- By Amanda Beres
The field of technical and professional communication is changing to include a focus on social justice issues. More interconnected, wide, and vast, employers are looking for people who can think on a global scale. Now more than ever, technical and professional communication focuses on user experience. In fact, it almost is a requirement to have some training in usability working in the field. As instructors, we need to give students hands-on learning. Simply saying “design” does not work anymore.
Social justice issues are coming to the forefront of technical and professional communications or TPC. TPC professionals are positioned to help through their training and skillset. Being able to identify the audience, genre, and understand the situation allows TPC professionals to engage with social justice issues in a uniques way. As teaching fellows instructing TPC classrooms, this is what we are preparing our students for. Whether science communication, technical communication, or business communication, social justice will come into the mix. How then should we approach this as instructors? Through promoting collaboration! How do we promote collaboration? Through a process-driven approach! We must find ways to get students invested in the process and invested in designing together.
Now, returning to this idea of saying “design” does not work anymore. Liz Lane, a TPC professor at the University of Memphis discusses the interstitial design process. In her chapter Interstitial Design Processes: How Design Thinking and Social Design Processes Bridge Theory and Practice in TPC Pedagogy, she says we must think of the design process and creative thinking in the practical sense. We should encourage our students to think of how they might apply the design process to their area of interest. More importantly, we should encourage students to design for a specific audience. For example, when discussing resumes and cover letters, there is a specific audience and specific criteria. The audience: the hiring manager: The design: simple and easy to read with relevant information. But what about discussing the visual rhetoric of an Annual Report or About Us page? What about discussing the social impact of companies through their communication? Employers look for globally-focused communicators, who can empathize and design for specific users.
Knowing this, we can then design the appropriate class assignments and activities. Lane says “With social issues in mind, design thinking offers instructors and students the freedom to err, stumble, and revise within comfortable boundaries of an iterative, recursive cycle. All ideas should be valued and placed into conversation with other prototypes, drafts, and versions,” (Lane 35). Discussing social justice issues, with hands-on instruction within graphic design, user-expeirence, and visual communication promotes collaboration. This opens an array of opportunities for both students and instructors. There are many routes we can take as teaching fellows:
- Group projects
- Analyzing what pictures and information are on the page
- Looking at the page layout
- Designing info-graphics in teams for a specific non-profit
These activities encourage students to discuss the design process, collaborating with each other, while teaching them the importance of TPC within social justice. Understanding how the information is designed and presented encourages students to work together to find design solutions. TPC students must learn collaboration is key in design at all stages. Thus we should try to promote collaboration and discussion of social issues in the classroom. “An interstitial design approach flourishes when collaboration rests at the center of its application, echoing James Purdy’s claim that “design projects require multiple hands and minds, and a design thinking approach to writing makes such collaboration standard, accepted, and unquestioned” in his study of design thinking in writing studies (2014, p. 633),” (Lane 32). TPC has shifted and is shifting.
TPC is so interconnected with user experience not discussing social justice is a disservice. Teaching students specific genres to reach a specific audience is essential. We must constantly remind students they are designing for someone. We must encourage free-thinking and radical design choices. “The TPC classroom is a place for radical design, where we say just as much with plain and simple language as we do with adhering to and bending design principles,” (Lane, 41). Each audience has its own language, so each audience requires a different design. To prepare students to enter the field, they must understand in every design process, collaboration is key.
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