorial appeals but also imagerial and gestural. Besides its demonstrative effects, Carter’s address called writing studies scholars into valuing making as a valid and plausible way of learning in the 21st century. Carter’s exigence is built upon the historical impact that making has on our field and its advancement. She called our attention to several innovative instances, such as Daedalus, ELI Review, BABEL, and EyeGuide, all of which have helped define writing studies as a productive discipline that contributes to the betterment of our knowledge society.
When I talk about making, I’m flipping the power and flipping the epistemology, and saying that when you make, you dictate what will happen. You create new things that hopefully challenge the status quo (which is also the goal of advocacy), and while some, if not most, efforts end in failure, some will be quite disruptive. (Carter, 2016, p. 390)
And when you hear one of your colleagues say the words “my startup company,” or “my new app,” you might be tempted to think, “Oh, that’s a bit unusual for someone at the C’s to talk like this.” I’ll argue that that kind of statement at the bar, or in a session, should be seen as desirable and normal—as normal as someone who mentions “my new book,” or “my research” or “my advocacy.”
(Carter, 2016, p. 391)
While Carter’s address begged for more litigable theoretical frameworks for making, disrupting, and innovating in writing studies, her contention for a multimodal future of writing studies is well taken and can be used as a springboard to research that investigates design-driven and problem-based technical communication pedagogy. Along with Carter’s motivation, making responds to our field’s growing needs for viable pedagogical frameworks to integrate multimodal composition and design thinking with technical communication programs. As I iterate throughout this book, making subscribes to a particular characterization of technical communication set out byjohndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart Selber (2013):
Technical communicators do not merely learn skills; they must also learn how to learn new skills, upgrading and augmenting their abilities as they mature in careers, analyzing the matches and mismatches between what they currently know and what a communication situation demands. . . . [They] must learn to become reflective problem solvers.
(P- V
Johnson-Eilola and Selber considered problem-solving to be a productive characterization for it acknowledges the extent to which our field contributes to technological development and its use, the interpretation of rhetorical situations, and the design of viable solutions based on context, complexity of the tasks and their characteristics. With Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s characterization, I address the core question Leverenz (2014) asked about multimodal writing instruction, “How can we teach writing so that students learn to use words and other language resources to define and respond in creative ways to problems they see as important?” (p. 4). I take this challenge a notch higher by asking how we might deliver technical communication instruction such that writing becomes the “head fake2” (Pausch & Zaslow, 2008) in the learning process, so that other desirable traits—like greater rhetorical awareness, collaboration skills, critical thinking, ethical decision making, etc.—might emerge as the learning outcomes.
Across many fields, particularly education, engineering, and business, the Maker Movement and its philosophy have been adopted for creating innovative, open, and collaborative communities of learners and makers (Hagel, Brown, & Kulasooriya, 2013; American Society for Engineering Education, 2016). In these communities—fondly known as makerspaces—students cultivate a strong sense of agency in solving problems they identified as important through a design thinking process. This process requires students to combine creative and analytical approaches to define problems and invent desirable solutions by collaborating with others. Although not limited only to schools and university campuses, most makerspaces today are built within an education setting (Carlson, 2015). The idea of a Maker Education is to create such spaces where students collaborate across disciplines and tackle complex problems.
Many technical communication scholars come from a background in writing studies and may be curious where making and professional/technical writing overlaps. While it may seem far-fetched at first, there are a number of recognized connections between making and writing. For one, making, much like writing, is process-oriented; it involves the drafting and composing of an artifact, trial and error, revision, and reflection (Sheridan, 2010; Gierdowski & Reis, 2015). One might also recognize the similarities between making and the growing conversation about multimodality that is taking place in the areas of rhetoric and composition, computers and writing, and digital rhetoric. In writing studies, we have been challenged to reconsider what we see as “texts,” as James Porter (2002) pointed out, “We are already in the age of new media, where visual and video forms of expression supersede alphabetic text” (p. 389). The material outcome of a “making” could very well communicate a message the same way as conventional alphabetic texts, if not more effectively. What’s more, the project-focused, process-oriented maker approach that favors co-creation is comparable to the participatory, collaborative knowledge-making practices that are highly regarded in rhetoric and composition studies (i.e., Ede & Lunsford, 1990; Yancey & Spooner, 1998). Finally, emphasizing the importance of translating knowledge into practical application, Miles Kimball (2017) stressed the need to leverage the technical communication classroom for change-making:
Compositionists are rethinking general college writing instruction, for example by having students write “multimodal” compositions. . . . This change reflects a growing awareness of the importance of technology in human communication. Multimodality, however, does not always emphasize instrumentality; many multimodal compositions are simply expressive writing in multiple media. We owe all students an opportunity to learn how to communicate in a technological world—not just by writing a multimodal essay instead of a lexical essay, but by learning to use technologies of communication to bring about practical change. Technical communication is ideally situated to help do just that.
(p. 350)
Given these observations, I see an opportunity to identify the viability of a maker pedagogical approach for technical communication, through the perspectives of design thinking.
