This is a the transcript of an interview with Dr. Kirk St.Amant on 28 March 2016, on the occasion of his visit to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville as the Spring 2016 Rhetoric Series Speaker for the Division of Rhetoric, Writing, & Linguistics in the UT Department of English.
Interviewers: STC members Savannah DeFreese and Elizabeth Sonewald, students in technical communication program in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and student liaisons to the East Tennessee Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication.
How long have you been in the field? How did you get started?
I’ve probably been in the field for give or take twenty years now, and I got into it sort of accidentally. I was working in customer service at a printing company, and one of my jobs was to translate “printerese” engineering into English for clients, because I worked in customer service, and that was a very difficult task, and it turned out one of the universities I was at had some courses in technical communication, and we had a professional development program, and my boss said to me, “Why don’t you try some of these? They might be helpful.” And it just happened to work out really well. I stopped going to work and started going to class. So that’s what happened, it was just an accidental sort of thing.
What is your favorite part of your work?
The new stuff, it never sort of gets old. And I’m sure everyone experiences that in different fields of study, but quite often it comes through a relatively narrow bandwidth. In tech comm, you get the internal, academic way of discovering things, but the external, the society evolves with different things, you’re trying to keep pace with it as well. So it’s never a dull moment, and most importantly, it can never get old. In terms of everything is constantly changing, so I can’t say for example, “Well, I’m the world’s foremost expert in Netscape.” That’s gone. But you can always follow a pattern of online communication. So that’s what I think is the most engaging part of it, and it forces you to be nice to young people, so they can teach you how to use their phone.
What are the most pressing challenges for global communication and understanding?
I think they’re twofold, and it has to do with sort of internal and external. The internal part is, in the United States in particular, we’ve become sort of more isolationist, both politically and I think professionally or economically. And that’s problematic because we work in a global marketplace now, and so every business you’re a part of is inherently a global business, even education, you know we deal with global student populations all the time. As we move to online, it’s inherently global there’s no way around it, so the question becomes how to make sure that you address global audiences without sacrificing your domestic sphere. So that’s one part of the challenge. The other part is the disconnects in terms of how different things are done around the world: there’s language, what language do you use to communicate in. Technologies, what kind of software platforms are you dealing in, is it proprietary Microsoft products or is it open source products? What kind of bandwidths are you dealing with in online communication down to, do I do most of my online shopping or my online course work on a phone, or do I do it on a laptop? If it’s a phone, is it a flip phone that has like twenty characters per screen on it. So those sort of disconnects are incredibly big challenges and you can never have a uniform standard, but you can have a uniform baseline. Kind of akin to accessibility, if you assume that this is the threshold that we need to establish for as many people as possible to have access to our communications, then if we use that as the foundation, how do we build? So it’s the same basic principle, and I think we can learn a lot from accessibility in terms of what’s the most open platform to begin with and build onto it instead of reverse engineering it. Let’s build it first for what we think our audience is; let’s start with a foundation and build up from it.
Has the persona method been used in fields other than communication design?
It’s very big in human computer interface design, human computer interaction, and usability studies and user experience design tend to be the areas you see it used in a great deal. For the most part, if you survey the research, there’s not been a whole lot of research done on persona creation per se. A lot of it shows up in industry based trade publications, which is great, but in terms of the idea of we’ve got something we’ve tried and it works in this context, the notion of empirically testing it to see how it works, I don’t know if anybody’s really done that. That’s not to say it can’t be done, but there’re a lot of complexities inherent to it. So it’s a great concept that people have used very successfully. The question is, have we taken the time to evaluate to see how effective it is and can it be improved.
How do you balance the local and global contexts when developing a global communication design? Do you think those separate contexts will merge as we continue to develop both technologically and globally?
There’s something called “transcreation” and it's the parallel creation of products of websites, right now, the tendency is for me to build my American website, and say Oh I have a client base in Brazil. Let’s take the American website and retool it for Brazil. And they try to create it with enough parameters that it’s flexible and more {}, but what transcreation says is don’t build one and then base off of it, build multiples and so at the same time we’re building the site for the US we build one for Brazil, we build one for Russia, for Tajikistan, but they run in parallel to each other and they’re all separate items, designed specifically for that culture and individuals within that culture vs one person determines what goes in it and other people have to work with what someone else is creating.
Who oversees that?
It depends, historically, it’s cheaper to build one and then retool, but that’s a critical mass issue. You do that as long as the external market isn’t large enough to have an impact on your sales. But what happens when China becomes one of the major global players and you’re retooling your work for China, no you need to start creating for that audience primarily. And so you’re seeing as China, Brazil, India, Russia, and South Africa become major global economic powers, the desire to instead of treat as an afterthought, to treat as a parallel partner in design. So a lot of it is done on an agreement basis, we think this is a good business model, but it’s not necessarily widespread, and there aren’t necessarily regulations that govern it.
The goal of persona is to create a stand-in individual; how essential is it to keep in mind the human element vs the technological aspects when you’re creating?
Think about it this way, when we often talk about creating materials for an audience, we think about demographic data. What is their background, what is their socioeconomic level, what is their profession, what is there education level. That tells us who someone is, that doesn’t tell us what someone will do with something once they’ve got it, and the idea behind personas is you take that demographic audience information, this is who somebody is now what is their life like? And so it’s kind of grafting ethnographic research onto demographics. So if we look at how a person lives the course of their daily life, at what point in time will they use this technology, at what point in time would they access this information, and based upon that you design not just for the person but the context in which they’re using something, the context of use. And the benefit a persona brings is that it contextualizes information so that it can be more usable. It’s important to keep that in mind, these are human beings. And so take for example medical instructions. The chances are when most people are going to turn to emergency medical instructions are going be under a time of duress, at that point in time are they going to want to read a very standard generic laundry list of what to do, or do they want information packaged in a specific way to find it very quickly. That’s the benefit personas bring is you get to keep that human being in mind, that human being will have different emotional states, they’ll be suffering different stresses and duresses during the time they’re using something. So that’s the important part to remember, they are human, they’re going to be under pressure from human frailties.
Aside from developing personas, what are some ways to make online communication technologies more useful and appealing to international audiences?
You’ve got to account for three things. The first is you’ve got to account for infrastructure. Just because you build it, does not necessarily mean they can access it. And by infrastructure we’re talking everything from bandwidth to access to different kinds of technologies. What kind of mobile phones look like what can they afford, what is their payment plan? Most of the world does payments by transferring cell phone credits around, and those are considered the equivalent of cash vs having credit accounts that we would use to transact business. So completely different infrastructures affect how technology is used. The second part, the conditions of use. We tend to, because we’ve got relatively inexpensive mobile access, use the internet all the time. We’ve got no problem with high bandwidth files that we send all over the place. What happens if the place I’m in I only can check my internet every so often, my bandwidth is limited, and I’m paying an ungodly amount to access it? That’s greatly going to affect what I can do. So you’ve got infrastructure, context, then you’ve got culture. Culturally, in the community I’m a part of, what do I look for that indicates something is worth believing, listening to or paying attention to, does it depend on who has said it, does it depend on how it’s written, does it depend on the language it’s in? Does it need to be image intensive, or is it text intensive? But it’s adjusting for those cultural factors that make people stop and say, Oh this is worth paying attention to, that need to be addressed also. So it’s those three, it’s getting it into their hands, making sure they can use it, and culture being should they believe it and act on it. So it’s sort of a threefold process.
Do you think we will be able to reduce friction points as we progress globally?
I think they’ll change. They might increase, they might decrease, but I think they’ll change. Most of the friction points that I’ve talked about are big points: What’s the legal structure of the country look like? As countries evolve or cultures evolve, they become more fine tuned. What does this particular group in this nation think is legally important, as opposed to this other group. What does the regulatory structure say about how a product is disseminated in that culture vs the people who need to access to say a pharmaceutical product. Those are different friction points, but they depend upon how things proliferate over time. Will they increase or decrease, I don’t know, but they’ll certainly become more nuanced, and every time something changes it’s a new level of nuance that get’s added.
When you think of friction points, think of culture as existing in concentric circles that affect friction points. Let’s start with the foundation: What is culture? Culture is basically a worldview. It’s how you and I look at the world and how we organize stuff in it. What is worth paying attention to, what is worth talking about, that’s our culture. And that in and of itself creates friction points because we have different opinions, but our culture tells us this is how you play nice. And so we have rules for engagement. That’s the primary sphere. The secondary sphere is intercultural. So two different cultural groups in the same proximity; in this case let’s talk about two different cultures in the same country. Canada: French and English, the US: a large Hispanic population. Two different cultures, two different worldviews. Those different worldviews are going to create different friction points in terms of what we talk about and how we talk about it. What matters to me is not necessarily what matters to you and we’ve got different rules of engagement. So the friction point there are cultural or linguistic. Let’s move to the next sphere: international. Now we’ve moved outside of a country, now we’re talking about geopolitical spheres. So not only do I have to account for culture and language, I’ve got to account for politics, economics, and geography. So those legalistic aspects, those economic aspects become a friction point. Let’s push it all the way out, the largest sphere is global: We’re going to do everything all at once, all across the world, that’s infrastructure. So those infrastructures become friction points on a greater level. So it simply depends on what level of this concentric framework you wish to look at that takes the friction points, but once you know it, you can begin to identify it. And there’s no perfect method, but it’s at least being aware that it’s not a uniform, it depends upon what you’re dealing with.
The problem historically with intercultural communications has been something called the monolith, and that is all cultures have been treated like these monolithic entities. And so personas and friction points and spheres, they’re always looking at culture as more complex than that. We all know this, that cultures are comprised of cultures within them. How to begin to detangle that to get around this problem of monolithics, and so that’s where personas come in, looking at they’re people within a culture, they’re not a culture as a faceless entity. Friction points, what kinds of different experiences do different individuals in a culture encounter vs the whole thing being treated as one. So that’s kind of the big challenge, how do we detangle the monolith to make it work.
Has your French-Canadian background given you insight into these challenges?
I grew up on the border, and where that becomes important is growing up we could do conversions from Fahrenheit into Celsius in our heads, if you’re dealing with two currencies every day and you’re moving back and forth between two languages. And so you realize there are these differences, and they are friction points. Currency access, measurement systems, everything else. And so I guess it did make me aware of those factors.
Anything else?
I wish that folks your age would get much more involved in international things, simply because social media is everything now internationally. It affects a very small percentage of the population globally, but the impact it can have is pretty tremendous when you think about it. Everything from the Iranian Revolution to any sort of social uprising. Folks in my generation don’t understand it, I mean we studied, we understand it but we didn’t grow up with it, akin to the way it’s like a second nature for you. And I think of my parents’ generation grew up with cars, they were always there, they governed how they thought about their lives. Your generation is social media, that was not part of my life, and therefore in trying to grapple with that concept, I’m ill-prepared. I would say anybody over 30, 35, 40…. Most folks of a certain generation are ill-prepared to grapple with what it is, how it’s used and what it means. I think the more folks from your generation who get involved with that, who grew up with it, can think about it. A classic example, apparently unfriending somebody on Facebook is a fate worse than death. Why? As someone who didn’t grow up with that, I have no idea why this is a big deal, so if I’m doing business internationally and I suddenly decide I don’t like the way this person is doing business and I decide to unfriend them, what did I just do? I don’t understand those dynamics. Or twitter feeds, I get 140 characters to say something. What does that mean? How do you train yourself to think in 140 characters that’s meaningful, I can’t do that. And I’m sure you can tell the age of somebody by how they post things. Oh this is my grandma, this is my mom and dad, just the language and nature of things. How to live with one of these (a phone). In all seriousness, I keep accidentally calling people, I’m not familiar with how this technology works, you all grew up with it, you understand it. And that’s a phenomenon that happens with every generation, but between my generation and yours, the speed with which it has happened and the global proliferation is incredible, And my generation can’t keep pace with it. Globally it’s impossible to understand these dynamics, but it requires these kinds of partnerships, where generations have to work together to do these things.