Investigating the Impact of Design Thinking, Content Strategy, and Artificial Intelligence: A “Streams” Approach for Technical Communication and User Experience

2021 ◽  
pp. 004728162110419
Author(s):  
Gustav Verhulsdonck ◽  
Tharon Howard ◽  
Jason Tham

Technical and professional communication (TPC) and user experience (UX) design are often seen as intertwined due to being user-centered. Yet, as widening industry positions combine TPC and UX, new streams enrich our understanding. This article looks at three such streams, namely, design thinking, content strategy, and artificial intelligence to uncover specific industry practices, skills, and ways to advocate for users. These streams foster a multistage user-centered methodology focused on a continuous designing process, strategic ways for developing content across different platforms and channels, and for developing in smart contexts where agentive products act for users. In this article, we synthesize these developments and draw out how these impact TPC.

2022 ◽  
pp. 004728162110725
Author(s):  
Jason Tham ◽  
Tharon Howard ◽  
Gustav Verhulsdonck

This article follows up on the conversation about new streams of approaches in technical communication and user experience (UX) design, i.e., design thinking, content strategy, and artificial intelligence (AI), which afford implications for professional practice. By extending such implications to technical communication pedagogy, we aim to demonstrate the importance of paying attention to these streams in our programmatic development and provide strategies for doing so.


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 437-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Pope-Ruark

In this special issue, we explore design thinking as a broad conceptual process as well as a tool that might align with the work of technical and professional communication (TPC) programs. But what is design thinking? What are the benefits and drawbacks of the process? Can design thinking be used to help students address rhetorical challenges and complex problems? How is design thinking showing up in the field, and does it belong in TPC programs? Four scholars explore these questions in their niche areas: process, usability and user design, technical communication, and industry and programmatic perspectives.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 393-414
Author(s):  
Godwin Y. Agboka

Understanding the law and its impact on the practice of technical communication has been an important scholarly thread in technical and professional communication (TPC) for more than two decades. Technical communicators recognize the impact of their work on stakeholders as well as the potential liability issues associated with composing technical communication documents. While this scholarship is widespread, relatively few pedagogical resources are available to prepare students for success in a litigious world or to guide instructors in teaching legal writing. This article offers a case study of a legal writing course that prepares TPC students to develop legal literacy and succeed in the workplace.


2021 ◽  
pp. 004728162110315
Author(s):  
Mason Pellegrini

Fierce competition has made innovation increasingly necessary for business success, and this has increased the importance of user-based innovation strategies like design thinking (DT). While many studies in technical and professional communication (TPC) have explored how DT can be used pedagogically, no studies have done this through investigating how DT is used as a workplace composing process. This study does exactly that. First, it presents the current state of research on pedagogical uses of DT in TPC, and then it builds upon those suggestions with an empirical study that chronicles on how two web design firms use DT to make websites. My main suggestion is to teach DT as a recursive process that allows students transcend potentially incorrect assumptions built into design tasks through gathering data not only from users, but from clients as well.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gallagher ◽  
Aaron Beveridge

This article advocates for web-scraping as an effective method to augment and enhance technical and professional communication (TPC) research practices. Web scraping is used to create consistently structured and well-sampled datasets about domains, communities, demographics, and topics of interest to TPC scholars. After an extended description of web scraping, we identify technical considerations of the method as well as provide practitioner narratives. We then describe an overview of project-oriented web scraping, and we discuss implications for the concept as a sustainable approach to developing web-scraping methods for TPC research.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (5) ◽  
pp. 450-471
Author(s):  
Elisabet Arnó-Macià ◽  
Mary McCall ◽  
Daniel Kenzie ◽  
Suvi Isohella ◽  
Bruce Maylath

This article draws on Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Project (TAPP) collaborations (e.g., [Arnó, 14] [Vandepitte, 16]) to show how students in already-existing technical communication classes can join other classes in realistic transnational projects through ICT and thereby acquire and enhance various types of transversal competences necessary to students’ future performance in a globalized workplace.


Author(s):  
Hilary A. Sarat St. Peter

Research in the ICT4D field implicates lack of user-centered design in the high rate of ICTD project failure. The field of user experience (UX) offers potentially fruitful approaches for user-centered design. In the ICTD context, these principles and methods clash with the triple constraints of project management (time, scope and funding). This paper introduces the user persona from UX design as a powerful tool for considering the user's perspective within resource-constrained ICTD projects. Although personas appear simple, they introduce complex communicative affordances, pragmatic benefits, and risks to ICTD projects. A brief conclusion revisits the larger problem of ICTD project failure, and considers the potential role of personas in addressing this problem.


2021 ◽  
pp. 105065192110441
Author(s):  
Godwin Y. Agboka ◽  
Isidore K. Dorpenyo

The social justice turn in technical and professional communication (TPC) has inspired a substantial body of progressive scholarship and discussion. But it is not clear how these scholarly efforts have shaped (or are shaping) programmatic and curricular efforts. This article reports the findings of a survey of TPC instructors and an analysis of 231 TPC programs to examine their curricular efforts toward social justice. Drawing from the mixed findings, the authors argue that vigorous curricular efforts in social justice enable TPC to fully and practically demonstrate the core mandate of our discipline.


Author(s):  
Kimberly C. Harper

This chapter discusses the author's approach to implementing social justice and learner-centered pedagogies in a course titled Technical Communication in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter. The author uses the Black Lives Matter movement as a springboard for teaching technical communication students about the responsibilities of workplace writers. Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) make use of a skills-based pedagogy and, at times, omits the importance of providing students with cultural competency skills. However, there is a shift in the field of TPC as some scholars are advocating for the inclusion of topics such as race, culture, gender, and class in pedagogical discussions. Discussed in this chapter are the theories behind the author's pedagogical choices when creating the described course, the student assignments, and the challenges encountered while teaching the course.


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