By Cameron Sinclaire
“Design, when considered as a core concept of making process-based decisions toward crafting a solution or deliverable, involves recursive critical thinking towards a goal,” Liz Lane (pg. 30) states, author of Interstitial Design Processes: How Design Thinking and Social Design Processes Bridge Theory and Practice in TPC pedagogy.
So how might we, as instructors, bridge such a gap in a way that our students can understand? In this chapter, Lane argues that a renewed approach to our pedagogy processes can only benefit our students and ourselves in the dynamic technical communication field today. She focuses specifically on social design and elements of design as interstitial tools to support our theories, practices, and approaches to the ever-changing world of TPC.
To proceed, I think it’s important to define the two main focuses of this chapter: Social Design and Interstitial.
Social Design is the application of design methodologies in order to tackle complex human issues, placing social issues as the priority. In other words,
Interstitial is relating to or situated in the interstices–the small spaces in between things.
In this chapter, Lane terms the practice of a dynamic approach to teaching design in TPC as interstitial design because of the multifaceted, interdisciplinary benefits of blending several theories of design into one broad, flexible recursive process for TPC pedagogy that is itself evolving rapidly. Including interstitial design in our pedagogies allows our students to analyze cultural and social justice issues within real workplace settings. These settings demand flexibility and responsiveness to increasingly connected and global audiences (31) and it is our responsibility to prepare our students for such an environment.
No matter their field, students are expected to be able to communicate effectively in their workplace and produce technical documentation. One real-world example I can draw from is my partner. He has been working within the Engineering field for over two years now as a full-time employee after graduating from UMass Dartmouth. He’s told me that taking the technical communications course during his undergraduate degree was far more valuable than he ever anticipated because he was expected to already have these technical writing skills and create technical documents for his team and the government.
“Indeed, the TPC classroom is often wildly collaborative, in that we prepare our students to collaborate and test project management skills for eventual implementation in their professional lives beyond the classroom,” (pg. 32) Lane explains. Through collaboration and communication, we’re helping our students build their arsenal of skills to draw upon in the future. Encouraging and showing them how to learn their audience, identifying their user’s needs, brainstorming together, and drafting mirrors the responsibilities they will one day have in the “real world”. As Lane says, design thinking holds the potential to bridge technical communication and usability with creative analyses for a myriad of contexts and audiences.
Overall, introducing interstitial design and encouraging collaboration in our classroom is a key element to preparing our students for a successful career in the real workplace environment.
“As our field’s social justice turn charged each of us with the task of bringing social justice issues more apparently into our pedagogy and research, the time is ideal for our field to begin showing how we can apply our unique design theories, practices, and knowledge to pursuing this call,” (pg. 40).
Hi Cameron, thanks for breaking down this reading in your blog post. I didn’t really like it because I feel like I wasn’t really getting anything new or exciting out of it; we talked about the word “interstitial” in class and how its use here is interesting because so many of our classes talk about “those spaces in between,” in between disciplines, in between classrooms and the real world, etc. a lot, just never using “interstitial design processes” as a term to describe this approach. So again, i think you did a nice job at communicating what it is that Lane says that is NOT necessarily new info for us as instructors to consider, as well as a nice job at summing up “interstitial.” More importantly, I think the example you bring up about your partner’s experience in the engineering industry is the exciting part about this reading. Helping our students to understand why they’re taking our courses, outside of “checking the box off your tracking sheet,” is such an important part of their overall course comprehension. Some people, like your partner, may not see as much of the value in our writing courses as they might when they’re actually entrenched within the industry, producing the documents we teach them about. That disconnect is really important for us to identify and work into our curriculum in order to bridge those gaps, so our curriculum is effective now and later, and not just later, when they realize why it’s important. I wonder if instead of spending all 13-14 weeks cranking our homework after homework, assignment after assignment, would our students benefit from more conversations in between (interstitial! ha) the core curriculum, about its relevancy to real-life scenarios? How can this program use the testimony of people like your partner, who have graduated from the course and the overall major and now see in the value in our courses, to bridge that gap? It would be neat to have students who later reflect that these classes are helpful, come in to talk to students and/or supply us with content to use in generating more relevant scenarios and activities.