Reading Deep: Design as Advocacy

Reading Deep: Design as Advocacy

Madison Turkette

Source: McKinsey.com

While studying at Purdue University, I have been frustrated with the stereotype that most non-STEM majors are worthless in our service and technology economy. It doesn’t help when most potential employers say “we don’t recruit for these jobs at Purdue” or “sorry, we don’t need anyone who’s good at writing.” Most people infer that majors like Communications are simple, clearly-defined majors such as Civil Engineering or Nursing, but the emphasis on certain studies and courses can be honed in on by the type/number of classes the student takes while enrolled in said major. A professional writing major (PW) is much more than technical writing, or how everyone else puts it: “So, professional writing, that’s like, manual/technical/research/academic writing, yeah?” (Hint: for those who are trying to understand professional writing, don’t try to delineate it with one of the words you’re defining.) The main takeaway for this written discourse is that technical communication has its merits in investigating the interdisciplinary skills that are sculpted during higher education studies and, later, finalized into what could be considered a “master” of their arts. From henceforth, I will negate any word constructed from “writer” to make this post—and my argument—more effective.

A reading in class produced by Emma Rose—a current assistant professor at the University of Washington Tacoma--was our main focus for a week in the PW capstone course. The article relayed the influence technical communicators have on advocacy for the public eye. As she emphasized for over a decade of studies and published works (http://directory.tacoma.uw.edu/employee/ejrose), her motivations involve design for digital inclusion. I chose to focus this post on her article because of the emphasis she put on the differences between patois—jargon that is used here at Purdue University (and will be discussed in more detail later in the post).

“Design as Advocacy: Using a Human-Centered Approach to Investigate the Needs of Vulnerable Populations” (2016) focuses on the positive effects that technical communicators can have on social justice problems while moving toward the solution that most rhetoric scholars are debating in their research. For Rose, she focused on policy-making and how research influences policy changes in most circumstances (Grabill, 2009; Blythe, Grabill, and Riley, 2008; Buchanan 2001). With this in mind, there are multiple service-learning projects (SLP) developed alongside the PW department for non-profit groups in the Lafayette area. I had the ability to work alongside my classmates in a previous course while creating materials for a real-life organization who needed help but couldn’t afford it with the work they did. We learned about the stigmatizations behind who these organizations helped, evaluated, and eventually tackled these problems so they could thrive with the materials we provided them. This doesn’t necessarily mean my classmates and I were the best people for the job, but we learned life-skills without having to compete with our classmates for a single position (which also would have taken a longer time to produce the materials we did for these organizations).

Going back to the article by Emma Rose, I wanted to point out was the focus she put on the differences between user- and human-centered design, and how these two terms differ in the current research world. Rose defines user-centered design as solely focusing on people and their relationship to and the use of technology, while human-centered design represents a broader scope to provide a way to consider how design can support or constrain the needs of people whose lives are impacted by both the systems and policies that are created by a more digitized world.

Many classes at Purdue University use the rhetoric of “user-” terms to describe this new concept of technological design. What I find most interesting is how each of these different “user-” definitions may be placed on a binary scale, identifying as more “user-centered design” or “human-centered design.” Codifying such definition in this way would allow students more responsibility to pick which concepts they would like more studies on.

The ubiquitous idea of technology being more user-centered in most classes taught at Purdue has caused an estranged view that everyone has superior training over others after taking one class on user experience. Most students, however, do not understand the concepts surrounding how people are supported or hindered from specific design creativity. If only there were more classes dedicated to the theory of ethics surrounding human-centered design, rather than glossing over the impacted lives of certain designs (especially in consideration to the advertisements).

The RXA Reading Deep Series is the course's "deep dives" into literature on professional writing, user experience & architecture, and design, written by the individual scholars of RXA.