QUERY: Question on Possible Submission

[vidus]

I'm interested in submitting to PUSH, and was wondering if this topic would be of interest to folks: The Potential for Source-Based Composition to Focus Students on Design over Surface Aesthetic.

In teaching document and website design for the paste several years, I've noticed that when students are given WYSIWYG design tools at the start of a project, the visual aesthetic of the site becomes more important than the actual functionality of what they are working on. The tools allow them to move past the fundamentals too quickly, and they lose site of the project as a whole because of their focus on the visualized end product.

When I teach students to compose texts from a source-code level, where the coding of the site is building its structure first and adding in the visuals as a secondary concern, students tend to be more focused on the functionality of the site rather than the end visual result, making for better documents I believe.

In this piece I'd combine my own experience and work with relevant theory and work in the field, including work by Donald A. Norman on design, Mike Monteiro, Ethan Marcotte, and some rhetorical history on Petrus Ramus.

[brocktopus]

Adam, I'm speaking solely as a potential reader, but I think that there could be quite an intriguing article here. I admit that the first question I had after the first sentence was "what exactly is meant by the distinction between design and surface aesthetic?" Of course, it's clear after reading the rest of the query that you mean info design/architecture as contrasted with graphic design.

There are a few texts that I would probably expect to be used as potential sources here, including the following list. It would probably be key to note how the theoretical/historical work you want to bring in would help the work stand apart from these preceding texts (or other perspectives in teaching HTML/CSS from other disciplines, like design). Again, I'm speaking just as a reader, but that's the sort of concern that I think it would be helpful to address.

Kristen Arola, "The Design of Web 2.0: The Rise of the Template, the Fall of Design." Computers and Composition 27.1 (2010), 4-14. doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2009.11.004

Teena A.M. Carnegie, "Interface as Exordium: The Rhetoric of Interactivity." Computers and Composition 26.3 (2009), 164-173. doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2009.05.005

Robert E. Cummings, "Coding with Power: Toward a Rhetoric of Computer Coding and Composition." Computers and Composition 23.4 (2006), 430-443. doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2006.08.002

Bradley Dilger & Jeff Rice, eds. From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Nicholas Mauriello, Gian S. Pagnucci, and Tammy Winner. "Reading Between the Code: The Teaching of HTML and the Displacement of Writing Instruction." Computers and Composition 16.3 (1999), 409-419.

• In fact, pretty much all of the articles in this issue of C&C would be worth considering since it was a special issue on code and its relationship with composition. Sure, there's a bit that feels dated now, but the foundational work that's there could be quite helpful.

Karl Stolley, "The Lo-Fi Manifesto." Kairos 12.3 (2008), http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/12.3/topoi/stolley/

[vidus]

Kevin,

Thanks for the feedback on the idea. Glad you think it would be something worth pursuing. The extra readings and suggestions are quite helpful as well. I'll admit the initial query was a bit sparse, but the idea is one that I've been kicking around in my head for some time and I felt like this was the perfect place to give it a bit of air.

My goal is to get a text together between now and March or April that is ready for review. If things go as planned, this will be an outgrowth of my next to last dissertation chapter.

Thanks also for the language suggestion, upon reflection the initial draft was a bit vague. I'm definitely interested in the relationship between graphic design and information design, and especially how that concern can be traced back (I'd argue) for quite some time in the history of rhetoric as a field. I think what really makes the topic stand out personally is the way that we're in many ways reenacting some of the past problems rhetoric has had with the subject in our move towards the digital. (Primary point I look to: the removal of invention from rhetoric by Petrus Ramus, which kicked off in some definitions the Modern period of rhetoric and set the discipline back for a good long while).

[s2ceball]

Hey Adam,

I agree with Kevin's suggestions for scholarship to include, but would also (speaking from my exp as an editor of another journal whose audience may overlap somewhat with PUSH) suggest "caution" (yes, in scare quotes) of referring to the visuals as secondary.

On Dec 15, 2012, at 1:11 PM, Adam Pope wrote:

When I teach students to compose texts from a source-code level, where the coding of the site is building its structure first and adding in the visuals as a secondary concern, students tend to be more focused on the functionality of the site rather than the end visual result, making for better documents I believe.

I totally get your point about focusing on the code first, and that's an obvious good thing to focus on for PUSH, but your audience will split depending on how you treat the visual "results" of the coding process (e.g., do you want to reach programmers as folks who would only rather focus on code? or do you want to reach people who marry the code and the interface design?) My personal/scholarly hope (as a reader) would be both.

And I think this is an easy fix, if you didn't intend to suggest that the interface design is of lesser concern (which is how an argument like this could easily go...), just be aware of your language choice when discussing the visual stuff. Otherwise, sounds like a great submission!

Cheryl.

[brocktopus]

Cheryl is totally right re: visual design as "secondary" being potentially problematic. +1 👍

[vidus]

Cheryl,

Thanks for point out that problematic language. I can see that being taken entirely the wrong way, as you suggest. Rewording is definitely in order. I do want to reach both folks who would rather focus on the code and the folks who are interested in marrying the two.

I think it would read better if I made it clearer that when I say secondary concern, I mean secondary in the chronological sense, rather than the in reference to importance. I consider graphic design of a web text to be incredibly important as a builder of ethos, but I find that when students are allowed (and even myself really) to think too much about the graphic design of the site they are building before they focus on what the structure of that site looks like (interface-wise and code-wise), their aesthetic goals sometimes end up preempting their goals in making usable and well-thought-out sites. That, or they end up spending a disproportionate amount of their resources on the graphic design of the site while the rest suffers due to their desire for a great looking site.

An example I look back to in my own work is when I first started reinventing the Drupal-based LMS we use at Purdue. When I first got started, I wanted a simple interface that was graphically clean and didn't overwhelm. Because of that I ended up going with a single menu for instructors to use when managing their site. That ended up being a terrible idea because the list of tasks that were available was at least 15 to 20 items, and finding the item you wanted quickly was a chore. After reading Donald Norman's recent work on complexity, I realized that I was going for an overly simple interface that was aesthetically pleasing, but practically impossible to create. There was a underlying level of complexity in the function of the sites that had to be addressed in the design of the structure of the site. By putting my desire for a clean aesthetic ahead of the structural concerns, I created a minimalist-looking site that was more complicated to use than it should have been because of that aggressive simplicity. In future iterations I focused on the structure first, and embraced the complex nature of the LMS, ending up with more menus that were simpler and easier to find and navigate for teachers and instructors than the original "simple" version of the site.

To get back to my students, I find that by putting them into the coding mindset first, they are forced to think about how their site is put together, how the structure is going to work (doubly so with a mobile-first design strategy that is responsive in nature). This gets them thinking about audience-level concerns relating to usability, information design, and the like. And, I'd argue they are much more likely to think that way while coding than when I give them WYSIWYG tools where the visual level is immediately accessible and can become an immediate temptation and time sink.

Hopefully that makes sense and addresses the concerns you've raised above. And thank you both again for the feedback--it is great. I wish every piece of scholarship I started working on had a writing process this interactive.

[s2ceball]

Adam,

I think you've just written your introduction ;) Good luck with the piece!

Cheryl

[rmflight]

This sounds like a really interesting idea, and I look forward to seeing this. I believe you can probably extend this however (and perhaps it is not appropriate to do so for this paper) to any authoring system where the primary goal is communication of ideas. For instance, I am finding that writing papers in markdown forces me to think about the text itself, and worry about what the html output will look like later, but it supports making changes in the visual aesthetic that may help or harm the communication of the ideas in the text, but it comes after getting the ideas down on paper.

This is in contrast to writing in Word, where immediately I want to start messing with the font, paragraph spacing, etc, and worry about that as I am writing the document, rather than making it a secondary concern.

[vidus]

Thanks again Cheryl for the feedback, and thank you as well to Robert: that is a good point--the idea could very well be extended to Word and the like (though we'll have to see where the paper ends up taking me at this point).

Now for the business of actually sitting down and writing it out :)