{"title":"The persuasion of perception: Internet narratives in the public consciousness","authors":"E. Pearson, R. Forno","doi":"10.1145/3121113.3132158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3121113.3132158","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we discuss the influence on popular culture's representation of the work of technologists and 'geeks' on how the general public and policy makers perceive of both new technologies and those who adopt and adapt them. We argue that, over time, the media shorthand of imagery and stereotype are replicated and repeated until they become a default general model for understanding a complex and ever-changing technological landscape. Drawing on examples from the last forty years of Western popular culture, this paper explores the presentation-perception relationship as non-experts try to grasp complex digital innovation.","PeriodicalId":159144,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 35th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115377403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Designer perceptions of user agency during the development of environmental risk visualization tools","authors":"S. Stephens","doi":"10.1145/3121113.3121223","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3121113.3121223","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents initial results of an interview study of designers or developers of interactive tools for visualizing environmental risks (e.g., maps of coastal flooding). It focuses on visualization development as a space in which users can exercise agency via user-centered design practices, thus enhancing user agency during the ultimate context of use. I describe commonalities of user inclusion in the development process, and trends in designer perceptions of the role of users in development. I focus on: 1) how and why environmental risk visualization tool development projects involve users, 2) how and to what extent user participation in design/development helps co-define the design of the visualization tool, and 3) how the literature on user agency may contribute to design practices tailored toward the ultimate context of use of risk visualization tools.","PeriodicalId":159144,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 35th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121234130","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Academic makerspaces: contexts for research on interdisciplinary collaborative communication","authors":"D. Andrews, Dustyn P. Roberts","doi":"10.1145/3121113.3121230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3121113.3121230","url":null,"abstract":"A growing trend on university campuses is the design and implementation of spaces---sometimes called \"design studios\" or \"invention studios\" or, more generally, \"makerspaces\"---that support project-oriented collaboration among students in engineering, science, and other fields. Through an emphasis on making, they also foster the face-to-face communication essential for community building and allow for the mess that accompanies innovative, iterative, and productive group problem-solving and prototyping. Using the Design Studio of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Delaware as a case study, our focus is on how---or whether---the physical environment of such a makerspace might indeed breed collaboration, an often cited goal of such spaces.","PeriodicalId":159144,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 35th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122817886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Using lightweight in-app messaging solutions for embedded assistance","authors":"Emily Manwaring","doi":"10.1145/3121113.3121211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3121113.3121211","url":null,"abstract":"Embedded assistance provides information to users at the right time and place, but common implementation models can take time to implement, require manual work, have heavy up-front costs, and be error-prone. In contrast, lightweight in-app messaging solutions help technical communicators quickly implement and control a messaging layer where all embedded content resides. In-app messaging solutions allow non-developers to build and deploy tooltips, lightboxes, tutorials, or other embedded assistance objects to a website or web application from a web browser. It minimizes implementation time, automates manual tasks, requires little programming skills, and modularizes the embedded content, keeping the code base clean. This experience report outlines the lightweight in-app messaging model and reviews several in-app messaging solutions for their feature set, ease of implementation, and ease of maintaining embedded content. It compares the in-app messaging model to common implementation models and explains the advantages and disadvantages of the lightweight approach.","PeriodicalId":159144,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 35th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114519800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Participatory design research to understand the legal and technological perspectives in designing health information technology","authors":"Maha Aljohani, J. Blustein, K. Hawkey","doi":"10.1145/3121113.3121240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3121113.3121240","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we report applying participatory design research on the development of effective privacy compliance framework in the context of healthcare applications provided to IT designers. We aim to bridge the gap between privacy law designers and privacy IT designers by expanding the concept of end-user participation. We propose a mixed approach between Participatory Design Research and Human Computer Interaction techniques to facilitate the participation of different stakeholders during the design lifecycle.","PeriodicalId":159144,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 35th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122060022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Using non-speech sounds to increase web image accessibility for screen-reader users","authors":"Ratan Bahadur Thapa","doi":"10.1145/3121113.3121231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3121113.3121231","url":null,"abstract":"Screen-reader users access images on the Web using alternative text delivered via synthetic speech. However, research shows that this is a tedious and unsatisfying experience for blind users, because text-to-speech applications lack expressiveness. This paper, poses an alternative approach using an experiment that compares audemes, a type of non-speech sounds, with alternative text delivered using synthetic speech. In a pilot study with fourteen sighted users, findings show that audemes perform better across many areas. Specifically, audemes required lower mental and temporal demands and led to less effort and frustration and better task performance. Moreover, participants recognized audemes with higher accuracy and lower errors. Audemes were also perceived as more engaging compared to alternative text delivered using synthetic speech. Additionally, audemes were found to be richer in delivering information. This study suggests that non-speech sounds could substitute or complement alternative text when describing images on the Web.","PeriodicalId":159144,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 35th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127216643","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The complex example of online search: studying emergent agency in digital environments","authors":"Daniel L. Hocutt","doi":"10.1145/3121113.3121207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3121113.3121207","url":null,"abstract":"Rhetorical agency in online search is not a straightforward proposition, emanating from either users or algorithms. Rather, agency emerges from assemblages that form and disassemble throughout the search session. Specific entities that coalesce into such assemblages include users, environments, technologies, networks, hardware, software, corporations, ideologies, and data structures. This paper proposes Levi Bryant's [11] onto-cartography as a framework for depicting emergent assemblage agency across four aspects of online search: 1) search and its results page; 2) the content of search results; 3) the searcher's research literacy; and 4) the ambient environment of the search session. The paper suggests methods to be used for studying emergent agency and encourages technical communicators to engage in studies that identify and trace rhetorical agency, especially in post-human assemblages of human and nonhuman actants.","PeriodicalId":159144,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 35th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication","volume":"53 98 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129986964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Testing methods of promoting critical listening skills in the service learning classroom","authors":"Sarah K. Gunning","doi":"10.1145/3121113.3121222","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3121113.3121222","url":null,"abstract":"This experience report presents the results of a year-long case history of testing strategies of introducing critical listening processes to technical communication students. The study investigates two graduate introductory technical writing courses (a total of 41 students, 4 clients) over two semesters. The report traces learning the institution's typical service learning process as a co-teacher, and again as a solo teacher, determining that collaborative writing skills, personnel management, and research skills were the main objectives in my construct of service learning outcomes. Using Kastman Breuch's [1] framework on critical listening, I assess students' experiences with clarity of 1. information received from client and 2. students' interpretation of the client's needs. The report describes students' experiences identifying/not identifying key themes in the verbal exchange, views about debriefing, and misinterpreting clients' wishes. The report concludes with lessons learned from the experience and what I would do differently in subsequent service learning courses.","PeriodicalId":159144,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 35th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127921269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Helping communication: what non-profits need from content strategists","authors":"Guiseppe Getto","doi":"10.1145/3121113.3121213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3121113.3121213","url":null,"abstract":"Contemporary non-profit organizations must reach a variety of audiences in order to sustain themselves, and must compel these audiences to take action on behalf of a specific cause. At the same time, digital communication is becoming an essential venue for reaching new audiences. Past research has indicated that non-profit professionals often lack the necessary training and expertise to leverage digital technologies for effective communication. This report of preliminary research findings is based on an ongoing Participatory Action Research (PAR) project to learn about, and help improve, non-profit content strategy in the community of Greenville, NC. The project included a series of focus groups with representatives of thirteen different organizations. Ultimately, I provide heuristics gleaned from the initial findings of this study and my ten years of working with non-profits to help improve their web presence and content strategy.","PeriodicalId":159144,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 35th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125341843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From concept to completion: building a digital book","authors":"Liza Potts, Victor Del Hierro","doi":"10.1145/3121113.3121124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3121113.3121124","url":null,"abstract":"Building a digital book is a process in which the author must do the scholarly work of an extended article or monograph plus the application work of building a website, app, or other kind of interactive system to display the scholarship. Like many digital humanities projects, building a digital book can take a team effort. This experience report discusses the culmination of several years of research and a year of building the digital book. Working in a Digital Humanities lab with strong backgrounds in user experience and digital scholarship, the team leaders reflect on their reasoning behind technology choices, their methods for managing processes, and their efforts in implementing the project. Benefits and drawbacks for tools will be discussed, as well as lessons learned for their next large-scale team project.","PeriodicalId":159144,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 35th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125519471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}