Say "information design," and most people—technical communicators included—think about document design: page layout, typography, and other graphic elements of communication. But in fact, information design is much more complex and spans the entire information product development process. It begins with the identification of audience and communication purpose, includes the selection of data and generation of content (both text and other media) to achieve that purpose for that target audience, and is finally physically manifested in the publication medium, layout, typography, and graphics.

The purpose of this course is to encourage you to think in terms of the more inclusive and organic definition of information design; to expose you to the principles, concepts, approaches, and methods commonly used in information design; and thus to enable you to design and produce quality information products.

By the end of this course, you will be able to do the following:

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My name is Helen Grady, and I am an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Technical Communication, School of Engineering, Mercer University. During my 14 years at Mercer, I have been actively involved in the curricular design and assessment of Mercer's engineering core courses, in addition to teaching a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate technical communication classes. I founded Mercer's Center for Excellence in Engineering Education and, after four years as Center Director, I became director of Mercer’s MSTCO program. Prior to joining Mercer, I managed a large technical publications organization for Northrop Corporation in Research Triangle Park, NC. This organization grew from 8 to 24 editors, writers, and graphic artists in the 10 years I ran it and had an eventual budget in excess of $1 million.

The easiest way to contact me is via email (grady_h@mercer.edu).

We will use a listserv to distribute email messages to the entire class. Here are the directions to subscribe to the TCO 660 listserv. If you download the contents of the listserv, you will be able to retrieve the preferred email addresses of your colleagues. (Note: you may subscribe to the listserv using multiple email addresses, i.e., home, work, etc.)

You may also use the online chat feature of WebCT for synchronous communication.

All students enrolled in the course must have access to the following text:

M.J. Albers and B. Mazur (eds). 2003. Content and Complexity: Information Design in Technical Communication. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

ISBN: 0-8058-4141-5.

This book is available from Amazon.com and other vendors.

 

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There are three assignments. The due date for each assignment is listed below. You will find detailed instructions for completing each assignment by clicking on the assignment links. You can also access this information from the assignments page.

	Title	Due Date
Assignment 1	Annotated Bibliography	2/16
Assignment 2	Article for Intercom	3/16
Assignment 3	Redesign of an Information Product	4/20

You are responsible for critiquing at least one other student submission for assignments 2 and 3 and completing your peer review in a timely manner so that your fellow students can make the appropriate revisions to their work prior to submitting it for a grade.

The final version of each written assignment is due no later 8 p.m. on the due date specified in the table above.

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The Fall semester officially begins on Tuesday, 10 January and ends on Friday, 28 April. Our class will meet for synchronous chat on Thursdays from 8:00 to 9:30 p.m. EST. View the course schedule by clicking the schedule button in the left nav bar of this web site.

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All students enrolled in TCO 660 are expected to have access to Microsoft Word to create and view word processing files. In addition, you should be able to create and edit simple Web pages. All of your written assignments should be saved as .html or .doc documents and emailed to me.

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