Technepisteme: A Pidgin for Intertwingling Theory & Practice

As Johnson-Eilola and Selber point out in their introduction of Central Works in Technical Communication, so much conference and journal content in our field is dedicated to reconciling academy-industry issues, such as the perceived divide that sets them apart professionally and philosophically.

One of the aims of my dissertation research project will be to explore the possibilities of developing a pidgin rhetoric that can be used to further meld together the realms of theory and practice in meaningful and useful ways.

By simultaneously being a user and a designer of a specific technological artifact (a retail automation system), I hope to develop a sort of bidirectional empathy from which will emerge a process I’m calling “design-centered use,” a compliment to Johnson’s UCT theory.

By collapsing the user-centered rhetorical triangle, I will immerse myself as a designer-user (more than a participant-observer) into a bona fide context of retail in a live environment with a “grammar of motives” that will inform my existing design processes.

By intertwingling theory with the practical at every turn, I hope to develop a synthesized discourse that embodies equal proportions of both, which will yield a hybrid rhetorical mode that can be taught, evolved, theorized, and used to negotiate and facilitate, among other pursuits, bridge building and service learning projects.

Learing, Doing, & Producing: The User’s Situation

In User-Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory of Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts (SUNY, 1998), Robert Johnson advocates for a paradigm shift in design from that of the long-standing system-centered approach to that of a user-centered method.

As an extension of the “rhetorical situation” that Bitzer introduced in the late 1960’s, Johnson’s conceptualization of the user’s situation involves three high-level processes through which an individual proceeds as they interact with an artifact.

Learning, doing, and producing.

Since I have immersed myself in the management of our employee break room (Food For Thought), my efforts to develop empathy for our retail customers is catalyzing a shift in my situational perspective from a system-centered to a user-centered understanding of the product.

The notion of in situ design is resonating with more volume and clarity with each subsequent task I perform as a user of the products my team designs. As I “learn” the system I’m attempting to be aware of how explicit knowledge is becoming more tacit over time.

As I “do” things with the system,  muscle memory takes hold of processes that were once slow and awkward, and I feel myself being able to focus more on the content of my work, and less on the content of the interface. The computer hasn’t become invisible (in Norman’s sense of the phrase), but it does seem to be moving in that direction on certain levels, such as when I’m creating new items in the database that I want to include in forthcoming orders.

As a user this represents a very satisfying level of techne to have reached. As a designer, it represents an opportunity to automate the process, thereby absolving users of mere data entry tasks at this vector of work. One consideration that complicates this process for me on an ethical level is how the automation process would impact the users’ sense of value if a skill they have achieved and honed over time for their organization is suddenly supplanted by an automated process.

Can there be a logical scaffolding up to a fresh new level of knowledge and know-how for users, or does the skill that gets replaced by automation represent a threshold beyond which a user’s current competencies, at least within this domain of work, do not align?

There is so much to parse through here, and I haven’t even addressed “producing” yet. More to come…

Some Things My Brain Is Chewing On

The Food For Thought employee break room experiment in user-centered technology (user-centered design) is in every nook and cranny of my mind this morning.

The first and most exciting thing happened yesterday when my boss (our owner) gave me permission to make this project the subject matter my dissertation. My research is focused primarily on user-centered technology as presented by Robert Johnson in his book by the same name. Johnson’s subtitle, A Rhetoric Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts, is really resonating with me as I continually analyze my goals, tasks, and the motivations that underpin them regarding this break room project.

I’m also tying in Adorno’s The Culture Industry (particularly sub-cultures of retail and it’s sub-sub cultures of consumerism, buyers, vending, suppliers, technologists, etc). Clay Spinuzzi’s Tracing Genre’s Through Organizations will serve as my third point of triangulation. His manner of dispelling the myth of designers-as-saviors who swoop in to save users is resonating with more clarity every day. In other words, by using the technology that my team designs (an unattended self-service kiosk) to operate our own employee break room, my new perspective as a user (and the genres I create, centrifugally, to adapt my tasks to the system’s limitations – and/or vice versa) helps me see that innovation does indeed start with the user. Designers are merely conduits who must research, analyze, and prioritize user innovations in rhetorically meaningful ways (via centripetal TPC acts).

So, back to the mundane meatiness (apologies to R. Johnson) of the project.

The first thing that crossed my mind was that today is Thursday and my next order is due to arrive tomorrow. But I don’t know for sure 1) if that’s pretty much a sure thing and 2) what time it’s likely to get here. Knowing both of these things would be very helpful to me, and if I was using the ECRS Gateway for automatic EDI integration with my supplier (KeHE), I’d have the situational awareness I need to stop wondering. The Gateway provides a wealth of automated notifications, all of which display on a real-time dashboard accessible via a browser. These include PO acknowledgements, ship notifications, invoices, etc. Gateway also handles the insertion of new items into the database, which I’m doing manually now.

Also, two guys from our vending operator advisory board will be in town this afternoon for a meeting in which we’ll discuss all the things they and their break room operators need.

So much more…

Vending operators, restocking, recycling, coffee, Boone Barr display (move candy dispenser), sit-and-eat (ipods on wall), rodents, menu rotation, loyalty add value, opt-in/out of marketing (current method for filtering), etc.

Halloween Price Slashings

This was an interesting experiment in creating a holiday-related store promotion. On the one hand I wondered who might be offended that we were celebrating Halloween, as certain religious groups don’t observe it because of its (arguable) pagan origins, such as having derived from the Gaelic Samhain festival.

On the other hand, I also wondered who might be offended if I failed to include their favorite scary monster in the animated .gif, which I placed on the welcome screen of the self-service kiosk in our employee break room. I started out thinking I would include as many familiar horror personae as I could muster, but I quickly realized that to be an exhausting exercise.

So instead, I simply included three of my favorites – Michael Myers from Halloween, Nosferatu (1922 version), and Freddy Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street. They’re all trumped, of course, by the scariest monster of all – Michael Bolton!

Gearing up for an order…

It’s Thursday morning and it’s time to replenish our Food for Thought employee break room. As I prepare to place the order on Monday morning, several tasty thought morsels cross my mind…

• Restocking – I need to get in early this morning to pack the shelves full, which always seems to inspire more activity. It’ll also give me a good sense of my back stock quantities. Having inventory in two physical places (back stock and break room) is challenging.
• Building the Order – I’ll use CATAPULT HHT and a PO worksheet to create the order, which I’ll then review on my laptop before I submit.
• Shelf Talkers – I gotta find out where to get shelf talkers for both the cooler and the dry goods rack.
• New Items – I have the latest KeHE catalog and some products I picked up at Expo East that I want to add to this weeks order, so I want to assess the process of getting new items into the system (and printing labels for them, and letting employees know about them, etc) to see where improvements can be made.
• Promotions – Several slow movers still linger on the shelves in large quantities in the cooler and on the dry shelf, so I’ll drop the price of those permanently using CATAPULT’s Price Change worksheet.
• Combos – There are several product combinations (such as sardines and coconut water) that I’ll bundle together as promotional combos this week, so they’ll need visual ads that rotate on the kiosk welcome screen.
• More Fruit – Desperately need more organic apples and oranges. What else?
• Communication – Employees need a Food for Thought email and intranet post to get them up to speed on what’s happening in their break room.

Ah, Youth: Generational Design Considerations

It’s 5:31 a.m. on Tuesday and I’m about to go wake up my 8-year old son. While tucking him in last night he made me promise to get him up “extra early” this morning so that he could play Minecraft before his older brother and sister wake up and join the virtual realm with him.

It occurs to me that he’ll be on one computer doing things in Minecraft that I have no idea how to do, but that I’ve only watched passively as he and his siblings move through 3-dimensional worlds collecting supplies and interacting with each other (sometimes amicably, sometimes not).

So, while I’ll be furiously pumping out my thoughts on how our retail technology can be improved through a better understanding of user-centered design, I suddenly wonder how relevant my insights (and subsequent designs) will be for members of my children’s generation who are interacting with each other in real time in virtual worlds on a regular basis.

What will their expectations be, and how will the designs I create support or fall short? Will they be bored or engaged when they move from Minecraft to our retail automation environment? I have this idea that I’ll train my 12-year-old to manage our employee break room once I get the reigns on it myself, but now I’m starting to think that he’ll want the system to do things that I can’t foresee because I haven’t adequately accounted for his needs and expectations. Perhaps his insight if/when he takes over break room operations can be in the form of design.

The possibilities for bridging the generational design gap are limitless, but one must make an active, rigorous effort toward these ends if one wants to narrow the chasm.

Fluctuating Fruit Prices: Apples as Loss Leaders

Last night after I got back to the house after restocking the break room, I emailed our HR guy that we needed to replenish the organic apples and oranges. He’d stocked it with fresh fruit last week for the first time after he’d found some really great deals at one of our local natural products stores which is right by his house. Our thinking here is that its better to get it locally than through our supplier, but we may need to reconsider.

This morning I had an email from him saying that he’d picked up some more, but that we’d have to raise the prices significantly. Like by about 30%. Not good. How are we going to mitigate this price hike? Do we even need to?

For now we’ve decided to let our fresh organic fruit (primarily apples) be the loss leader for Food For Thought employee break room. If we can break even on apples – or lose only pennies per each – we both agree that this can be the solution for the time being.

This week I will look at our supplier’s fruit offering to determine what other options might be available to us.

Setting Up a Dynamic Promotion Using a Store Coupon

I had every intention of putting together another product order when I stopped by the office on this hazy Sunday afternoon. The break room is running low on several popular items (Martinelli sparkling apple juice, Krave beef jerky, Apple & Eve grape juice, Clif peanut butter crunch bars, etc.).

But instead of focusing on replacing these fast movers, I got distracted with the slow movers instead, and with how I should promote them this coming week since I’ll be at NCGA Geekfest in Austin, TX Thursday through Saturday.

I also need to find someone to do the pull-forwards each morning and mid afternoon, but that was a secondary concern that took a back seat to promoting some slow movers. Using CATAPULT’s Dynamic Promotions module (formerly Promotional Combos), I created a combination discount for .50 cents off when you purchase a hummus with any of four different kinds of chips.

But I only wanted this combo discount to be triggered when a customer (who is tracked in the CATAPULT database) is associated with the transaction. To achieve this I created a Store Coupon profile, which I linked on one side to the Dynamic Promotion called “Hummus & Chips Combo Discount,” and to all tracked customers on the other side. I then gave it a start and end date for this coming week, as well as an all-day/every-day active schedule. CATAPULT’s discount distribution feature allowed me to apply 30% of the discount to the lower priced hummus and 70% to the higher priced chips.

I tested the combo to make sure it didn’t fire when there was no customer associated with the sale, and that it did fire when a customer was associated. Then I realized I needed to promote it, so I went out on the web and grabbed product images so I could promote them effectively via email first thing tomorrow morning. I’d post the promotion on our intranet as well. Finally, I needed to create ads to rotate on the home screen of the self-service kiosk, which would be a handy visual reminder for those who don’t read their emails and the company intranet.

Now that our CID (rotating ad media) supports rich media from any URL, perhaps I can single source the ads in these three places as an animated .gif. Hmmm…?

Organic Apples & Oranges – But What Else?

Friday morning our HR guy showed up with a bag of fresh organic apples and

Pre-washed organic apples and oranges!

oranges for the Food For Thought employee break room. He’d beaten me to it, and I’m glad he did. As the newest additions to the product mix (and our loss leaders) they were a huge hit, and already need replenishing.

We split the different between the cost of the apples and oranges and simply made them all the same price at .95 cents each. Apparently this is a bargain, but I think it’s worth it in terms of providing truly organic whole foods to get employees more interested in the overall offering. Right now I have a yellow post-it note taped to the basket showing price. This means we have to use the non-barcoded menu on the kiosk screen to ring them in. But I’ll soon have the fruit bar-coded so that it can be scanned.

Question: Should I use GS1 Databar codes or just make my own?

I’m going into the office tomorrow to put together my very first order on my own. Expo East in Baltimore last month gave me some great ideas for new products, so I’m going to mix things up a bit with this order. Greek yogurt, hummus/chips combos, a new style of jerky, and perhaps some healthy chewing gum will spice things up a bit.

Stock-Outs: A True Wake Up Call

The last two mornings I have woken up well before my alarm clock went off. Both times my mind was racing with ideas about how to eliminate (or at least reduce) stock-outs in Food For Thought, our employee break room.

Even though the primary goal of this project is to get inside the minds of our retail customers by using our technology the way they use it, I realized that the way I deal with stock-outs is considerable different than what most of our users have to deal with.

Because ours is a healthy micro market, we only have 100-120 items for sale at any given time. And because I have to order at least $1,000 worth to get free shipping, I need to keep a considerable volume of back stock. I keep the lighter stuff (mostly edibles) in the stock room one floor below me. I keep the drinks underneath my desk because their weight makes them a pain to haul up and down the steps.

So I have something going for me that most our our retail customers don’t. I can pull from back stock to replenish stock-outs or near stock outs. Most of our users have to place new supplier orders to address this. And our software allows them to do just this – and to do it with awesome accuracy.

Given this difference, I need to get my head around the fact that I’m “cheating” at a certain level. By having back stock at my disposal, I don’t have the same pressures that our customers have because they have to place actual orders every time they have holes (or near holes) on their shelves. And even still, the thought of stock-outs is waking me up prematurely.