This is part 2 of our 3-part series on disaster communication, where we are discussing the book The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disaster, by Juliette Kayyem. Last time, we talked about the barriers that make comprehending and communicating about crisis challenging. This time, using cases such as Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon explosion, we address how to overcome those barriers and get quality info to the people who need it. The first step is listening downward, or gathering info from people who are closest to disaster.

Many organizations focus on preventing disaster from happening, but don't have plans in place for when disaster inevitably does happen. And as climate change worsens, we need to buckle up for living in an age of disaster. What does this mean for communicating about risk, crisis, and disaster? To answer this question, Benton shares insights from the book The Devil Never Sleeps by Juliette Kayyem. Benton and Abi also discuss their own very different reactions to disaster in their own lives, as well as their favorite zombie media.

We spoke with Dr. Joseph Robertshaw about his show, The Podcast of Podcasts, and the potential that podcasting holds for everyday technical communicators: students, professionals, educators, and even homesteading enthusiasts.

For transcripts and sources, visit https://faculty.mnsu.edu/tctalk/

We sat down with our friends Lindsey and David to talk about medical misinformation and its effects on relationships, the challenge of choosing what to trust in the swirl of constantly changing pandemic info, and the role that communication can play in increasing access to vaccines and clinical trials.  Lindsey and David also tell the story of their family's participation in clinical trials for the COVID vaccines, and the surprising ways it changed their views on social media and the medical research process.

TC Talk opens its 2nd season with a special episode for the Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2022. We took our own (very literal) spin on the Carnival theme "Rhetoric: Spaces and Places in and Beyond the Academy" and discuss the epic communication challenge of alien-to-human contact, as portrayed in film. From Arrival to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, sci-fi movies have a lot to teach us about technical communication, audiences, and empathy. Don't forget your towel!

For transcripts and sources, visit https://faculty.mnsu.edu/tctalk/

In this final part of the UX series, we share some ways instructors can help students to see user experience and usability as the rhetorical, human, and messy processes that they are. We also celebrate the season finale of TC Talk with a game show, Wheel of Exigencies, during which you will meet the new celebrity spokesperson for Course Hero!

What if User Experience professionals, instead of designing for a "universal" user, put their most marginalized audiences first? In this episode, we share how you can invite audiences into classic UX processes including personas, localization, visual methods, and usability. We also discuss the challenges that come with participatory design, and how technical communicators must step into their advocacy role in order to support more socially just UX.

For transcripts and sources, visit https://faculty.mnsu.edu/tctalk/

Last episode, we focused on UX (user experience) and usability as a discipline; in this episode, we focus on UX as a practice. We discuss various stages of the UX process,  from "empathize" to "ideate" to "prototype." Abi describes typical methods in UX research and testing and when to use them. To demonstrate, she springs a (poorly conducted) usability test on Benton.  Finally, they discuss the typical skills and traits required of UX professionals.

Abi and Benton explore the differences between usability and UX (User Experience) through the extended example of a toaster (and share their secret for extra delicious pop-tarts). They discuss the origin of the field of usability and its overlap with technical communication.

For transcripts and sources, visit https://faculty.mnsu.edu/tctalk/

Audience is arguably the most central concept in the fields of rhetoric and tech comm. What have theorists been asking about audience from centuries ago up until the modern day, when social media has exploded the reach and interactivity of audiences? What does the evolution of audience mean for technical and professional communicators? And what is the best episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000? Books discussed include Involving the Audience by Lee-Ann Breuch and Update Culture by John Gallagher.

For transcripts and sources, visit https://faculty.mnsu.edu/tctalk/