Design Thinking in Technical Communication: Solving Problems through Making and Collaboration

This book explores the relationships between design thinking, critical making, and socially responsive technical communication, using the Maker Movement to identify how citizen innovation can inform social innovation. It offers opportunities to cultivate a sense of critical changemaking in technical communication students and practitioners, showcasing examples of socially responsive innovation and expert interviews.

Format: Hardback
Length: 148 pages
Publication date: 19 May 2021
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This comprehensive book delves into the intricate relationships between design thinking, critical making, and socially responsive technical communication. By leveraging the recent technology-powered DIY culture known as the Maker Movement, it aims to uncover how citizen innovation can inform cutting-edge social innovation that advocates for equitable change and progress on today's pressing issues.

After providing a concise overview of the origin and recent history of design thinking, along with its connections to the design paradigm in writing studies, the book delves into the realm of maker culture and its profound influences on innovation and education through an ethnographic study of three academic makerspaces. It offers valuable opportunities to cultivate a sense of critical changemaking among technical communication students and practitioners, showcasing examples of socially responsive innovation and expert interviews that urge a disciplinary focus on social justice advocacy and an embrace of the design-thinking principle of radical collaboration.

The author passionately argues for a future in the field where technical communication constituents are recognized as leaders in driving radical innovation to solve wicked social problems. This book serves as a vital resource for instructors, students, and practitioners of technical communication, and can be effectively utilized as a supplemental text for graduate and undergraduate courses in usability and user-centered design, as well as research.

Weight: 354g
Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367478322