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. 

BIB_07: Coppola, N. W. (2005). Big science or bricolage: An alternative model for research in technical communication. IEEE transactions on professional communication, 48(3).

Coppola argues in this article for the continuation of the bricoleur approach in technical communication research that has been undervalued by researchers who are proponents of the Big Science approach. The article is in response to the prevailing call for "research" in technical communication, which favors the Gig Science research often associated with funded research. Drawing on Aristotelian philosophic tradition and invoking the idea of praxis, Coppola emphasizes the importance of the attention to context and individual experience in research, an approach in line with bricolage in Lévi-Strauss's term. Coppola advocates resistance to the assertion that not enough research has been done in tech comm, and call for the celebration of the a multi-methods tradition in technical communication research.

This is another article that deals with the debate between scientific and non-scientific methodologies in the field of technical communication. Coppola, like many from a rhetorical background such as Salvo, Johnson, and Sullivan, puts great value to the consideration of contexts and specificities. His is a piece that directly resist the impulse of valuing empirical/scientific research over bricolage.