Still and Albers provide a brief editorial outlining a direction for TC. Their call for TC’s movement toward (into) usability practices is one area of disciplinary overlap for TC and IA.
Still and Albers are claiming that the TCer’s perspective is valuable (and therefore should not be ignored) as usability practices increasingly require knowledge from user experiences, which were previously ignored. While their claim is heavy with presumption about the range of skills and tools available to the TCer, it does highlight the TCers traditional (modern?) position in proximity to the end user. This proximity – actually, the space between the TC and the end user – is where I see IA trying to stake out a piece of HCI and usability studies. I similarly see this space as a territory formerly occupied by TC, yet increasingly encroached on by IA, HCI, Usability, and other more timely, modern, and sexy disciplines.
“… technical communicators have a vital role to play in retooling usability… Poised on the line between quantitative and qualitative, theory and practice, producer and user, science and rhetoric, and information and knowledge, technical communicators have important insights that have the potential to make usability studies into a more relative and more relevant discipline.”
No comments:
Post a Comment