Shoutout to designers and devs who know that communication is key to their process
The following links are to articles of designers and developers, who are writing about the ways communication is integral to their process. As a writing studies researcher and teacher, these articles bring little tears of joy to me eyes. Because, yes!!, written and spoken communication are essential practices.
Al Scott, "Using Cookbook Documentation to Pass on Knowledge."
Soundbite: "Documentation is hard. Like writing code, it is a delicate balancing act of packing information into a format that is both very dense and very readable."
Alla Kholmatova, "The Language of Modular Design."
Soundbite: "Naming things together is a useful habit for your team to develop, because in the process of trying to give something a name that makes sense, you work out its function and, most importantly, reach consensus."
Abby Covert, "How to Make Sense of Any Mess."
Key message: Work professionals need to pay closer attention to developing a shared language, or "controlled vocabularies."
Nicole Fenton, "Words as Material." h/t @caseyboyle
Soundbite: Provides a nicely defined problem to tackle and says, "We’re [designers] here to make meaningful changes in the world, but we can’t do that if we don’t understand each other. We can’t ignore people or work around them."
Again, it's so great to read about designers and developers discussing these issues, solutions, and strategies surrounding communication. I find myself nodding my head in agreement with much of what they're preaching. I see them starting to realize how even the seemingly simple act to name a thing is an interpretive act that conceptualizes design goals and functions of particular aspects of a tech being developed. I also see them knowing and seeking to know their audiences. And, overall, I see them convincing other design and dev professionals that their teams need to invest in communication time up front, as well as test such concepts and applications with the actual people who are going to be using the tech in particular goal-oriented ways.
Written communication is indeed language made material. Language use is a complex tool, inextricably bound to our bodies, contexts, and cultures of practical activity (cf. Haas, 1996, 1999; Haas & Witte, 2001; Witte, 1992). I think I like Edwin Hutchins' (1995) way putting this phenonema best: that humans are the "coordinating tissue" within the systems of activity that include particular people and tools being put to use in particular ways. It's no wonder then that designing and using technology is a bear to do and understand. It means we must admit that culture and tool use are intertwined, which then means tech-folks need to get real about the complexity of culture!