BIB_07: Salvo, M. (2001). Ethics of engagement: User-centered design and rhetorical methodology. Technical Communication Quarterly, 10, 273-290.

In this article, Salvo argues that the shift from observing the users to inviting users to participate in the design process poses new ethical demands to technical communicators. Salvo invokes dialogic ethics in rhetoric theory, in which the self is understood to be constructed through dialogue, or its interaction with others, and argues that dialogic ethics can inform the development of user-centered and user-participatory methods. Salvo uses three examples of user-centered design practice to illustrate that these methods, as dialogical interactions, can best help designers design technology that serves the users' needs. These examples are Pelle Ehn's participatory design, or Scandinavian Design, Roger Whitehouse's description of designing directional signs for blind users in "The Uniqueness of Individual Perception," and the design of a Web-based first-year composition system.

Salve seems to distinguish "user-centered" methods from "user-participatory" methods, although sometimes this distinction is not very obvious. Salve argues that user-participatory methods have grown from user-centered methods, and dialogic ethics in rhetoric provides a lens that informs the development of user-participatory design (p. 287). Since dialogic interaction is highly contextual, i.e., that it responds to specific situations, the theoretical lens is particularly valuable in cultural usability research. The "respect for local conditions" (p. 282) that required by dialogic interaction is also a principle in cultural usability research.