Editorial

A Note From the Editors

This issue of Intercom centers on multimedia and new media, especially the role new media centers or labs have on technical communication practice and instruction. I thank co-editor Dr. Rich Rice of Texas Tech University for his assistance with the content of this issue. I also want to thank author Geoff Hart who is retiring his information design column after 20 years' service to Intercom.

—Liz Pohland

liz.pohland@stc.org

The ever-increasing use and professionalization of new media, both in the workplace and in academia, by way of the synchronization and analysis and assessment of video, audio, picture, text, databases, mobile devices, higher quality printing, and other output and distribution tools is unmistakable. This demand for well-considered, well-integrated, and well-timed use of various media types in materials and projects is being mirrored by greater integration of media lab support spaces in communication, media, and technical communication programs.

In addition to reader, writer, and text, the modality and media used as well as the location in which content is received are crucial to any communicative act. The media used is central to: creating effective technical documents that are backed by relevant theory, analyzing and responding appropriately to rhetorical situations and varying audience agendas, user-centered approaches to technical communication, paying attention to ethical and professional and cultural issues, and effective composing today.

Just as good writing instruction needs sound support mechanisms like writing centers, faculty and students involved in the production of good new media composing need the support of dynamic media lab spaces. Featured articles in this issue explore the role new media labs play in technical communication instruction, in knowledge-making in general, and as spaces promoting divergent thinking praxis for individual and collaborative work as well as for professional project management.

Specifically, as a director of a lab, I offer an article detailing ways in which new media labs are important instructional support spaces for every type of course in a technical communication program. Media labs “scaffold the work students and faculty do in order to build theory-supported, audience-driven content,” and the most useful labs are often built organically, directly integrated into the work of location in which they are situated. Put simply, “A new media lab is an intensely interactive and responsive support space.”

Geoffrey Sauer, a director of the lab at Iowa State, tells the story of the lab's development and how it has become a sort of “incubator” for content. He points out why departments need such labs and what sort of physical and virtual space, hardware, software, networking, security, and expertise is needed. Media labs are affordable spaces. Media labs can bring synergy to ideas and, as Geoffrey writes, “multimedia labs are a place where we can begin to teach digital media to managers and instructors, as well as colleagues and students in this way, as skills and techniques, enabling people to practice comfortably if and when they wish.”

In an era of mass assessment and converging goals and objectives and mission statements, media labs offer students, faculty, and administrators support for meeting those needs through unique processes. Ben Lauren, an instructor at Florida International who is currently working with writing program colleagues to build a media lab, and who is studying the impact of media labs directly on writing programs, discusses the value of divergent thinking through media labs, which is a value central to the field of technical communication. As Ben reminds us, “Technology brings technical communicators the ability to make an idea unique—to stand out—to take an accessible shape or form as culture evolves.” He reminds us that the medium and the message is the message in our field.

Next, students from a recent class taught in Texas Tech's new media lab carry this idea forward, describing the lab as a “messy mash-up space” central to their education. The class worked to produce social media and other materials for a client that markets eye-tracking technologies for usability testers. The intensive work in the media lab producing something real, backed by the theory of the course, became a sort of remix or mash-up, an approach students suggest is helpful in technical communication and rhetoric instruction in general. As they write, “it was in this space where lessons about collaboration, time and resource constraints, and working as a professional team became a window to understand how new media works in professional contexts.”

Regular columns in this issue also focus on strategies for drawing readers' attention to key information using multimedia and important principles of information design.

There is nothing necessarily “new” about new media. The creation and distribution of any content is always based on audience, rhetorical aim, and available information. However, the economics of attention demands greater understanding of how the design and integration of new media types work to more effectively convey content. As practitioners demand these skill sets, academic programs must continue to better prepare students for such demands, and this includes developing necessary hands-on think tanks or media labs to support such preparation.

—Rich Rice

rich.rice@ttu.edu