Interactive Illustration: An
Opportunity for Integrating Technical Communication Into Enterprise.
Abstract
In this article I describe an emerging landscape that supports
an ecology made up of of freely available 3-D content, a software and hardware
combination that provides access to this content for disparate groups of users
ranging from highly skilled to general users, and a wide variety of authoring
tools that allows those users to express this content in a wide variety of
genre.
I also provide
a case study showing how we are using rhetorical principles to implement web GL
as queriable illustration.
Technical
communication has been directly influenced by cultural developments that moved its
practice. As Brockmann (1998) notes, in response to the rapid acceptance of the
personal computer by the general public in the late 20th century,
the emphasis of documentation shifted to “what readers need to know in order to
perform the task rather than focusing on the internal workings of the tools
used to perform the task – built on a tradition of American instruction manuals
reaching back to at least the 1850s” (p. 378).
The tradition described by Brockman, which focused on “task orientation” (p.
378) and the rapid development of the computer screen as an interface to
technology, later gave way to Carroll’s (1998) “Minimalism,” an anti-intuitive
style of “less is more” (p. 2) documentation, which fundamentally changed the
established culture of practicing technical communicators. In addition to a
shift in consumption, the well-established production techniques in workplace
culture were also changed by the appearance of Postscript page description
software, desktop publishing technology, and the Portable Document Format (PDF).
These technological affordances shifted the professional culture by
marginalizing craft workers such as typographers and production artists, who
were bound by tradition and obsolete hardware, as it empowered other workers
such as technical communicators who then became responsible for layout, design,
and typography (O’Hara, 2001; Dicks, 2009) and thus became more involved with
the techniques of visual expression. This continuing technological evolution
now provides the opportunity for technical communication to expand its domain
to include illustration.
Technology, like culture, continues to evolve. As it
affords more capability to the practice of technical communication, the
specific role of technical communicators in the creation of visual expressions,
dependent as it is on its application, will continue to evolve. The process of
evolution is often blurred by the passage of time, and as Finnegan (2004) has
noted, a historical perspective will provide some clarity. The technical
communication field continues to change and adapt to a shifting cultural
landscape. During the last two decades of the 20th century, most computers and
software shipped with a set of printed documentation. With the wide acceptance
by the public of the Internet, web-based publishing, help files embedded into
software, and the Portable Document Format (PDF), this practice of including
physical manuals has all but disappeared, and technical communicators have struggled
to accommodate and absorb these technological developments. Unfortunately, for
those technical communicators who are accustomed to working with conventional
printed manuals, cultural developments such as globalization, off-shoring, and
open-source, user-generated content published on YouTube have created
conditions of diminishing opportunity. For practitioners, these new management
practices and distribution channels introduce challenges for our profession
that are difficult to solve. One thing is certain for technical communication:
change is inevitable, and to sustain our profession, we must find ways to
accommodate these changes. Brumberger (2007) recognizes the evolving nature of
technical communication in her observation that technical writers are now
responsible for the creating of visual artifacts and incorporating them into
visual compositions (p. 377). According to Johnson-Sheehan and Baehr (2001),
“[n]ot only does new technology require us to do our jobs differently; it also
urges us to think differently about the nature and use of texts” (p. 30). How
can we, as technical communicators, learn from the symbiotic process
demonstrated by cultural, commercial, and technological developments, and how
can this evolving process be harnessed for the advancement of our profession?
As culture and
technologies evolve, so too must the role of the technical communicator change.
Johnson-Eilola, Selber, and Selfe (1999) consider it “crucial that
technical communicators [… ] gain the ability to think critically, multiply,
historically, and contextually about the way the computer technologies are
developed and used within our culture and how such use, in turn, intersects
with the practice of technical communication” (p. 198). Although they
specifically address the use of the computer, the ubiquity of this technology
in nearly all manufactured products, i.e. the “Internet of Things” (Ashton,
2009), suggests that in the future their recommendation could be applied to all
products. In that spirit, practitioners of technical communication have
developed strategies of finding ways to better embed and become integrated into
the culture of the business enterprise they serve. Writing in the online
publication, Tech Writer Today Magazine, Giordano (2011), has formally defined this
process as “integrated technical communications (ITC) […] the coordination and
integration of all technical communication processes, tools, functions, and
sources within an organization to convey information and knowledge relevant to
optimizing the users’ product experience.” According to Giordano’s (2011)
model, the technical communicator becomes involved
in the development and manufacturing of the product, its sales and marketing
effort, and the continuing service relationship with the owner of the product.
To become engaged in this integrative process, as suggested by Johnson-Sheehan
and Baehr (2001) and Giordano
(2011), technical communicators may have to enlarge their scope to include
documents, which are not typically associated with our profession. Similarly,
Longo (2000) notes we need to “look beyond technical communication textbooks
and instead look to mass media to learn about cultural debates and issues that
will modify our practices” (p. 168).
