Chapters 10 and 11

Chapter 10 discusses how technical communication projects have begun incorporating users in the development process.  As opposed to a strict “audience analysis,” users in many new successful ventures are actually part of the process themselves.  The chapter also cautions against including users in the design process simply as a “means to an end,” suggesting instead that users be asked to “genuinely contribute to the conversation” (247).   To address the issue of organizational constraints or budgetary issues, companies might set a specific point of contact within a company, set up in-house stimulations of the user environment (as opposed to traveling to user locations), and examining the cultural context of users.  From reading the chapter and understanding some cultural perspective of user inclusion in projects, it seems reasonable that user-centered projects will become increasingly common in the future.

Chapter 11 considers how technical communicators can study work contexts, when “context” is defined as “the set of observable differences in actors’ material relationships within two or more instances of the same activity. A practitioner of technical communication needs to be aware of the work context to adequately serve the needs of the organization.  The definition of “context” in this chapter is defined and sub-defined to provide the basis of the chapter.  The chapter makes sense from its definition of “context,” but the narrowness of the definition seemed a bit foreign to me.  When I normally think of context, I think of the social and cultural norms present in an organization, not necessarily dealing with “material relationships.”  From this standpoint, it seems like another word could have been a better substitute for “context,” but it made sense from the careful way it was defined in the chapter.