The complexity of situated text design: a negotiation between standardization and spoken language in a manufacturing company

Abstract

In information design textbooks, text design is mostly understood as typography and layout. The meaning-making process of language, involving social interaction that affects language, is rarely acknowledged. Instead, texts are supposed to be “clearly” written. In this research article, we argue that the understanding of text design could benefit from also addressing text production and use situated amid social activity. This article presents a study on a text design process partly based on spoken language and owned by assembly operators in a workplace. Capturing the spoken dialogue and transforming it into instructive texts resembling transcripts are essential steps in securing the best practices for the smallest tasks in manual assembly, the minima of working, which is crucial for manufacturing. Our aim within the information design field is 2-fold: To underline the meaning-making process in language as a social phenomenon and to show that the situated design perspective, i.e., an outlook that highlights the uniqueness of the setting, can be important for the production and use of certain texts, such as instructions, and for affecting language. We asked ourselves: What are the consequences for the information design field when meaning-making in a language is understood as being socially situated in an activity? We have studied a design process and used observations, interviews, and text analysis to gather data. The result showed that the workers' ownership of text documents is crucial for the texts' use, yet the texts used do not meet the standard of information design textbooks. Moreover, the design of the text involves a continuous and non-linear collective negotiation that balances standardization in language and work procedures with the incorporation of operators' linguistic improvements. We unfold a case of text design where there is a closeness of designer and user roles, a non-linearity of the process, and an understanding of an information design product as becoming rather than having been finalized for use.