Andrew Mara

PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES: Using Charettes to Perform Civic Engagement in Technical Communication Classrooms and Workplaces

Charettes offer a productive way of combining theory and practice to address some of the difficult matters of getting students to see and perform technical communication as students, professionals, servers, and citizens. This collaborative activity helps students prepare for an increasingly modular professional world by revealing the contingent rhetoricity of professional autonomy. Charettes can help technical writing programs and students integrate service and civic learning into the curriculum by using indigenous professional genres that actively demand stakeholder participation. The intensity and pragmatic force of charettes can assist students in building their ethos while working with fellow stakeholders. The wide range of possible documents involved in the process associated with charettes can help technical communication students and teachers explore the connections between rhetorical exigencies and genre and put their skills to good use in a culture where many are looking for new ways to build critical citizenship.

The ethics of agile ethnography

In this paper, we describe methods for evaluating the ethics of agile ethnographic research. The large variety of how the term ethnography is used and a lack of a clear scope of associated activities limits the capacity for communication design researchers to accurately and ethically conduct ethnographic field research in various settings. This paper discusses possible ways to conduct ethical ethnography by providing a common definition and case studies to support an agile, rich, iterative, contextual research process.

Ethos as market maker: The creative role of technical marketing communication in an aviation start-up

This study examines how a very light jet start-up, Eclipse Aviation, changed its ethos appeals in order to survive the loss of its principally declared innovation, a jet aircraft engine. Eclipse Aviations corporate transformation from a spin-off company to a convergence-of-innovation company hinged on modifying an early marketing strategy. To overcome the loss of the jet engine, employees had to radically modify earlier expert representations and adopt rhetorical appeals that more closely parallel what Miller described as “cyborg discourse.” To understand how Eclipse Aviation survived the typically fatal loss of a stated primary innovation and to explore the implications that this particular start-ups rupture has for technology transfer and technical marketing, this study centers its analysis on a Web site that marketers used to “ventilate” the company and prevent financial collapse. The transformation in the companys marketing strategy illustrates how cyborg ethos appeals aggregate and discipline distributed stakeholder roles.

Capturing social value in UX projects

In this experience report, authors detail how qualitative User Experience (UX) research aligned the interests of UX researchers with the interests of the communities being investigated to increase participant engagement. Because UX research is designed to maximize insights into user motivation, part of UX ethical concerns should include how insights get integrated into the communities where the technology is deployed. This report discusses successes and challenges of drawing conclusions from qualitative research in an annual art event. In the Fargo-Moorhead Art Marathon, content creators collected user data, collaboratively strategized with participants, and refined a three-year-old event that has grown from a loose assortment of performances into a ten-day multi-mediated art event created for alternative art engagement. The authors, who conducted initial research to create a phone app to track the participant progress, report on how event data during was evaluated and folded into the next iteration.

Mutt Methods, Minimalism, and Guiding Heuristics for UX Project Management

UX has coalesced from a multiplicity of perspectives and approaches, and is held together by a focus on the user. In order to create the flexibility necessary to accommodate the wide range of projects and perspectives, it is necessary to narrow down the UX team concerns and goals before the project management approach is selected. Rather than depending upon a narrow definition of project management that grows out of an overall work style-whether, Agile, lean, or waterfall-the UX project can usefully benefit from a tailored project management approach that matches the project demands. To narrow down the team focus, the authors propose four heuristics to locate: 1. project scope, 2. project agents, 3. evaluation timing, and 4. evaluation criteria. Once those four questions are answered, the UX team can then better locate what kind of project management approaches and genres will best accomplish the team goals.

Blending Humanistic and Rhetorical Analysis to Locate Gendered Dimensions of Kenyan Medical Practitioner Attitudes About Cancer

ABSTRACT Medical humanities and the rhetoric of health and medicine apply different methods to healthcare documents and discourses. This methodological reflection of a project studying cancer attitudes in Kenya describes how researchers combined practices from these disparate fields to produce more sensitive and ethical methods for studying cross-cultural contexts. By extending humanistic methods into social-science data collections, researchers were better able to ask precise questions and to perceive context-specific cues for consent and non-consent.

Framework negotiation and UX design

Framework negotiation is a mixed-methods research approach to help a UXD researchers uncover the relationship between cross-cultural identity and location. In this study, surveys initially located connections between conceptions of the self and symbolic pathways. Then, community-based research and usability testing verified root metaphors for website navigation. This mixed-methods research uncovered how Kenyans ported navigational strategies from other institutional settings. The article outlines the creation of the research instrument, describes how early data collection guided later data collection, and finally details how the methods uncovered user significance through metaphor.

Leveraging UX research method shifts to uncover guiding user metaphors

The research paper describes mixed-methods Experience Design research instruments that investigate the relationship between cross-cultural identity and location. Qualitative research instruments were designed to initially locate connections between conceptions of the self and symbolic pathways, and then to push out from conceptual paths to find boundaries and key connections between them. This paper details qualitative research into how an African university deploys place-based identity through its website, and how university students navigate through the university portal to desired information. This research uncovered whether the structure of a website reinforced audience notions of place through their use of metaphor, image, and navigation cues. The paper outlines the creation of the research instrument, discusses how early data collection guided later data collection, and finally details how these methods solicit users to define the significance of the data during research method shifts.